Arivaca to Avdiivka, It’s All About Borders

ARIVACA, Arizona — On party days when banjos and stirring voices spill out from La Gitana Cantina and Café, talk of the nearby Mexican border is mostly muted. This funky little settlement smacks of a ranchland redoubt of old souls and new-age spirits.

In Avdiivka on the collapsing Ukrainian front, the soundtrack is booming artillery. Russians knifed through town to advance on farms and villages against heavily outgunned dispirited defenders who plead for more ammunition.

The two towns, 6,500 miles apart, seem to be in different galaxies. But they’re not.

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Polls show “the border crisis” is the overriding issue as American elections approach. The Republican mantra resonates: Fix our own borders rather than worry about other people’s distant troubles. That falls somewhere between absurd and insane.

I grew up near Mexico and during 60 years as a reporter crossed hundreds of borders around the world in war and peace, legally or otherwise. Today, I see territorial imperatives — boundaries — as the greatest challenge in a world spinning out of control.

The root of “Ukraine” means borderlands. As on America’s southern frontier and most everywhere else, title to it has shifted over millennia. Stability depends on protecting societies that have evolved as integral parts of a single imperiled planet.

And people in disparate cultures need the possibility to move across controlled frontiers. In some cases, families in search of a better life bring fresh spices to season a melting pot. In others, increasingly, it is a matter of life and death.

Europeans settled the United States, muscling aside native tribes. Now Europe is overwhelmed. Beyond orderly procedures to admit people its economy requires, America must confront the causes that force families to reluctantly flee their homes.

Upheaval abroad pushes yet more refugees toward a permeable wall that savages hallowed Indian ground, wildlife habitats and fragile ecological balance. War cuts deeply into food supplies. Desperate people do what they must to survive.

Much of the blame falls on T. rex, a modern-day tyrannosaurus in (sort-of) human form bent on ruling an ex-United States as his personal corrupt fiefdom. With political cunning, Donald Trump now exploits fear of intractable problems that predate him.

Gitana means gypsy, evoking an ancient people constantly on the move. A sign outside Arivaca’s La Gitana bans the intolerant. ”UNWANTED: Members of any border military group, including, but not limited to AZ Border Recon.” It harks back to a 2009 outrage, long before Republicans seized on scapegoating migrants as a path to power.

Three white supremacists from Minutemen American Defense — aptly, “MAD”— entered the home of Raul Flores Jr., a 29-year-old Mexican American, claiming to be law officers seeking fugitives. They looted the place to fund self-appointed border vigilantes.

They murdered Flores and his 9-year-old daughter. His wife took three bullets and played dead. As she was talking to a 911 operator, they came back. She fought them off with her husband’s pistol.

Two await execution in a state prison; the third is locked up for life. Yet ragtag militias of America Firsters in castoff camouflage, some armed to the teeth, still roam the borderlands to harass humanitarian volunteers and kick over cached water barrels.

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Land grabs and ethnic discrimination are the new norm in much of the world: Israel-Palestine; an acquisitive China; across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Multiple millions are on the move spurred by conflict, terror, poverty and criminal gangs.

Ukraine is especially dangerous, a first step in Vladimir the Terrible’s grandiose imperial dreams. It starkly illustrates why Joe Biden’s humane approach to geopolitical cooperation is so vastly superior to Trump’s selfish, ignorant demagogy.

Voters — and all but a few trusted reporters — see only Biden’s surface compromises, essential to all presidents in a superpower of 320 million people with deep-seated biases of every sort. His tough diplomacy, by necessity, is conducted behind closed doors.

Israel is a stark example of why the world’s lone free-world superpower needs consistent foreign policies and legislators who resist publicly undercutting its chief executives.

Trump backed ultra-Zionists’ plans to subjugate Palestinians into apartheid after moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Hamas’s despicable reaction on Oct. 7 stunned Israel and spiked its popularity among Gazans who had mostly opposed it.

Biden publicly supports Benjamin Netanyahu not only because of Jewish opinion at home but also because Israel is meant to be an enlightened democracy with enough military clout to anchor a hostile neighborhood rich in petroleum.

But he despises the man who with Trump’s solid support pushed issues of land and legitimacy to violence. Settlers displaced Palestinians by force in the West Bank, and Israel Defense Forces cracked down hard on young protesters who fought back.

Jews, divided into subsets, have no hierarchy. Many abhor Netanyahu’s devastating overkill, which violates its basic teachings. Yet his ruthless campaign in Gaza and settlers’ West Bank killings have turned much of the world against Jews of every sort.

Biden opened aid corridors and pushes for two-state coexistence. He has contained wider war, with plans for long-term stability. But he comes off as weak. Netanyahu ignores him, counting on a Trump second coming to save him from corruption charges.

At the core, the basic problem is boundaries and borders.

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As U.S. elections near, Republican politicians parachute into Eagle Pass, Texas, to praise Gov. Greg Abbott for flouting the law. His razorwire and state lawmen prevent federal authorities from rescuing illegal crossers from drowning in the Rio Grande.

