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Transcript

General Chapman’s Last Stand · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:22
Speaker 2: Something there is that doesn't love a wall that sends
0:27
Speaker 2: the frozen ground swell under it.
0:31
Speaker 1: Robert Frost, one of the greatest American poets, reading Mending Wall.
0:37
Speaker 2: I let my neighbor know beyond the hill, and on
0:40
Speaker 2: a day we meet to walk the line and set
0:42
Speaker 2: the wall between us.
0:44
Speaker 1: They walk together down the border of their properties, between
0:48
Speaker 1: his apple orchard and his neighbor's pine trees. Every spring
0:52
Speaker 1: they have to mend the wall, hauling stones to fill
0:54
Speaker 1: the gaps. The narrator asks his neighbor, do they really
0:58
Speaker 1: need a wall to keep pine and apple trees apart?
1:02
Speaker 2: He only says, good fences, my good neighbors. Spring is
1:07
Speaker 2: the mischief in me, And I wonder if I could
1:09
Speaker 2: put a notion in his head. Why do they make
1:11
Speaker 2: good neighbors? Isn't it weather cows? But here there are
1:14
Speaker 2: no cows. Before I built a wall, I'd ask to
1:17
Speaker 2: know what I was walling in or walling out, and
1:21
Speaker 2: to whom I was like to give offence.
1:27
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
1:31
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
1:38
Speaker 1: about the most famous line from mending wall, good fences,
1:42
Speaker 1: make good neighbors. Written in nineteen fourteen, as if it
1:47
Speaker 1: were yesterday. The historic home of the US Marine Corps
2:05
Speaker 1: is the Barracks in Washington, d C. Eighth the night
2:08
Speaker 1: Streets near Capitol Hill. From May until the end of August,
2:12
Speaker 1: every Friday night, the public is invited for evening parade.
2:17
Speaker 3: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the oldest
2:20
Speaker 3: post of the Corps, Marine Barracks, Washington, d C. Celebrating
2:24
Speaker 3: over sixty years of performing evening parades.
2:27
Speaker 1: It starts at eight forty five, precisely on the immaculate
2:31
Speaker 1: lawn in front of the Commandant's house. The ritual of
2:34
Speaker 1: honoring the flag, the famous silent drill, the drum and
2:37
Speaker 1: bugle Corps marines in the traditional white with dark blue tunics.
2:43
Speaker 1: One hour and fifteen minutes of precision marching. Evening Parade
2:54
Speaker 1: was the creation of General Leonard Fielding Chapman, Junior, when
2:59
Speaker 1: he assumed the command of the Marine Barracks in nineteen
3:02
Speaker 1: fifty seven. Chapman believed Marine parades had become anglicized too
3:07
Speaker 1: many theatrical flourishes, trick drills, frivolities like the Queen Anne's salute,
3:13
Speaker 1: the small hats. The British favor the heavy double soled
3:16
Speaker 1: shoes with cleats. My policy was that we will be regulation.
3:23
Speaker 1: Chapman once said, we will be U S Marine Corps regulation.
3:27
Speaker 1: We will do everything in accordance with the Marine Corps
3:30
Speaker 1: regulations and will do it perfectly. I've met a handful
3:40
Speaker 1: of senior military leaders in my life. They're not like CEOs,
3:44
Speaker 1: who represent an infinite range of variation on the general
3:47
Speaker 1: theme of tall white guy. Generals are the product of
3:50
Speaker 1: one of the world's largest and most rigorous meritocracies. To
3:54
Speaker 1: get to the top, they've had to be more disciplined
3:56
Speaker 1: than the disciplined people, and then at the next level
3:59
Speaker 1: up smarter than the smart people, then at the level
4:03
Speaker 1: after that, more charismatic than the charismatic people, and on
4:06
Speaker 1: and on all the way up to five stars. Generals
4:10
Speaker 1: are the winners of a single elimination tournament that goes
4:13
Speaker 1: on for thirty years. Chapman was appointed Commandant of the
4:22
Speaker 1: Marine Corps in nineteen sixty seven, served with distinction for
4:26
Speaker 1: four years during one of the most difficult periods in
4:28
Speaker 1: Marine Corps history. He was a Southerner, who loved Lincoln,
4:32
Speaker 1: A voracious reader, an intellectual, the man who did as
4:36
Speaker 1: much as anyone to bring the Civil rights Revolution to
4:39
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps. Chapman was once interviewed by a Marine
4:42
Speaker 1: Corps historian, and by the end of the recording, which
4:45
Speaker 1: runs for hours, you want to follow him into battle.
