First read robert frost's mending wall not long afterwards in school. The poem is a back and forth between a man and his neighbor over the value of their fence. Frost's neighbor thinks good fences solve problems. But do good fences make good neighbors, or do they just disrupt normal patterns of behavior? So what happened when the mexican border became a good fence? Well, the historical mexican migration pattern was that young men came to america, worked, went home, came back, went home again. That's what douglas massey documented in the mex Mexican migration project.