A shutdown and showdown

The President of the United States and the Congress are deadlocked on the border security. President Trump firmly believes building a concrete wall along the southern border would ensure border security by preventing the influx of economic migrants from entering the United States. He maintains the illegal immigrants who enter in thousands, carry with them drugs and resort to crimes of myriad types and harm the society. The Democrats who since January came to control the House of Representatives view the problem differently. They believe most of the illegal immigrants travel through legal check posts and drugs and other contraband items reach the soil of the United States through sea and airports. They consider building the wall is unproductive, expensive and un-American.

Wall, as deterrent, has not been found to be effective. The Berlin Wall that had bisected Germany in two parts collapsed in 1991 after causing colossal sufferings to those who wanted to move into West Germany from the eastern side. India has built wire-fencing along Bangladesh border to halt smuggling of cows from India much to the chagrin of the people living on both sides of the border. Israel has built the huge wall on the land of the Palestinians to frustrate infiltration of militants into Israel and harass the security forces. The wall has been declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. It also failed to serve the purpose.

The southern border of the United States is about 2,000 miles long and porous. It passes through mountains, deserts and sea. It is estimated that building a wall would cost more than $20 billion and will take several years. Since the migrants come through highways and seas it is argued that wall would not be conducive to halting the influx of illegal immigrants. The Democrats and many Republican lawmakers argue that instead of spending billions on the construction of the wall, it would be beneficial to invest in strengthening the border security by providing better equipment to the border guards, augmenting the number of border police and deploying more immigration judges to ensure prompt adjudication of the trials. The House of Representatives, prior to the shutdown, appropriated $1.5 billion for the border security. But Trump insisted he would not sign any funding bill if it lacked $5.7 billion for the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

Trump conjured the idea of building the wall along the southern border during the presidential campaign. He laid emphasis on the construction of the wall and repeated many times that the government of Mexico would pay for the wall. Trump, at the early days of his presidency, did raise the issue with his Mexican counterpart but as expected, the then Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto made an outright rejection of the proposal. The newly elected president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has displayed no exuberance to the construction of the wall. Now Trump is demanding the US taxpayers to pay for the wall.

On December 22, Trump had a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and sought $ 5.7 billion for the construction of the wall. Pelosi and Schumer reiterated their opposition to the proposal. Trump announced that he would shutdown the government to mount pressure on the members of the Congress and he would take the mentor of it.

The furloughed commenced before the Christmas and continues for over a month. About 800,000 Federal government employees fell under this suspension of work. As the deadlock prevailed it became untenable for essential staff to cope with the workload, the government commissioned more staff to join the workforce but without payment. One of the staff associations moved to the circuit court seeking instruction to pay the workers. But the court rejected the plea.

Consequently, thousands of government employees including 40,000 staff of Internal Revenue Services, have been summoned for working without being paid. Many employees have exhausted the savings and found it extremely difficult to support their families. Numbers of young ladies appeared on the television screen and said they didn't know how to feed their babies and young children as their spouses missed pay checks. It is incomprehensible that people in one of the richest countries would be subject to such a man-made crisis of cataclysmic proportion.

On Saturday, January 19, Trump announced a new offer granting a reprieve to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants. DACA was introduced by Barack Obama in 2012 providing renewable work permits to around 70,000 undocumented young immigrants, known as "dreamers", who were brought into the country as children. TPS included a few thousand immigrants who fled from their home countries in Latin America and Africa after natural disasters and other emergencies. They were assured of ultimate citizenship provided they have records of decent conducts. Democrats dismissed Trump's latest proposal as unravelling and Republicans derided this as amnesty.

Nancy Pelosi instead suggested "Reopen the government, let workers get their pay cheques and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the border."

A recent interview of the cross sections of people, who voted either Trump or Hillary Clinton, revealed profound contempt for both the President and the Congress. They maintain that the government and the members of the Congress are impervious to the sufferings of the people. In short, people are losing confidence in the institutions meant to serve the nation. This does not bode well for the future of the country.

On 30th day of the shutdown, the National Governors Association wrote to the congressional leaders informing that some states are beginning to run out of money. There was a note of circumspection that federal welfare benefits provided to 1.0 million adults and 2.5 million children will cease unless alternative funding is ensured soon.

The State of the Union speech has turned into an annual fanfare. In the joint session of the Congress and in the presence of a large number of invitees, the president gives an account of his achievements of the preceding year and makes a lofty promise for the current year. This has little relevance to the people who have been pushed to a situation where they are selling household items to feed their children. In this context, Speaker Pelosi is justified to propose postponement of the annual event. On the other hand, in view of the situation arisen from the shutdown, Trump has cancelled his trip to Devos, Switzerland to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Later on, he instructed the delegation meant to represent him in the forum to cancel the trip. He had also cancelled Pelosi's planned visit to Iraq and Afghanistan citing shutdown. The entire exercise has been viewed as tit for tat. It speaks volume of the acrimonious relations between the president and the speaker.

During the Obama administration, Vice President Biden was seen assuming lead in the negotiation with the Congress and the shutdown did not last more than two weeks. Now Vice President Pence and the Senate Majority Leader McConnel appear to have taken the rear seat in the negotiation and the shutdown has entered into the fifth week, longest in recent history.

It is not incomprehensible that two organs of the state i.e. the executive and the legislature might have reached an unbridgeable position from neither can retreat. In such a situation,  each side can assign its own group of negotiators to work out a formula through negotiations.

Abdur Rahman Chowdhury is a former official of the United Nations.

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