4:50
Speaker 4: Towards the end of the war, when we were pulling
4:53
Speaker 4: out of Vietnam, I came to the decision that we
4:57
Speaker 4: were going to clean house, shape up, or ship out.
5:03
Speaker 1: Chapman shrank the Marines from three hundred thousand to two
5:06
Speaker 1: hundred thousand men, let go every marine that he did
5:09
Speaker 1: not measure up, made sure everyone who remained knew what
5:13
Speaker 1: the score was.
5:14
Speaker 4: And I'd make my speech about tightening up the Ring
5:18
Speaker 4: Corps and going back to our standards. And I got
5:23
Speaker 4: applauded every time. And it was in such sharp contrast
5:27
Speaker 4: to what was happening in the other services. See, the
5:30
Speaker 4: other services loosened their standards, you know, long hair beer
5:37
Speaker 4: in the barracks, Navy, especially Navy especially. Yeah, we went
5:44
Speaker 4: exactly opposite directions. The Navy loosened their standards, so did
5:48
Speaker 4: the Army.
5:50
Speaker 1: To me, what what did he look like?
5:52
Speaker 5: Well, he was very handsome. He was, you know, the
5:55
Speaker 5: pictures of him when he was young and in a
5:58
Speaker 5: pretty incredibly you know, dashing sort of man.
6:03
Speaker 1: This is the general's granddaughter, Danielle Chapman.
6:06
Speaker 5: And he was still very handsome when he was in
6:08
Speaker 5: his sixties and seventies and tall, you know, he still
6:12
Speaker 5: had that military posture to him. Also, just an incredible
6:17
Speaker 5: stamina and he actually was very proud of that too.
6:21
Speaker 5: On the golf course that until he was in his eighties,
6:25
Speaker 5: you know, he walked and carried his clubs, and he
6:28
Speaker 5: would really rib his buddies about that, and he would say,
6:31
Speaker 5: you know, they would ride in the cart and he
6:33
Speaker 5: would say, oh, they're over there riding in the cheeseburger wagon,
6:38
Speaker 5: you know. But he was.
6:40
Speaker 6: He was.
6:42
Speaker 5: Walking and carrying his clubs the whole way.
6:45
Speaker 1: General Chapman retired from the Marine Corps in nineteen seventy one,
6:49
Speaker 1: but he didn't take a lucrative job in the defense
6:51
Speaker 1: industry like so many ex military brass do. Instead, he
6:55
Speaker 1: goes to his boss, the Secretary of Defense, and asks
6:58
Speaker 1: for help in finding another job in government. He gets
7:01
Speaker 1: his wish in nineteen seventy three. He's named commissioner of
7:05
Speaker 1: what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the
7:09
Speaker 1: agency responsible for securing the borders of the United States. Now,
7:14
Speaker 1: why does he do that? Being head of the Marine
7:19
Speaker 1: Corps is a job of enormous prestige. The ion s
7:23
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three was a backwater. Why would someone
7:27
Speaker 1: take such a big step down. It's not obvious until
7:31
Speaker 1: you think about what Chapman has just been through Vietnam.
7:36
Speaker 1: He ran the Marine Corps during the worst years of
7:38
Speaker 1: the war. And what was Vietnam? A war about a border.
7:44
Speaker 1: The country was split in two, with a communist government
7:47
Speaker 1: in the north and a pro Western government in the south,
7:50
Speaker 1: and the North kept sending insurgents across the border to
7:53
Speaker 1: make trouble in the South. That's why the US went
7:55
Speaker 1: to Vietnam to secure the border. The Marines were in
8:00
Speaker 1: the thick of it. They were way up in the
8:01
Speaker 1: farthest corner of South Vietnam, right on the border with
8:04
Speaker 1: the North. At one point, the Secretary of Defense wanted
8:07
Speaker 1: a wall built along the border to stop the North
8:10
Speaker 1: Vietnamese from trickling in. It was the job of the
8:13
Speaker 1: Marine Corps to build it, and they couldn't do it.
8:15
Speaker 1: They couldn't secure the border. Nothing worked. Chapman saw the
8:19
Speaker 1: failure first hand.
8:21
Speaker 7: The trouble with Vietnam for the Marine Corps was that
8:27
Speaker 7: the army was in charge of the whole thing.
8:31
Speaker 1: Chapman Son Walton joined the Marines and served in Vietnam.
8:35
Speaker 7: And the Marines that were there, my dad had no
8:40
Speaker 7: tactical control. In other words, he couldn't tell the twenty
8:47
Speaker 7: six Marines to leave Kisson and go somewhere else.
