On My Trip to the Border Wall

My boots-on-the-ground experience in Nogales, AZ, learning about the immigration crisis from immigration-focused organizations

I was featured on the Montana Public Radio show 89.9 KGPR Voices & Views with David Saslav back in November. I had just returned from a weeklong immersion course in Tucson, AZ where I worked and met with immigration-focused organizations. I had the opportunity to touch the Border Wall and speak with 10+ organizations who gave me invaluable insight into immigration discourse.
You can listen here, or read the outline below.

David: Tell us about yourself, Leigh.

Leigh: Howdy, David. My name is Leigh Larson. I’m a web and graphic designer here in Great Falls under the name creativeLeigh Digital and a political/history/theological social media content creator under the handle FollowTheLeighder. I was born and raised in Texas, graduated from UT Austin with a BA in International Relations with a focus on environmental sciences and African studies, and was a student scholar in the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas program. I served in UT’s student government, participated in the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority and UT’s Outdoor Recreation Club, interned in the Texas Senate, and graduated as a Presidential Scholar. After college, I traveled and worked for Sister Cities in Fort Worth, TX, then attended seminary and joined the USAFR Chaplain Corps in the Chaplain Candidate program for seminary students. I wound up walking away from seminary and was no longer qualified for the USAF Chaplain Corps, but continued to serve others by helping to start up a non-profit for recovering addicts and trauma survivors outside Boulder, CO. When my car broke down on the way to work, I had to choose between car repair and rent, so I decided to go back to school and graduate from a software engineering program to achieve a livable wage. I worked in corporate tech for a few years before going full-time on my web and graphic business and moved up to Montana in 2022. I’ve since published two children’s books, narrated by my dog as he teaches kids about national parks and American history, and decided to return to seminary in a hybrid/remote Master’s program and plan to be ordained, but I have no plans to serve a church or organized religion.

D: Tell us about your courses at your seminary.

L: Oh, man. I could talk all day. Because I am not on the institutional ministry track, which would cover church, military, hospital, or military ministry, I am on a separate track for ministry in the public square, which means a lot of public speaking, or these modern days, social media ministry. My classes aren’t focused on institutional official ministry, such as funerals or weddings or the history and protocols of any denomination, and instead focus more on history, ethics, and religion as a political power.

For example, my curriculum includes classes such as Women & the Christian Church which looks at notable Christian women in the Bible and also in history, such as Joan of Arc; the History of Religions in America, which discusses the separation of church and state and religious pluralism; the Theodicy of Hell, which looks at how the concept of Hell was constructed in the Bible; and the History of the Bible, which looks at how the Bible and religious doctrines were constructed over time. Recently, I went to the border of Arizona and Mexico for an Ethics and Immigration class.

D: Tell me more about your Ethics and Immigration class.

L: Sure thing. Our 9-person group went with our professor to Tucson, AZ and stayed in an educational program called Borderlinks. Borderlinks is a third-party group offering room and board and organizes immigration-related organizations to speak to groups and teach them about their specific issues. We drove to Nogales and walked along and touched The Wall, spoke with rural communities that are impacted by desert-crossing migrants and Border Patrol checkpoints, watched an immigration court hearing and spoke with a district judge. We met with the Sierra Club to learn about The Wall’s environmental issues, spoke to migrant labor legal advocates, met with local church leaders, and dropped off humanitarian aid to desert-crossing migrants in the hot, exposed Sonoran Desert. I spoke with some Border Patrol officials and heard from global economists about the role of American economic policies and immigration.

D: That’s a lot.

L: Yeah, too much for a half-hour interview. But yeah, I slept for 3 days when I got back. And cried a lot.

D: Sad for the people?

L: Sad that the American people do not understand the complexity of our nation’s immigration policies. Many people think a politician will save the day, but it’s the corporate elite that recruits and hires foreign labor when the cost of American labor is deemed too high for them, especially when Americans unionize. Such as the case of Oakes Farm in South Carolina, a major meat processor. The conditions for rapidly cutting meat are dangerous and American workers striked for safer equipment and better injury and health coverage for the high risk of working with blades.

Those American laborers were subsequently laid off, and the employer went down to Venezuela and started recruiting. It should be known that the bonuses for the C-suite were high that year. So while Americans blamed the immigrants for coming to their jobs and taking their jobs, it was the employers that hired and brought them here. So much of our cultural wars are, in fact, class wars, and we point the pitchforks at the wrong people.

D: What about immigrant crime?

