Seeing in Trump’s Wall more than what’s intended

Walls to ward off anyone deemed undesirable or just about anyone who doesn’t belong has become a prominent idea these days in America, as posed by Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to solve the immigration problem.
Nothing new, isn’t it? Though the sheer magnitude of Trump’s Wall sounds appalling, who hasn’t known of walls, borders and fences? Even seeming infinite spaces, such as oceans and skies, do divide us with rights of ownership. Yet, how seemingly easy these could be breached, like the Philippines’ problem with China on the Scarborough Shoal, yet quite difficult to relax, like the borders that Syrian refugees crossed from Hungary to Croatia.

While fences and gates were but part of home structures in my Ilocos childhood, so much so that I passed in and out of these as if I had multiple houses in which to play, the concept of boundaries started dawning on me when I learned about fights in Manila neighborhoods—some over matters as petty as a fruit tree leaning over the other side of an adjacent wall, or a few escalating to decades-long court cases on a few meters gobbled up by a sibling’s wall.

But nothing like international travel woke me up to how seriously borders can mean more than just a defining wall, especially in the post-9/11 years, when I still had a Philippine passport. On many a close-to-midnight landing at JFK’s cavernous arrival area leading to Immigration swathed in an almost eerie light from high ceilings, I had felt like an ant as I crept with a cordoned line of tourists to an immigration official’s window.

In reality, though I would not have gone that far if denied a visa at the US Embassy in Manila, still in each of my arrivals, my heart wildly thumped with fear; I could be sent back on the next available flight, and this has happened to some. I thought it would, once, when I couldn’t seem to convince an official that I bore no malicious intent of jumping into the woodwork to work illegally and disappear, as hundreds of Filipinos had done. Even as he stamped my passport and handed me the B2 form, he still seemed derisive.
The same attitude had me melting when, on a visit to my sister in Vancouver shortly after she submitted the petition forms for me, I had stood below the immigration official’s high window at the US-Canada border crossing in Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia, as he flipped through my Philippine passport.
He was incredulous of my answer to his question on whether I intended to work in Canada—I had said I didn’t need to but would wait for the approval of my immigration papers —because a sister is considered non-family. In the minutes it took him to access what I supposed were my online records, already horrific scenarios as to where or how I would end up began to scare me—and what would I do with my pasalubong of half-a-dozen steamed blue crabs from Baltimore?
The first time I passed this border with my Canadian passport, I felt like another person, and maybe I was. On a car with a friend carrying a US passport, the immigration officer simply waved us off and succeeding times on board Quick Shuttle, which picks up passengers from Vancouver to SeaTac International Airport, the officer only wanted to know how long I was staying in New York or Hawaii.
How amazing to realize that borders could be mere inner spaces, and more than the structures that set people and their countries apart, these may mean layers of realities within us. Imagine then how Trump’s Wall would seem not only to Mexicans who he wants to ward off but also to many who would invariably see in it more than what’s intended.