8:52
Speaker 1: General Chapman would make the long journey to Vietnam many times,
8:55
Speaker 1: but all he could offer was moral support. There's a
8:58
Speaker 1: moment in his Oral History when Chapman describes the orders
9:01
Speaker 1: that came down from the Pentagon when the US military
9:04
Speaker 1: shipped out of Vietnam. Each branch of the military was
9:08
Speaker 1: supposed to pack up and send home anything worth more
9:11
Speaker 1: than fifty dollars. Chapman said, no, the Marines would bring
9:15
Speaker 1: home everything worth five dollars or more.
9:18
Speaker 4: Furthermore, I issued an order that we'd leave our spaces
9:21
Speaker 4: in Vietnam ready for inspection, everything cleaned up, all the
9:28
Speaker 4: trash buried, all the temporary buildings knocked down and disposed of.
9:35
Speaker 4: And we did that too. We lived and left every
9:38
Speaker 4: one of our areas in impeccable condition, ready for inspection.
9:45
Speaker 1: That's what the Marine Corps was reduced to in Vietnam,
9:48
Speaker 1: being the best at tiding up behind them. How could
9:51
Speaker 1: someone like Chapman be satisfied with that? If he couldn't
9:55
Speaker 1: defend the borders of South Vietnam, then maybe running thes
9:59
Speaker 1: would be his second chance.
10:00
Speaker 7: He was like nothing better than to be able to say, yes,
10:06
Speaker 7: the border is secure, mister Secretary, was the interior the
10:10
Speaker 7: border is now secure.
10:19
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, a young sociologist named Douglas Massey
10:23
Speaker 1: became interested in the subject of Mexican migration. It was
10:28
Speaker 1: then as now a matter of political significance, but Massey
10:32
Speaker 1: was struck by how little was actually known about the problem.
10:38
Speaker 1: Nobody really understood exactly where migrants were coming from, or
10:42
Speaker 1: exactly where they were going, or for that matter, what
10:45
Speaker 1: they were doing once they got to the US, and
10:48
Speaker 1: what happened to the families they left behind. Sociologists are
10:53
Speaker 1: the great note takers of the social sciences. They're used
10:56
Speaker 1: to projects that stretch out for years, that even consume
11:00
Speaker 1: entire careers. So Massey decided to be a good sociologist
11:04
Speaker 1: and study migration properly. He found a partner, a mexicanthropologists
11:09
Speaker 1: named Jorge Durand, and the two of them began systematically
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Speaker 1: interviewing families of migrants around Mexico.
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Speaker 8: We pick communities. We pick four to six communities every year.
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Speaker 8: We do a complete household roster and collect basic sociodemographic
11:25
Speaker 8: information on everybody in the household, plus detailed information on
11:30
Speaker 8: everybody's first and last trip to the United States and
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Speaker 8: the total number of trips they've taken.
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Speaker 1: The survey is called the Mexican Migration Project. After thirty years,
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Speaker 1: it's massive, millions of life years of information, case histories,
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Speaker 1: extraordinary detail. It's the gold standard. This has got to
11:49
Speaker 1: be one of the world's biggest migration databases.
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Speaker 8: It's certainly the biggest and most reliable on Mexico US migration.
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Speaker 8: When the government wants to know what goes on, they
12:01
Speaker 8: don't go to the border Patrol because their data are allowsy.
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Speaker 8: They come to the Mexican Migration Project.
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Speaker 1: In all of your work with this project, was there
12:10
Speaker 1: anything you ran across that really surprised you?
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Speaker 8: I guess what surprised me. In the late seventies, when
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Speaker 8: I first saw this was just how routine it had become,
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Speaker 8: and how institutionalized the circulation was, and how it was
12:23
Speaker 8: woven into the fabric of Mexican life at the time.
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Speaker 1: How institutionalized the circulation was. The principal finding of the
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Speaker 1: Mexican Migration Project is that Mexican migration to the United
12:36
Speaker 1: States has a distinctive pattern.
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Speaker 8: It's overwhelmingly circular.
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Speaker 1: Now, what does circular mean?
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Speaker 8: Exactly means they work seasonally in the United States and
12:46
Speaker 8: return home on an annual basis to be with their families.
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Speaker 1: So these workers there are they leaving their families back
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Speaker 1: in Mexico.
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Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it's overwhelmingly male, young, young males. And the
13:00
Speaker 8: typical pattern is you go for several times to earn
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Speaker 8: some money to help you back home.
