Would you rather have a low fence between you and your neighbor or a high wall? One can be a meeting ground where people can lean into conversation and coexistence, and strangers can become friends. The other is an impediment to contact, a barrier where people on each side sacrifice freedom and opportunity in favor of false security against an enemy that doesn’t even exist.
The world is trillions of dollars poorer today than it was last Sunday, and decades of social and political evolution in Europe has been undermined by anti-globalization and anti-immigration fears and the vote of England’s least literate and informed citizens. The secondary reverberations have yet to be felt across the continent and world markets.
The so-called British exit, or ‘Brexit,’ turned out not to be the choice of the British, but really the English, or ‘Exit.’ Despite all evidence to the contrary, a narrow constituency that believes what divides us is greater than what unites us in this world carried the day and sent us all tumbling backwards.
Closer to home, the same virulent rhetoric of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters has hacked the Republican Party, and left many a party leader fumbling to justify his tepid support for the party’s candidate. The campaign feeds its followers, mostly less educated white people, a diet of nationalism, racism, and Islamophobia. Who can imagine four more months of such unhinged behavior?
All of this global and national convulsion seemed somewhere far away Thursday evening as a bicultural, mostly bilingual audience filled the Frost Bank Plaza Club for a reception welcoming newly arrived Mexican Consul General Héctor Velasco Monroy.
The people who gathered to meet and hear the new consul general are fence builders, not wall people. They understand San Antonio’s unique place in New World history and culture and, as the city approaches its 300th anniversary, the opportunity that comes with open doors and welcoming embraces.
Velasco Monroy made no pretense of playing it safe. He condemned Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric and promised that no wall would ever divide the two nations.
(Read more: New Mexican Consul General: Border Wall? ‘Forget That’)
After all, in this instance, neighbors are family, and there is no divorcing our shared history or our mutual interdependence. A majority of the city’s population has roots in Mexico, and tens of thousands of Mexican nationals live and work here and contribute to the city’s vibrancy and growth. Build a wall and watch San Antonio’s economy crumble. Open the city’s gates while others turn inward and we can create new opportunity.
The city’s relations with Mexico have ebbed since 9/11, and it has been more than a few years since we have played host to a truly dynamic consul general who has the ear of the Mexican president. The last truly influential consul general was Carlos Sada Solana, who served here from 1995-2000 and recently was named Mexico’s ambassador to the United States.
Velasco Monroy is close to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, I am told, so perhaps the moment has to come to look beyond years of cartel violence and enduring corruption and search for new ways to deepen our economic and cultural ties.
More Mexicans are leaving than arriving in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump’s fear-mongering about Mexican rapists and criminals and others flooding across the border illegally is basically a lie.
In the world where I live and work, as a neighbor of Geekdom in the Rand building, the Mexicans I meet are talented young entrepreneurs who have come here to build new companies, to use technology and talent to solve problems, to find their place in an environment where they can work alongside other young entrepreneurs and find the support and the capital to realize their dreams.
Visionaries in San Antonio built this environment. It didn’t happen by itself. And it’s no coincidence that one of San Antonio’s most prominent businessmen, philanthropists and civic leaders, Red McCombs, has underwritten an annual luncheon speaker series for the Asociación de Empresarios Mexicanos (AEM), an organization of Mexican business owners and executives in the United States that was founded in San Antonio in 1996.
The AEM promotes U.S.-Mexico trade and relations and serves as an international business development bridge between the two countries. McCombs knows that good neighbors make good trading partners.
Why shouldn’t San Antonio work to become the destination city for talented neighbors to the south who are seeking to come where they stand the best chance of succeeding? Every major employer in the city, from USAA to Rackspace, is competing for talented tech workers. There simply are not enough to meet the demand.
Over time, innovative schools like the recently announced CAST Tech and other planned Centers for Applied Science and Technology will produce more homegrown talents, but why wait when people are asking to come here and help build the new urban economy?
Of course, today San Antonio’s economy and job base is intertwined with Japan, Germany, South Korea and other countries. Our international connections are growing. The city’s developing World Heritage profile will draw visitors from countries around the world who otherwise might never have come here.
Even before the epic disaster of Great Britain’s referendum where Leave defeated Remain, it was evident in the United States that cities had become the catalysts for growth and change. National and state governments are polarized by political extremism and seldom can be counted on to act in the interest of the majority.
San Antonio is responsible for its own future well-being. People here can reject the siren call to hate your neighbor, to blame outsiders for everything, to lock the doors and load your guns. The truth is life isn’t terrible, other people are not to be feared, and the country is not spiraling into oblivion, as Trump and others would have us believe.
Look out your window, walk through your neighborhood, make your way through the city, and look at all the different people living, working, and playing together. Yes, there is crime, terrible poverty, people without homes, children without good parents, social injustice and economic inequality. These ills must be fought and surmounted.
But acting out of anger, fear or frustration accomplishes nothing and, as we have seen in Europe these past few days, can wreak havoc and damage that will not be easily undone. It probably will take a generation to regain what has been lost.
Globalization has produced its share of winners and losers. Every possible political scenario does the same. Many in the media search out the losers and present a simple and incomplete narrative when only an understanding of complexity will do. That’s why it’s so important to elect smart, educated and worldly leaders who know that only hard work and good will produce lasting results.
Totalitarian governments and sectarian wars have done far more to displace millions of people who now are homeless refugees doing exactly what any of us would do in such circumstances: seek shelter, security, and employment for themselves and their loved ones.
There isn’t enough concrete and barbed wire to shut everyone out. Technology and smart phones have done more to take down borders and walls than anything governments have done in recent times. There is no going back. The only way to work ourselves out of the problems we share as a world community it to work together.
