U.S.-Mexico Wall Won't Break Ties That Bind

SAN FRANCISCO--Here's the dirty secret about walls, especially walls built as a way to solve problems because one party or the other is tired of talking: Instead of really separating the two sides, the barrier just links them together more firmly.

Walls are what everyone is talking about these days in America. The House wants a wall, a 700-mile-long one running along our southern border. The Senate Judiciary committee is studying the idea, committing only to double and triple fencing along the Arizona border. Immigration advocates and security hawks have talked endlessly about the wall of death, drug smuggling and sovereignty, but the debate remains stuck in an "undocumented" vs. "illegal" logjam, neither side willing to budge.

In my childhood in Calcutta, we visited relatives we called the Divided Family. Two brothers warring over the ancestral home adamantly refused to budge from the house, preferring instead to split it up. When we visited, we had to make sure we spent exactly equal periods of time in each half, matching a cup of tea here with a cup of coffee there. Despite the wall, perhaps because of the wall, the brothers seemed to know even more acutely what was going on in the other half, until not even a cup of tea could be drunk on one side without causing the kettle to be put on the boil in the other.

When former Mexico City mayor and presidential hopeful Lopez Obrador calls the wall "an insult" and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza finds the Mexican umbrage "personally offensive," I smile, because all I can think of is the divided family.

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