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Speaker 1: What made the back and forth circulation possible was the
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Speaker 1: fact that for most of the twentieth century, the border
13:11
Speaker 1: between Mexico and the United States was porous, more of
13:15
Speaker 1: a line on a map than an actual border. The
13:17
Speaker 1: border patrol was a tiny force in those years. There
13:20
Speaker 1: were no walls, no surveillance drones. If you got stopped,
13:24
Speaker 1: you got turned around and sent back home.
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Speaker 6: Then you tried again, our family is mainly a family
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Speaker 6: that was born and raised in the border area.
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Speaker 1: Carlos Morentez, a labor organizer and former migrant worker, talking
13:40
Speaker 1: about his childhood in the nineteen sixties. Growing up in Warez, Mexico,
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Speaker 1: He and his friends used to swim across the Rio
13:49
Speaker 1: Grande carrying watermelons that they would sell on the American side,
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Speaker 1: like the river was a pond in their backyard.
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Speaker 6: Within a Hella scenes that we were living in two
13:59
Speaker 6: different countries. To us being children means that you know
14:07
Speaker 6: that we were living in a big with two neighborhoods,
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Speaker 6: one south of the river, one north of the river.
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Speaker 1: What Marentees is saying in economic terms is that the
14:20
Speaker 1: cost of crossing was effectively zero. It was free, and
14:24
Speaker 1: what happens when something is free, you use as much
14:27
Speaker 1: of it as you can.
14:30
Speaker 8: Usually they leave in February March as the seasons start
14:35
Speaker 8: picking up, and then return in December for the holidays
14:41
Speaker 8: and there's a big fiesta in migrant sending towns.
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Speaker 1: Massi is saying that Mexico was where family and roots were,
14:48
Speaker 1: it was cheap and close. America was where money could
14:52
Speaker 1: be made easily and quickly. This is not the way,
14:56
Speaker 1: say Jewish immigrants came to the United States in the
14:58
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. They didn't go back to Eastern Europe every summer,
15:03
Speaker 1: nor did the Italians who came over in the same period.
15:06
Speaker 1: Entire villages moved en mass from southern Italy the United
15:09
Speaker 1: States permanently. The price of returning where they came from
15:14
Speaker 1: was not zero. Their homeland was not welcoming, and even
15:19
Speaker 1: if it were, the cost of crossing the ocean was
15:21
Speaker 1: so high that it could not be done routinely. But
15:26
Speaker 1: Mexican migration was different. Carlos Morentez remembers his grandfather telling
15:31
Speaker 1: him that he wanted to return to Mexico to Zakitacus.
15:37
Speaker 6: So the attraction to go back to Mexico will be
15:41
Speaker 6: to go back to your real homeland, to the rural
15:45
Speaker 6: community that you left behind, with families, with your history,
15:52
Speaker 6: with everything the old your identity.
16:00
Speaker 1: This is not the story the United States tells itself.
16:03
Speaker 1: The inscription on the Statue of Liberty does not read
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Speaker 1: give me you're tired, you're poor, your huddled masses yearning
16:09
Speaker 1: to breathe free for six months until you make enough
16:12
Speaker 1: money to go home again. When we think of immigration,
16:15
Speaker 1: we think of the Jewish and the Italian model permanence.
16:22
Speaker 1: Second thing, circular immigration is very hard to measure. Border
16:26
Speaker 1: controls are designed to count the number of people coming in,
16:30
Speaker 1: not the number of people leaving, because we assume the
16:33
Speaker 1: number coming in is what matters, which it is in
16:36
Speaker 1: most cases, but not in the case of Mexico, because
16:40
Speaker 1: if a huge group of people eventually go back home again,
16:43
Speaker 1: the only number that matters is net migration those who
16:47
Speaker 1: come in minus those who go home. And thirdly, most importantly,
16:56
Speaker 1: circular migration is the result of a zero cost border crossing.
17:01
Speaker 1: It is what happens when you can swim across the
17:03
Speaker 1: Rio Grande or walk from Warez in Mexico to al
17:06
Speaker 1: Paso in Texas. So what happens to circular migration when
17:12
Speaker 1: the cost of migrating is no longer zero. One of
17:17
Speaker 1: the things that General Leonard Chapman heard when he took
17:20
Speaker 1: over the IS was that his predecessor had never left Washington, DC.
17:26
Speaker 1: For someone coming from the Marine Corps, that was unthinkable.
17:29
Speaker 1: Leaders review their troops, so Chapman set out to visit
17:34
Speaker 1: everys Field office, close to four hundred of them all
17:38
Speaker 1: over the world, some with no more than two or
17:41
Speaker 1: three people, and it took me.
