PARIS -- Reading today about the U.S. Senate's plan to build 870 miles of fences along America's Mexican border set me to thinking about my hometown in Wisconsin. When I was growing up in Tomah, it was possible (in fact, it still is today) to walk from one end of town to the other entirely through people's backyards. Fences were not considered either necessary or neighborly. The only caution a kid had to exert, as he took shortcuts through other people's private landholdings, were to know who had watchdogs quartered under the back porch, and which old ladies tended toward violence if you trampled their zinnias.

When I lived near San Francisco, much later on, the abundance of fences struck me as the true distinction between Californian and Midwestern cultures. California is a place not given to easy neighborliness. Unlike Wisconsinites, Golden Staters are a demure people, more comfortable sitting in the driver's seat with a cell phone than on the front stoop with a beer. I've considered the possibility that this culture gap relates somehow to the fact that California has far more Mexican immigrants than Wisconsin. Maybe all those fences are a line of defense against barbarian hordes...

Except that the hordes are devoutly Catholic and among the politest people on earth. In fact, among the few visitors allowed inside those California fences are Latin immigrants, given free rein as long as they bring along a lawnmower, leafblower and a few bags of mulch.

The California example, in fact, demonstrates that we're not planning Congress’s awesome and costly Southern Wall for the sake of "national security," because -- after all -- we’ve already winked and shrugged as (at least) 11 million "aliens" crept across this border and took up squatter's rights in the U.S. economy. Everyone knows that destitute Mexicans, Guatemalans and Panamanians don’t sneak northward carrying bombs and bitterly plotting to murder white people in their office towers. We do occasionally suffer a little carnage at the hands of Colombians, but this is not because the killers are poor and seeking jobs as tomato pickers. It's because they're rich and they already have jobs -- as druglords.

We want our illegal aliens, wetbacks and druglords alike -- but especially the wetbacks. The President has admitted as much, praising illegals for their willingness to accept menial jobs at starvation pay -- and implicitly scolding America's homegrown poor for their dogmatic obsession with health plans, indoor toilets and the minimum wage.

The great Rio Grande fence will fail. People will get around it, go under it, fly over it, swim beyond it, cut holes and crawl through. We’ll kill some of them and deport thousands more. But they'll keep coming back.

I find this pattern both inspiring and sad, because while we welcome these immigrants and give them work, we hold them in contempt. I'm reminded again of my smalltown childhood. You remember that there was always one kid, short or fat or ugly or younger than anyone else, desperate to join the group, to fit in and be befriended. He would do anything. If you tempted him with acceptance, he would eat a worm or pull down his pants in front of all the girls at recess.

But after he had suffered that rite of initiation, he found himself still isolated, an object of greater scorn than before. Now, he was an outcast not only for being short, fat and ugly, but also because he ate worms.

Likewise, we make Mexicans eat worms, as the price of admission into America, and then we're disgusted with them -- for eating worms.

The latest expression of our disgust is going to be a fence -- which, of course, won't work. Fences have never worked. The forebears of this particular fence include the walls of Jericho, the fortifications of Troy, the Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall and that cockamamie deadline they're stringing up now along the West Bank.

The fence won't work because we really don't believe in the damn thing. We're building it to appease xenophobes and bigots who keep finding new uses for Sept. 11, 2001. We're building it despite three hundred years of welcoming foreigners not just as "guests" but as aspiring Americans. We were all aliens once, except for a lingering handful of natives who are -- ironically -- blood relatives of the Indo-Americans against whom we're supposedly mounting this barricade. We're building this fence not as a barrier but as a colossally expensive act of symbolism.

What does it symbolize? Search me. The bigots know, but they won't say, because they insist on masking their motives and taking this whole fraud seriously.

One of the wall-builders, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, epitomized the xenophobe position by illiterately reciting from Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall." Quotes Sessions: "Good fences make good neighbors."

If Sessions had actually read the poem, he would've remembered that his quote is a line repeated mindlessly not by the poem's narrator (Frost), but by his neighbor, who is a fool. Frost's neighbor is stuck in his ways and blind to the reality that the fence keeps nothing out and holds nothing in. It is broken by nature, beseiged by hunters, undone by gravity and sabotaged (seemingly) by elves.

The neighbor is oblivious to Frost’s irony, and so Frost every spring -- magnanimously -- accepts the idiot ritual of mending the useless wall and tolerating the other man’s hand-me-down hogwash about good fences making good neighbors.

The moral of the poem is the opposite of Sen. Session’s assertion. It is that "Before I build a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense."

The real reprise of "Mending Wall" is this: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

I prefer to think that Frost's "something" is America itself -- where a kid could walk all the way from one end to the other through everybody's backyard.

David Benjamin is a novelist and journalist who splits his time between Madison, Wisconsin and Paris. His latest book is The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked. Email to: lastkidpicked@wanadoo.fr

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