That’s why San Antonians who gathered Thursday night to reaffirm our city’s welcoming disposition represent real leadership.
Top image: Councilman Roberto Treviño (D1) and Mexican Consul General of Mexico in San Antonio Héctor Velasco Monroy. Photo by Scott Ball.
Related Stories:
Commentary: ‘Brexit’ is Bad for America and Texas
New Mexican Consul General: Border Wall? ‘Forget That’
City Looks to Germany for Economic, Cultural Opportunities
San Antonians Make Business, Cultural Connections in Spain
Mayor’s Trip Promotes City’s National, International Economic Diversity
Nirenberg: Celebrating 60 Years of International Relationships in Our Own Backyard
Ask which party Red McCombs supports. Yes, there is crime, terrible poverty, people without homes, children without good parents, and social injustice, and over $50 billion has been spent since the “Great Society” fighting these symptoms. Still hasn’t changed. Globalization has put us $19 TRILLION in debt. What else has to be said. We have many smart and talented people, but unfortunately many, many more are being left behind because of immortality, irresponsibility, and ignorance. I pray that each American support themselves and their families and friends. Instead of having your hand out, keep them in your pocket to hold on to your money. If not, these governments will steal what little you have left.
Would you rather have a low fence between you and your neighbor or a high wall?
Poor choice of metaphor. Am I having problems with my neighbor trespassing and, worse, inviting others to his home and dropping them off on my side of the fence? Because that’s Mexico. Its citizens come over and those Central Americans who can get into Mexico are ferried up to La Frontera to be dropped off on our doorstep. Who’s the bad neighbor again?
And I’m happy for once to see open hostility to the “ignorant” and “uneducated” poor whites in your piece. most liberals would only say this at a dinner party.
Unsolicited advice: You should get out of the neat little Geek bubble you’ve created and go beyond the group of admittedly wonderful RR people you’ve curated—you’ve got disaffected neighbors who support Trump or who, across the pond, would have supported Brexit, who aren’t mere bigots or fearful reactionaries. Rather, they’re responding to something real. They’ve been marginalized. They have real concerns.
Thank God that disaffection and mistrust has an outlet at this early juncture before it gets really ugly. Trump represents what these people feel. Brexit—and all the exits to come—represent what those people feel. If you use up all your editorial page hyperbole on a Trump or a Brexit, what will you do when a Lenin (bad example I guess) or a Hitler show up?
“Trump represents what these people feel. Brexit—and all the exits to come—represent what those people feel. ”
How about we cut out the dog-whistling and the self-victimization “poor me my FEELINGS” schtick? Trump, and Brexit, represent nothing more and nothing less than racism driven by hate, anger, and fear. It’s true that the average Trump voter isn’t uneducated, but it is also true, overwhelmingly so, that they are white. (As were, oddly enough, “leave” Brexit voters.) Coincidences, I’m sure. How many of your “disaffected neighbors” aren’t white? I’d guess real close to zero.
This Trump supporter screaming in a Mexican-American man’s face to make him a burrito in broad daylight on a public street ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ups4FeSuHvY ; warning: language) totally isn’t racism–it’s just how he feels. Never mind that the political discourse is such that this guy FEELS it’s perfectly okay to do this. Never mind the parallels between this scene and 1963 Alabama.
Trump trades in anger and fear, based entirely in ignorance of documented fact, to advance a campaign based on racism. The saddest part of it all is the revelation of just how many ignorant racists we really do have in this country. But it does explain much.
Mr. Rivard,
Have you considered that in a recent fundraiser held for Donald Trump in San Antonio that Mr. McCombs was listed as a Co-Chair for the event? Is it possible that Mr. McCombs, whom you hail as a stalwart and upstanding San Antonian, is a bigot? Of Course not. To coyly charge that all who mention a slight agreeance w some of the populism that Mr. Trump espouses is a neanderthal w the IQ of a peanut and the racial opinion of a pre-Nazi Brownshirt is beneath the good journalism of which I know you are more than capable.
It is possible that the promise of free-trade and globalism has not materialized for the majority of Americans? Free-trade only works when all things are equal among trading partners, otherwise the society with the higher standard of living falls to the level of the one with the lower. All boats do not rise, rather, all boats level off and the boats for the US (& Britain) have gone down. Your view of the recent Brexit vote as an epic disaster, we view as an epic liberation.
Is it possible that those of us in the Trump camp are speaking of illegal Mexicans and not legal immigrants (whom you are neighboring w at Geekdom) who are abiding by our laws as to entrance into this country. My wife’s family, from the Philippines, college educated w PhD’s, took 20+ years to immigrate legally to this country. Have you ever spoken to a Filipino, desperate to leave a 3rd world country rife w corruption and lacking of opportunity, of how difficult it is to get that coveted immigration visa, how they feel about illegal immigrants?
Mr. Rivard-those of us on the other side believe in the promise of America so famously engraved on the Statue of Liberty. However, you must remember that everyone who entered our country through Ellis Island were vetted by immigration officials prior to entrance into our country.
By the way-if you would like a copy of the Trump invite I received w Red McCombs as the Co-Chair send me a link. Perhaps a follow up story on how someone so enlightened to support the AEM can also raise funds for an apparent racist would make a good read. My guess is the Express News (whom you are not affiliated with) did not print such a story because of the amount of print advertising McCombs Enterprises with their establishment. I hope that is not the case with your business. Thank you.
Section 1325 in Title 8 of the United States Code, “Improper entry of alien…
Does SA benefit from the global economy? Microsoft, Toyota and other transnational corporations certainly do. They enjoys city and county tax breaks, CPS discounts and other perks at the expense of local taxpayers. Rising property tax protests by a shrinking middle class are a faint echo of discontent. See story here: http://watchdog.org/268025/texas-corporate-giveaways/