There are utility fences and other fences. The utility kinds delimit property and make an effort to keep kids from using your property as a short cut to get from here to there. They also are fine ways to keep pets and crawling kids away from danger out in the street. But fences lose their utility when we put them up and then forget about keeping them up.
It looks like the 700 mile fence between Mexico and the U.S. is more of a slap in the face of Mexicans than it will be used to deter determined non-American citizens to cross over into the promised land. There is no money in the Bush Fence to keep it up. Civic-minded Americans on the right side of the border have taken it upon themselves to form quasi-military patrols to keep out outsiders and capture and bring to justice those who sneak in. Our legitimate border guards have had a tradition of apprehending the illegals, collecting them and sending them back to begin the charade all over again.
The saddest part of this is the promise made by “snake-heads” or those who prosper collecting illegals, herding them into trucks without water or comfort and then dropping them over the border into desert with no way out but to try to make it to safety. Many die in the attempt and the profiteers continue to dupe others into thinking it is an easy matter to cross the border under protection with manna and a good life just up ahead.
The fence put up by Israel seems to be doing its job of keeping out the vast majority of workers who want to earn a living crossing from Palestinian land into the bustling and developing land of Israel. It also serves to keep out the majority of “suicide” martyrs who want to take as many civilians as they can along with them but certainly deny them paradise with 70 Virgin prizes. Those attacks have dropped to almost zero, so there are now the rocket attacks from across the northern border and from Gaza. There is an inexhaustible supply of these brought in by tunnels under the borders between Palestinian properties and neighboring Arab states.
Not all fences are people proof or actually sufficient to do the job they were designed to do. Fences are good in American neighborhoods although I particularly do not like those with guards and bars so calls ahead can attest to my right to belong in the line where a record of my car is made and then I am waved on. My own house in our Condominium is fenceless and overrun with strange people whom I do not know but many of them have come to try to convert me or find jobs to help them and me out. Fences have a utility. Would that we lived in a world where they were not needed.