17:43
Speaker 9: Three years to do it, but I did. I got
17:45
Speaker 9: to every single one. I'm real least wont so. I
17:49
Speaker 9: spent a tremendous amount of time traveling talking to my troops,
17:55
Speaker 9: for whom.
17:55
Speaker 4: I built up a very high regard.
17:58
Speaker 1: Chapman modernized the agency. When it came to information management,
18:02
Speaker 1: he thought thes was thirty years behind the Marine Corps.
18:06
Speaker 1: Chapman set up a public affairs office, first in the
18:09
Speaker 1: agency's history. He became a familiar face on Capitol Hill,
18:13
Speaker 1: and the more he learned, the more alarmed he became.
18:18
Speaker 1: There was, as he put it, a general laxity in
18:22
Speaker 1: the enforcement of immigration laws. For goodness sake, kids were
18:25
Speaker 1: swimming across the Rio Grande, selling their watermelons and then
18:29
Speaker 1: going back home again. People were treating the border like
18:32
Speaker 1: it was just a line on a map.
18:34
Speaker 10: I mean, it's easy to inventage. Yes, twenty five million,
18:39
Speaker 10: fifty million, seventy five million. Why not, there's no machinery
18:48
Speaker 10: to stop them.
18:50
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, when Chapman took over the Ions,
18:53
Speaker 1: the cost of crossing the Mexican border was effectively zero.
18:58
Speaker 1: By the time he left in nineteen seventy seven, it
19:01
Speaker 1: was not, and so it begins. In nineteen eighty six
19:08
Speaker 1: comes the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which militarizes the border.
19:13
Speaker 1: Then Operation Blockade, which diffens up the border crossing in
19:16
Speaker 1: El Pasa, Operation Gatekeeper, which diffens up the border crossing
19:21
Speaker 1: in San Diego. The budget of the border patrol between
19:25
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen eighties and twenty ten increases tenfold. And
19:32
Speaker 1: then today with the Attorney General of the United States
19:35
Speaker 1: sometimes sounds like Commandant Jefferson Sessions.
19:40
Speaker 11: I have put in place a zero tolerance policy or
19:43
Speaker 11: illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross the
19:48
Speaker 11: border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you.
19:52
Speaker 2: Is that simple.
19:56
Speaker 1: The cost of crossing the border has been escalating for
19:59
Speaker 1: a generation, and it began with Leonard Chapman.
20:04
Speaker 4: We ran a gallup.
20:05
Speaker 9: Hole right after our first got there that showed that
20:08
Speaker 9: over something like fifteen percent of the.
20:10
Speaker 12: American people had ever heard of the problem. When I
20:13
Speaker 12: left three years later and we had another gallon role
20:19
Speaker 12: and that over eighty.
20:21
Speaker 10: Five had heard of him.
20:23
Speaker 1: In his years in office, Chapman made two hundred and
20:27
Speaker 1: fifty speeches across the United States. This is at the
20:30
Speaker 1: same time that he's personally visiting every IONS field office
20:34
Speaker 1: and overseeing the complete overhaul of the agency and making
20:38
Speaker 1: his argument over and again on Capitol Hill and giving
20:42
Speaker 1: hundreds of press interviews. The United States went from an
20:46
Speaker 1: IONS headed by someone who never left his desk to
20:50
Speaker 1: an agency headed by someone who couldn't stay at his desk.
20:53
Speaker 1: He was relentless wake in America.
20:56
Speaker 4: We're telling America about our problems. Then though they had.
21:01
Speaker 1: Americans didn't think they had an illegal immigration problem. Leonard
21:05
Speaker 1: Chapman convinced them that they did. When I was fourteen
21:17
Speaker 1: growing up in Canada, I went to a week long
21:20
Speaker 1: track and field training camp at the International Peace Garden.
21:24
Speaker 1: It's a park straddling the border between North Dakota and
21:27
Speaker 1: the Canadian province of Manitoba. I go for long runs
21:31
Speaker 1: each morning with two friends. One day we noticed a
21:34
Speaker 1: diner on the American side, so we hopped the fence
21:38
Speaker 1: and got a burger. I say fence because the border
21:42
Speaker 1: and nets Stretcher Prairie was just a fence, the type
21:45
Speaker 1: that someone in the suburbs might have around their backyard.