L: Great point, a district judge of Tucson, Arizona, and the University of Arizona’s Immigration Research Center articulated that crimes amongst immigrants are roughly the same as Americans. The difference is that if an immigrant commits a crime, they will likely be deported. But yeah, drugs, gangs, violence, rape, murder – our homegrown Americans are just as violent as immigrants. So if we are going to deport people, let’s deport people based on crime and not on legal status. And we can start with some of our politicians and billionaires.

D: Tell me about this Wall. What’s it like?

L: I wish the audience could see my eyes roll. Even some Border Patrol folks I spoke to don’t like The Wall. Some parts are made of wooden Normandy barriers, others in the Texas Rio Grande area are floating rubber balls chained together with razors wrapped on them, so if you grab them, you cut yourself, and if you swim under, there’s a net, which effectively harms river wildlife by cutting the river in half.

The newer, improved parts are tall metal structures with slats so Border Patrol can see through them. The Border Patrol folks I spoke to said they have issues with migrants using welding tools to cut through and that it should have been more like a concrete Great Wall of China-type structure, not this cuttable fence that can be easily scaled or cut. Furthermore, the metal wall stretches some 1200 miles, which prevents wildlife migration, and the constant lights for nighttime distort nocturnal animal patterns, and the concrete and metal to build it are an environmental issue. But people cut or climb over every day, as seen when I dropped humanitarian aid for migrants in the desert.

Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all contributed to building the wall. Obama deported more immigrants than any Democrat we’ve had in recent years while Trump ran a campaign with the most nonsensical mass deportation plan for handling 11-20 million undocumented people. So this narrative that there’s a good party vs a bad party when really, both parties are responsible for hyping up and building a crappy, cuttable wall that isn’t working is playing party politics and not looking at nuance. It feels very much like politicians use The Wall to divide not only our border, but our own citizens. I’ve been to The Wall, I touched it, wrote in my journal with my back against it, showed photos on my TikTok and talked about it on YouTube. It’s a crappy wall.

D: You said you delivered aid to migrants in the desert. What was delivering that aid like?

L: Harrowing. That aid is being used by real people, which was emotional to wrap our heads around. The sites are organized by various humanitarian groups with designated spots in the Sonoran Desert. Border Patrol, for the most part, respects the spots and waits a few miles down the road to arrest them. There are videos online of ‘bad’ Border Patrol dumping gallons of water, but for the most part, even Border Patrol will offer water to migrants when they arrest them. A lot of Border Patrol folks are just people working a job. There are bad apples, and those bad folks should be held accountable.

We saw used water jugs and canned goods, and our group hiked out and restocked them. There were broken shoes and torn shirts and hats left behind by migrants on the trail. A 10-15 day hike in the desert is no joke when you only have the clothes on your back and maybe a backpack.

D: It’s legal to give goods?

L: According to humanitarian law, it is. Food, water, clothing, and medical are essential humanitarian aid. Shelter, money, and providing transportation or any sort of map or navigation are considered aiding and abetting.

D: Is it considered enabling folks?

L: No, it’s humanitarian aid. Like, I said, the law is just down the road, waiting, and our taxpayers support Border Patrol and for them to do their jobs.

Furthermore, we give our worst pedophiles food, water, medical, and clothing as they rot in prison. For most folks crossing the desert, their crime is crossing a political boundary out of financial desperation that, arguably, our country instigated when we started messing with their governments or when we enacted NAFTA.

Something like 95% of immigrants come through our airports and overstay their visas. The poorest and most desperate are the ones crossing the desert on foot for 10-15 days. And while I’m on the subject, the coyotes, the guides for crossing the desert, are corrupt and dangerous. They aren’t Disney riverboat tour guides. They’ll likely steal the money of those they guide or sexually assault the women nightly. And if they don’t pay or the women don’t sexually put out, they’ll abandon them in the middle of the desert. It’s too large to cross independently. Lots of desperate people cross the desert and wind up getting further harmed by the coyotes.

The other option is the far more expensive cartels, but to ensure your silence and cooperation, they’ll have those migrants, including the children, carry drugs. So these impoverished families who have somehow, by the grace of God, made it from Nicaragua to our border and enlist cartel security and passageway are then caught with pounds of cocaine and heroin, which is a felony on top of crossing the border.

D: So we have to talk about drugs.

L: Yeah, drugs cross the border. But when our American government works with Mexican drug cartels in foreign elections while turning a blind eye to American pharmaceutical companies, we have to ask if blaming the immigrants is really going to fix the problem.

China, the cartels, and our pharmaceutical companies have a role here. The dying middle class struggling to survive and turning to drugs is a problem of low wages and tax cuts for the wealthy, all of which are American problems.

