Good reason for a wall

American Republican presidential candidates seem oddly fixated on walls. It’s hard to know what to make of that. Even Freud would probably be stumped.

Most of the talk has focused on walling off the United States’ southern border with Mexico to stem the tide of undocumented immigrants that has Donald Trump especially hot and bothered. In reality, the actual number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has remained relatively steady for the past five years.

Until recently, the silliest part of the wall fixation was Trump’s insistence that he could get Mexico to pay for his proposed border wall. Then Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker upped the ante on Meet the Press by endorsing the discussion of a wall along America’s other land border with Canada as a “legitimate issue.”

To be fair, Walker didn’t raise the issue himself; anchor Chuck Todd did. But Walker’s response was what guaranteed the northern-wall discussion would make news.

“Why are we always talking about the southern border and a fence there?” Todd asked. “We don’t talk about a northern border — where, if this is about securing the border from potentially terrorists coming over.”

He then asked Walker if he would “build a wall on the northern border, too.”

“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” Walker replied. “They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law-enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So, that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”

Walker naturally tried to backpedal after ridicule was heaped on him. He said his comment was misconstrued, claiming he had not discussed “a wall of the north,” focusing instead on infrastructure, personnel and technology to secure the border.

Maybe America could get a bulk discount on wall construction. The Canadian border is more than twice as long as the Mexican one, after all.

Meanwhile, the question of why the Republican field is more interested in building a wall between the U.S. and its Latino neighbours than between the U.S. and its Canadian neighbours could lead candidates into uncomfortable areas.

So could the unfortunate truth that — especially considering the antics of the current crop of presidential candidates — Canada just might be far more interested in securing its borders against us than the other way around.

The Kansas City (Missouri) Star