21:49
Speaker 1: On our way back to Canada, we were spotted by
21:51
Speaker 1: a border patrol officer. He arrested us, put us in
21:55
Speaker 1: the back of his car, and took us to the
21:57
Speaker 1: nearest as office. We had to put our names in
22:00
Speaker 1: a book underneath a big photo of President Jimmy Carter.
22:03
Speaker 1: I decided to be clever and wrote, my name is
22:05
Speaker 1: William F. Buckley. Then we got dropped off back at
22:09
Speaker 1: the border fence with a stern lecture. When I got
22:16
Speaker 1: home and told my parents, they found the whole thing hilarious,
22:20
Speaker 1: but as you can imagine, it left an impression. That
22:24
Speaker 1: Burger at the diner was my first visit to the
22:27
Speaker 1: United States and they ended up in the back of
22:29
Speaker 1: a patrol car. I first read Robert Frost's Mending Wall
22:35
Speaker 1: not long afterwards in school. The poem is a back
22:39
Speaker 1: and forth between a man and his neighbor over the
22:41
Speaker 1: value of their fence. One side says, good fences make
22:45
Speaker 1: good neighbors. The other side, the narrator says, maybe not.
22:49
Speaker 1: It all depends on who the fence is keeping in
22:52
Speaker 1: or out. Right from my first read, I sided with
22:56
Speaker 1: the narrator because all I could think of was the
22:59
Speaker 1: fence I'd just jumped between Manitoba and North Dakota. We
23:02
Speaker 1: were fourteen year olds, and the fact that there wasn't
23:05
Speaker 1: much of a fence between the countries at that point
23:08
Speaker 1: meant that we could do normal fourteen year old things
23:11
Speaker 1: like get a burger. Would a better fence there have
23:14
Speaker 1: made us better neighbors or would we have just gone hungry?
23:18
Speaker 1: Frost neighbor thinks good fences solve problems. And the funny
23:21
Speaker 1: thing about that poem is how many people agree with him.
23:24
Speaker 1: But do good fences make good neighbors or do they
23:27
Speaker 1: just disrupt normal patterns of behavior? So what happened when
23:32
Speaker 1: the Mexican border became a good fence? Well, the historical
23:36
Speaker 1: Mexican migration pattern was that young men came to America, worked,
23:40
Speaker 1: went home, came back, went home again. That's what Douglas
23:44
Speaker 1: Massey documented in the Mexican Migration Project.
23:48
Speaker 8: Our data from the Mexican Migration Project indicate that between
23:51
Speaker 8: nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five, eighty five percent
23:55
Speaker 8: of all undocumented entries were offset by departures, so the
23:58
Speaker 8: net influenced small.
24:00
Speaker 1: Between nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five, lots and
24:04
Speaker 1: lots of Mexican migrants came to the United States without
24:07
Speaker 1: legal status. Almost all of them eventually went home, but
24:12
Speaker 1: then the border patrol was expanded, the crossing opportunities through
24:15
Speaker 1: El Paso and San Diego were shut down, and migrants
24:19
Speaker 1: had to adapt. They shifted from the fortified crossings in
24:23
Speaker 1: El Paso and San Diego to the most brutal parts
24:26
Speaker 1: of southern Arizona.
24:27
Speaker 8: Now you're out in the middle of high desert, open desert.
24:30
Speaker 8: It's bitterly cold at night, boiling hot during the day.
24:34
Speaker 8: There's no water, and death'smount And when you're out in
24:38
Speaker 8: the middle of nowhere, it's more costly to stage crossing.
24:43
Speaker 1: The financial incentive to come to the United States remains,
24:47
Speaker 1: but returning home is now suddenly so risky that you
24:50
Speaker 1: don't do it every six months or every Christmas or
24:53
Speaker 1: maybe even ever. You stay, and.
24:56
Speaker 8: As the male workers stay longer and longer, family unification occurs.
25:01
Speaker 8: They send for their wives and younger children, and those
25:04
Speaker 8: younger children are today's dreamers.
25:07
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, what was likelihood of a Mexican migrant
25:10
Speaker 1: returning home after his first trip to the United States.
25:14
Speaker 1: According to the Mexican Migration Project's data, it was about
25:17
Speaker 1: fifty percent. By twenty ten, it's zero. We built a
25:25
Speaker 1: wall to keep Mexican migrants out. In fact, the wall
25:29
Speaker 1: has kept them in. People who would otherwise have gone
25:32
Speaker 1: home stayed so long they put down roots. In March
25:37
Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, Douglas Massey, along with Jorge Durand and
25:41
Speaker 1: Karen Prinn, published a brilliant paper in the American Journal
25:44
Speaker 1: of Sociology, Why Border Enforcement Backfired, in which they ask
25:49
Speaker 1: a hypothetical question, what would have happened if the United
25:54
Speaker 1: States had done nothing over the past thirty years, frozen
25:58
Speaker 1: the budget and staff of the border patrol at nineteen
26:01
Speaker 1: eighty six levels allowed for some circular migration. The researchers
26:06
Speaker 1: estimate the undocumented Mexican population of the US would be
26:11
Speaker 1: about a third lower a third lower than it is now.
