"Ground"

It's Friday night (though I think this won't post till Monday) and I went out to see a community theater production of "Ground" ... a play from just  few years ago, set in New Mexico but written by a playwright from Chicago.  The story starts when Zelda (who is Anglo) comes back to town after her father dies and leaves her his farm.  Carlos, her old boyfriend (whose family is Mexican), has married Angela and gone to work for the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a uniformed officer patrolling the border.  And stuff happens.  The play looks at migration across that one stretch of border from all sides.  Some of the characters are sympathetic, but the play doesn't leave you sure that their opinions are right.  Some are irritating (I found the character of Angela particularly grating, possibly because she is "high-maintenance" in a way that I found depressingly familiar) but it's not obvious that their opinions are wrong.  (Angela, obnoxious as she is, makes a lot of sense ... at least to me.)  There are no actual villains.  One fellow is a self-important, self-centered jerk, but he's not a lot worse than being a jerk – and he's the one I found least sympathetic of all.  The program says that the playwright "lays out the uncomfortable position that both principles are right and both are wrong."  (I assume that the "principles" here mean the principles either to support the immigration laws by sealing the border, or to subvert them in support of friends and family by helping people sneak across.)

Well, ... como si, como no.  I suppose if those are the principles involved, then yes the play shows good and bad sides to both of them, and that's fine.  Only there's one principle that the play never bothers to show a good side of, possibly because it is taken for granted so implicitly that nobody thinks to question it: and yet it's clear that it is this silent, undiscussed principle that causes all the mischief in the play, and that sets up the tragic conflict among all the other principles involved.  What I mean is, ... Why exactly are there any restrictions about who can cross the damned border there in the first place?  God knows this country got along for plenty of years with no immigration laws at all.  If you wanted to come to America, you came to America.  Simple as that.  And God knows if we were concerned about protecting the border when we ended the Mexican War, we would never have allowed it to be drawn there, where it was, through so many miles of empty space.  But that border was fine with us because it never occurred to us to give a shit about defending it against immigration.  That whole worry came much later.

I don't pretend to any special expertise or knowledge of the future, but I confess to a weakness for suggesting extreme "solutions" to see where they go.  And so I have started to wonder, ... What would happen if we just abandoned the whole thing and let anybody walk across – either direction – whenever they wanted to?  Would it actually make that much difference in the total number of people who ended up crossing, as a percentage?  Or would it just mean that fewer people died in the process?

Sorry, this isn't a political blog and in any event I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.  Just wondering out loud, is all ....