The Venezuelan family, who had to leave their home country as political refugees, largely because the conflict started with American interference in their governments, and had to mule drugs for the sake of survival, is collateral damage. Not saying carrying drugs is tolerable, but we have to have more nuance than that.

Furthermore, Americans are one of the top consumers of illegal and foreign drugs in the world, so if we want to reduce the import of foreign drugs, we need to take some responsibility for our drug consumption. We can’t ethically snort a line of cocaine or shoot up fetynal and then put all the blame on an immigrant for drug trafficking in America. Consumers have a role, too. Hard to sell a product when you don’t have a customer, and Americans are that customer.

D: Do you advocate for open borders?

L: No. Absolutely not. I am a veteran, after all, and securing our nation is critical. We need to protect our borders from threats of sex and drug trafficking. But I do advocate for immigration reform. The current system is not just a nightmare – it’s Earth’s version of Hell.

The fact that a mother can be separated from her children, and while she waits in a detainment center, her kids get fostered out, and if she doesn’t have a lawyer or her paperwork is within the six-month allotted window – rare, since many cases take 2 years – the kids get adopted out. The day of her arrest may be the last time she ever sees her kids again. And she’s not gonna rat out an adult family member to care for her kids, who are also probably here without documents. The detainment center conditions are terrible, with abuse running rampant. We need immigration reform, not bans, in addition to holding companies accountable who hire foreign labor while foregoing Americans here. Don’t blame the immigrant, blame the people who write their checks while snubbing Americans of their own.

I do advocate for certain measures: must have a job/employer/college lined up, must have a high school degree or equivalent, and must have X amount in savings. You wanna move here? Awesome, but unless you’re a refugee, which I argue we should allow and we should have welfare for refugees to get on their feet, you have to be pretty self-sufficient. A lot of Americans talk about moving to Canada, but Canada has a pretty strict immigration policy that I don’t think many Americans qualify for, including their clause on no pre-existing medical conditions.

But again, we have employers that specifically hire immigrant labor because they don’t want to pay Americans to do the dangerous labor or they don’t want to pay for increased safe workplace practices or competitive compensation packages such as health insurance or 401k, and politicians use immigration talking points to rally the masses for votes. So unless you can get the folks at the top to become more humane and actually hire American labor with fair and competitive compensation, they’ll keep using immigrants as a scapegoat.

D: What about immigrants' use of our welfare?

L: So immigrants do pay $98billion into taxes every year. They pay considerably into our tax system. Many do receive welfare, as do 37% of American households. But again, they pay $98billion into the system, so it is fair that they get something in return. They also wouldn’t come here and work if employers didn’t hire them over American workers. And it’s not that they ‘take our jobs’, it’s that employers give them those jobs that are too dangerous or demeaning for Americans to take.

Furthermore, many of the undocumented hide. That’s not to say immigrants don’t commit crimes or use resources, as I pointed out they do, but far more avoid hospitals and situations that would expose them and their families to deportation. And also, immigrants use health insurance and pay almost double what Americans pay. Many Americans won’t even pay for health insurance unless it’s through their employer. Our health insurance system is a nightmare, but what we do have, immigrants are paying into that. If you deport the existing immigrants, you not only lose a boat load in taxes, but a boat load in health insurance money, which is going to drive up costs for Americans.

D: What about mass deportation?

L: The American Immigration Council estimates a range of $325-$975 billion total towards mass deportation, so let’s call it, conservatively, a $650 billion effort that taxpayers would have to fork over to deport folks.

We’d need to double Border Patrol staffing, which is difficult since they’re already understaffed, and to build an additional 1,000 courthouses and then fund those and the courthouse employees government salaries and benefits who work inside them, which would be hard to build if we suddenly arrested 30% of our construction labor force. I have better ideas for that $650 billion, such as improved salaries for first responders, library staff, and teachers and increased support for our veterans. I think the ones who are here should stay unless they commit major drug, sex, or violent crimes, while we tighten immigration reform.

Also, the Corporate Corrections of America is tangential to the Heritage Foundation and ALEC, two major political donors. The CCA runs most of the private prison and detainment centers in America, while donating large sums of money to political campaigns to enact legislation for harsher legal punishments to fill their beds. Then, the CCA contracts the American government to detain its prisoners and immigrant detainees, and some detainment centers charge the U.S. taxpayers a minimum of 60% of a full center, meaning whether the center has 60% of beds used or not, they will get paid as if it is 60%. Some detainment centers are sitting near-empty but hold thousands of beds, and they collect that 60% monthly, costing taxpayers a fortune. Prisons and detainment centers are an industry here, using taxpayer money in a lot of unethical ways.