26:17
Speaker 1: This is according to the people who know more than
26:19
Speaker 1: anyone else about Mexican migration, who have access to one
26:23
Speaker 1: of the biggest immigration databases in the world. And what
26:28
Speaker 1: is their conclusion that the attempt to solve the problem
26:31
Speaker 1: of illegal Mexican migrants is what has caused the problem
26:35
Speaker 1: of illegal Mexican migrants. You can just hear the frustration
26:39
Speaker 1: in Douglas Massey's voice.
26:42
Speaker 8: For me I've been watching this train wreck in real
26:44
Speaker 8: time for the past two decades, really, and I kept
26:48
Speaker 8: trying to tell people that, you know, when it comes
26:50
Speaker 8: to border enforcement, less is more, and if you militarize
26:53
Speaker 8: the border, you're going to produce a larger undocumented population.
26:56
Speaker 8: I said this before the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate
26:59
Speaker 8: Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration.
27:02
Speaker 1: And what happens after Massi testifies the same thing happens
27:06
Speaker 1: every time.
27:07
Speaker 8: Nothing and then the rank King minority member who's representative
27:11
Speaker 8: for King from Texas gets up and basically says, take
27:14
Speaker 8: your lie in data and go home, because we know
27:16
Speaker 8: what the truth is. We're being invaded and we've got
27:18
Speaker 8: to stop this.
27:22
Speaker 1: Massey says, we need to do the exact opposite of
27:26
Speaker 1: what we're doing now. When we raise the cost of
27:29
Speaker 1: crossing the border, that shut down circulation. If you want
27:33
Speaker 1: to restore circulation, then you should make the border easier
27:36
Speaker 1: to cross. Reduce the size of the border patrol, don't
27:39
Speaker 1: increase it. Make it easier for migrants to get legal status,
27:43
Speaker 1: not harder.
27:45
Speaker 8: If you wanted to lower the number of Mexicans living
27:49
Speaker 8: in the United States, give them green cards, and a
27:51
Speaker 8: lot of them won't go home. The US is not
27:54
Speaker 8: that nice a place for people, for Mexicans these days,
27:58
Speaker 8: but they have families here, They got us born kids.
28:00
Speaker 8: They they and if they know they can come back,
28:03
Speaker 8: they'll go home.
28:08
Speaker 1: If we had kept things the way they were in
28:10
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies, the same badly run border patrol,
28:14
Speaker 1: the same ineffectual leadership, the same indifferent public, we wouldn't
28:18
Speaker 1: be tearing our hair out over immigration. If there was
28:23
Speaker 1: ever a place for bad government, it was on the
28:25
Speaker 1: southern US border. But what do we get. We got
28:29
Speaker 1: the one guy who couldn't do bad government, the man
28:32
Speaker 1: haunted by his country's failure to build a wall in Vietnam.
28:36
Speaker 10: I think who came out with comment about the all
28:39
Speaker 10: Marines are green.
28:42
Speaker 4: Fact the thing.
28:44
Speaker 1: There's a fascinating moment in General Chapman's oral history. His
28:48
Speaker 1: interviewer asks about racial troubles that rocked the Marine Corps
28:51
Speaker 1: in the late sixties, the civil rights movement was at
28:54
Speaker 1: its apex. There was a near race riodte at Camp
28:57
Speaker 1: La June, fistfights among soldiers in Vietnam. Black Marines wanted
29:02
Speaker 1: to be treated with the same consideration as white marines.
29:05
Speaker 1: Chapman's response may be his most memorable announcement. All Marines
29:11
Speaker 1: are green, not black, not white. The color of the
29:15
Speaker 1: uniform is what matters. Backed up by a directive unracial
29:19
Speaker 1: discrimination sent to every officer under his command. He even
29:23
Speaker 1: made a solemonic ruling on the prohibition against black soldiers
29:27
Speaker 1: wearing their hair in an afro. Hair he said was hair.
29:31
Speaker 1: The concern of the Marine Corps was not with its form,
29:35
Speaker 1: only with its length.