Millions of dollars that could build safe temporary housing at border posts and hire magistrates for rapid processing are squandered by shipping distressed, destitute people around the country in cruel political stunts.

Trump’s harangues are lies. Nearly all fentanyl is trafficked by Americans through ports of entry. Most arrivals are now asylum seekers from other continents eager to declare themselves and, if admitted, work in an economy that badly needs them.

Biden accepted stringent demands to speed aid to Ukraine. But Trump’s House puppet, Mike Johnson, killed a Senate compromise bill. Trump is exposing families to suffering and death so he can blame Biden for the border crush his own cruel policies created.

Ponder that a moment. Elected lawmakers betrayed their oaths of office in fear of an ex-president facing 91 indictments he has managed to delay. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney say some fear for their lives, and their families’, at the hands of his unhinged zealots.

Trump’s plan for Ukraine is simple: block military aid and refuse to defend NATO partners who don’t pay America enough protection money. That gives Putin a green light to push on from Crimea toward Kyiv and other parts of the old Evil Empire.

Ukrainians, like Afghans, would need refuge. Authoritarians would slam their doors and expel minorities, swelling the human tide looking for safe havens.

If America retreats with ignominy behind fortress borders, scornful allies will have to fill the void. Poland pays NATO nearly 4 percent of GDP. Its foreign minister told Fareed Zakaria that could double. “We will not be a Russian colony again,” he said.

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Along with his Jan. 6 insurrection and so much other treachery, it is clear why eminent historians recently ranked Trump as the worst president in U.S. history. A second term would be incalculably worse.

Those scholars declared Biden the 14th best U.S. president, two notches ahead of Ronald Reagan. Considering how successfully he has dealt with calamities Trump left behind, that is likely selling him short. And yet a troubling number of voters want him gone.

Doctors at Walter Reed medical center pronounced Biden “healthy, active, robust…fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” He jokes about senior moments, but his statecraft reflects acuity and wisdom acquired over time.

He is surrounded by able aides and a smart campaign-companion wife whose name he remembers. Trump recently referred to Melania, conspicuously AWOL, as Mercedes. Listen to him speak, anywhere, anytime. Basically gibberish.

I call these dispatches non-prophet, and I’m making no predictions. Too many people reduce complexity to kneejerk simplicity and obsess on single secondary issues. Much of the media mainstream piles on. Sitting presidents are sitting ducks.

Constant polling, meaningless at this early stage, reinforces a public sense that Biden is too old and tired. Yet early signs are encouraging. Reporters focused on Trump and Nikki Haley in South Carolina primaries. Biden won the Democratic vote by 96 percent.

After Super Tuesday results all but assured Trump the nomination, Van Jones observed on CNN, “Get ready for the fight of your life.” Trump’s speech to a cheering crowd was nearly 180 degrees off truth, beyond any possibility of comprehensive fact-correcting.

He praised his handling of “the China virus,” which, in fact, killed at least 200,000 Americans needlessly, wiped out jobs and left stock markets in free fall. He said he provoked no wars, ignoring Ukraine and Gaza. He blamed Biden for his own Afghanistan debacle.

Trump said he wiped out the Islamic State in four weeks. That took a months-long NATO campaign, with Iraqis and Kurds doing most combat. Today, ISIS terrorists and offshoots remain strong from Afghanistan to vast stretches of Africa.

He took credit for Barack Obama’s economic boom and energy independence and did not mention how quickly Biden brought prosperity and productivity to historic levels when he took over. Historians aside, Trump ranked Biden as the worst U.S. president.

Mostly, Trump focused on immigration. He said 15 million people besiege America, adding a preposterous claim that planeloads of 300,000 migrants are being flown into the country. As president, he said, he would seal the border. There was much more.

Jacqueline Geering, a visiting French photojournalist friend with decades of global experience, watched in stunned disbelief. “Nobody in that room listening to him would even consider that he was lying,” she said.

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I worry most about young voters, who will likely make the difference in November. For better or worse, they must live with the consequences. Conversations with smart 20-somethings I know well are troubling.

Some worry enough about the future not to have children. But few read newspapers or watch much TV. Echoes in their own circles seldom include distant geopolitics. Few want more Trump. But Biden leaves them cold.

Most report a groundswell for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Republicans bankroll exactly for that reason. His last name has a familiar ring, and he was an environmentalist before he went batty. Any vote not for Biden, or not cast at all, is one up for Trump.

With continuity in the White House and a Congress that embraces the Constitution, America can resume its historic role in a world that needs its wherewithal. Targeted aid and diplomacy can reduce the factors that force so many people to flee their homes.

This is beyond urgent. Climate collapse worsens by the month, with no regard for borders. Only concerted global cooperation can slow it down, let alone reverse it.

In the end, elections will depend on how many voters think beyond personal issues. Abortion, for one, matters a great deal. But in the wider world as it is today, so do Arivaca and Avdiivka.