Border Wars


A new film promises a new perspective
Libertas gives a heads-up on a new film, Border War.

Border War is by far the best effort yet from this creative team. Border War is an enormous, complex and stylistically advanced documentary on what is probably the most controversial domestic topic in America today: illegal immigration. Border War resembles nothing so much as Steven Soderbergh’s film Traffic, in that it tells separate, interlocking stories from different perspectives on the crisis at our Mexican border. We see the crisis through the eyes of: Mexican immigrants, border agents, a Congressman in Washington (J.D. Hayworth), immigration activists on both the Left and Right, and the grieving widow of a police officer slain by an illegal immigrant.

The most impressive aspect of Border War, however, is that the filmmakers have largely abjured the ‘talking head’ approach that drags down so many documentaries. Border War takes you out onto the streets, out into the desert with illegal immigrants themselves, takes you up into patrol helicopters and into smuggling dens and smuggling vans so that audiences can understand this problem viscerally, rather than just intellectually. Border War has an emotional impact that most documentaries don’t have because the filmmakers have gone out to where the problem actually is, and gotten some extraordinary footage (particularly of raids on smugglers) - largely due to having the government and border patrol’s cooperation.

The illegal immigration mess is one of those things that I am torn on. The U.S. has created a system that rewards illegal behavior, and as Milton Friedman pointed out, it's impossible to resolve that situation without addressing the welfare state.

I'm all for open immigration if we keep the violent criminals out and if the immigrants (and everyone else for that matter) won't get one penny in social and welfare benefits.

But every single solution that passes Congress just makes these problems worse.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - September 15, 2006 at 04:22 AM  Tag


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