29:37
Speaker 4: What it said was that within those limits, a marine
29:40
Speaker 4: can style his hair anyway he wants to. Yeah, that's
29:44
Speaker 4: what it said. So that if a black marine wanted
29:48
Speaker 4: to have an afro that was no more than three
29:50
Speaker 4: inches long and was neat and trail around itself, fine,
29:54
Speaker 4: why not? Yeah?
30:03
Speaker 1: And the evening parade. To participate in the evening parade
30:08
Speaker 1: at eighth and nine, you used to have to be
30:10
Speaker 1: a perfect specimen of military manhood, more than six feet tall,
30:14
Speaker 1: no glasses, and white. Chapman says, why can't you be
30:19
Speaker 1: a perfect specimen of military manhood and black? He desegregated
30:25
Speaker 1: evening parade that got him hauled before a congressional committee
30:29
Speaker 1: full of angry Southerners. Chapman describes the experience with typical
30:34
Speaker 1: understatement as a quote interesting few hours, but I'm a
30:39
Speaker 1: deep Southerner myself, and so I was able to battle
30:43
Speaker 1: them with good effect. Unquote. I'm curious if he were
30:50
Speaker 1: here today, what would he make of the way we
30:52
Speaker 1: talk about immigration away that debate has changed.
30:55
Speaker 5: I'm not sure what he would say.
30:58
Speaker 1: This is Chapman's granddaughter, Danielle.
31:00
Speaker 5: Again, you really disliked complaining, and you know he would
31:04
Speaker 5: always say if anybody was, well, okay, what are you
31:08
Speaker 5: going to do it? You know, he was incredibly pragmatic,
31:12
Speaker 5: so I think that he would probably view a lot
31:15
Speaker 5: of the current conversation as just a bunch of noise
31:19
Speaker 5: without a solution.
31:21
Speaker 1: So what was his solution?
31:22
Speaker 12: Then?
31:23
Speaker 1: General Chapman did what came naturally. He enforced the law,
31:27
Speaker 1: he drew the line. He made a complicated issue.
31:31
Speaker 5: Clear, he didn't like the idea of, you know, mass
31:36
Speaker 5: illegal immigration. But at the same time, his views had
31:40
Speaker 5: none of the tone that the immigration debate has now.
31:44
Speaker 5: He just didn't think of it in racial or ethnic terms.
31:49
Speaker 5: I never heard him talk about it like that or
31:53
Speaker 5: or attach the kind of emotions that you hear people
31:57
Speaker 5: attaching to it in the current debate.
32:04
Speaker 1: General Chapman traveled to every corner of the United States
32:07
Speaker 1: and stood up in that deliberate ramrod straight Marine Corps
32:11
Speaker 1: way and told the American people plainly and clearly what
32:14
Speaker 1: needed to be done. Can I fault him? I can't.
32:20
Speaker 1: I wish there were more people like Letter Chapin, especially
32:23
Speaker 1: these days. It's just that in some cases, complicated things
32:28
Speaker 1: are best left unclear, and we're better off letting whatever
32:32
Speaker 1: it is that doesn't love.
32:33
Speaker 2: A wall, or in its course, something there is that
32:38
Speaker 2: doesn't love a wall that wants it down. I could
32:43
Speaker 2: say elves him, but it's not Elves exactly, and I'd
32:47
Speaker 2: rather he said it for himself. I see him there,
32:50
Speaker 2: bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand,
32:53
Speaker 2: like an old stone, savage armed. He moves in darkness,
32:57
Speaker 2: as it seems to me, not of woods, only in
32:59
Speaker 2: the shade of trees. He will not go behind his
33:02
Speaker 2: father's saying, and he likes having thought of it so well.
33:06
Speaker 2: He says again, good fences, my good neighbors.
33:18
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is a Panoply production. Senior producer is Miel LaBelle,
33:23
Speaker 1: with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista Our editor is Julia Barton.
33:28
Speaker 1: Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson,
33:32
Speaker 1: original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to ac Valdez
33:36
Speaker 1: for capturing the sounds of the evening parade and for
33:39
Speaker 1: the audio of Robert Frost. Thanks to the National Council
33:42
Speaker 1: of Teachers of English, and thanks as always to Andy
33:46
Speaker 1: Bauers and Commandant Jacob Weisper. I'm Malcolm Glamin.
33:59
Speaker 5: I think the only time I can remember him really
34:02
Speaker 5: getting angry with me was when I kind of blasphemed
34:05
Speaker 5: the Constitution, and I don't know why I would do
34:07
Speaker 5: that except I was a teenager.