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