If there is a crisis on the border, cooperation is a better option than sealing it off.
That’s the lesson that President Harry S. Truman taught the nation in 1947, when a crisis in Mexico threatened to spread north and destroy the American cattle industry. Cattle owners and state governments wrote the president begging the federal government to build a fence and seal the southern border. But he refrained.
Instead, the Truman administration worked closely with the Mexican government to end the crisis before it could spread beyond Mexico. Although they initially settled on an anti-democratic plan to tackle the problem, the eventual solution engaged stakeholders and adopted democratic principles that obviated any need for the fence. The 1947 crisis reminds us that if we actually wish to handle the refugee crisis that is again creating demands for a fence, we must work to solve the underlying causes driving people to emigrate.
The cause of the crisis in 1947 was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, known as aftosa in Spanish. The disease had previously never established itself in North America, in part thanks to several expensive extermination campaigns. When the disease appeared in Vera Cruz, Mexico, in December 1946 in cattle imported from Brazil, it set off a large-scale disaster with continental implications. After arriving, the disease spread rapidly in central Mexico, reaching the other side of the country in less than two months.
The characteristics of foot-and-mouth disease shaped the outbreak. The highly contagious yet rarely fatal disease is caused by an aphthovirus that aggressively seeks out and infects cloven-footed mammals such as cattle, oxen and pigs. After infection, the virus incubates for up to 12 days before symptoms show.
Among its symptoms in livestock is weight loss, which made the virus a potential national emergency. American cattle owners feared that, if the disease made its way north, it would become too expensive to bring cattle up to slaughter weight. That posed a genuine threat to the domestic beef industry. As Agriculture Department official S.O. Fladness said at a congressional hearing, “I do not see how the feeding industry could survive under conditions of foot-and-mouth disease.”
To U.S. cattle owners, the solution was obvious. They demanded that the government build a border fence to keep infected cattle from crossing into America.