D: You sound like a conspiracy theorist.

L: That’s the thing about money and politics. It really is that bad without it being some Reddit forum conspiracy theory.

D: You went to Sweden before Mexico. Sweden has one of the strictest immigration policies in the world. Can you speak on that?

L: Yeah. Sweden is strict. And it’s not just strict against brown-skinned countries, but everyone. Employers have to make a heck of an argument as to why they should hire non-Swedes. Their policies imply the country and its citizens wish to be left alone.

They are predominantly a mono-culture, meaning everyone lives the same way and behaves and thinks relatively the same. It’s one of the safest countries I’ve ever been to.

But again, immigrant labor is cheap, and immigrant labor does contribute taxes. So while they have a safe and trusting environment, they have one of the higher citizen tax rates globally. They are not socialist, as people like to say – they cut those policies in the 1990s. They have a blend of capitalism with heavy socialist policies.

The tax burden falls on the lower and middle classes, who receive those benefits. You can’t have a welfare state and have the rich pay for it and tighten immigration, that’s just not gonna work. If you tighten immigration and want socialist policies, like increased salaries for school faculties and first responders and public transportation, the rich aren’t gonna pay for it, that’s coming out of working-class paychecks. If you make the rich pay for it, they will leave, and then you’re looking at jobs and GDP loss. If you cut immigration, you no longer have cheap labor and a contributing tax base, so the working class has to make up for that.

You get what you put into it – tightening immigration leads to greater trust among citizens, so they’re willing to pay more in taxes. Their significant tax rate is what allows the people to feel safe and cared for while not threatening the elite who hire the working class.

Because the employers aren’t threatened, they don’t leave, like Ikea and other companies left Sweden after they launched socialist policies in the 1970s. Sweden had to cut back on public spending and liberalize many of their markets. They also don’t have a minimum wage or taxes on inheritance or property, they allow for school vouchers and have reformed social security and relaxed standards on occupational licensing.

They have a larger and more secure working class because of the high taxes. High taxes mean when something bad happens to you, you have a safety net to bounce back from quickly. Yes, taxes will eat your income. But it also means you won’t be devastated and financially set back for years when you lose your job, get sick, or go through a divorce. It also means when you divorce, which 51% of our country experiences divorce, you can’t sue the ex-spouse for an exorbitant amount of money or child support because healthcare, basic housing, and childcare are already provided in your taxes. It’s simply an end to a marriage contract and not really the money grab from disgruntled exes we see here in America. Furthermore, it reduces the need for non-profits and philanthropy, though they are one of the most charitable countries in the world.

Nordic countries are not socialist and have not been in 30 years. They blend socialism and capitalism. Sweden is not perfect by any means, they have their issues, and we should not put them on a pedestal, but we can explore how stricter immigration, significantly higher taxes, and reduced regulation do and don’t work to protect their people, keep their major producers of income and GDP in their country, while also keeping in mind that there is nowhere on Earth that is as diverse as America. They’re two different worlds, and won’t be able to copy the other exactly, but we can learn from one another, just as Sweden learned from us about our capitalism, and we can learn from Sweden about how their socialist policies help their people in real functional ways, and how immigration plays in that discussion.

D: Any last words?

L: Yeah, some immigrants are violent, and some transport drugs across the borders: violence and drug crimes should always be held accountable. They do receive government welfare, but again, they pay $98 billion into taxes.

Americans have to wake up to the fact that this is a class war, not a culture war. Blaming immigrants for all of America’s woes while ignoring unethical corporations, political groups, and politicians is chasing the wrong enemy. It’s like going for crumbs while the king and his court laugh at their feasts. I have far more in common with my fellow working class than I do with any billionaire or politician. When I volunteer or acquire clients, I work with conservatives and liberals alike.

We, the people, can do better. I want to believe that the American people can come together. Otherwise, we’re looking down the barrel of the working class dying at a faster rate and falling to civil war, all the while the rich buy themselves out of any draft or risk of combat as they have done since the Civil War of the 1860s.

This holiday season, let’s not forget that Jesus was from Nazarene, a Palestinian city inside Israel. Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian refugee who died speaking out against the State and elitists in power. Let’s not celebrate his birth while ignoring what he did while he lived, and why he died.

If you want to hear more from me, my TikTok, YouTube, and blog are all under the name ‘followtheleighder’. Leighder is spelled Leigh, because it’s my name, and I love a good play on words.