Walls of delusion
Twenty-seven major new border walls have been constructed around the world since 1998, more than during the five-decade Cold War. There’s just one problem — they don’t work.
“We live in the most borderless world that’s ever existed for people like you and me. But it’s the hardest and most bordered world for the poor.”
REECE JONES GEOGRAPHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII
It wasn’t a wall that killed 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez on that dark desert night in October 2012. It was the 10 bullets that struck him, either in the head or in the back, all fired by an agent — or agents — of the U.S. Border Patrol stationed near the border wall that separates Nogales, Ariz., from a town by the same name in Mexico. Now, roughly15 months later, the shooters — assuming there were more than one — have yet to be identified by U.S. authorities, much less disciplined, much less charged. According to witnesses on the Mexican side of the border, Elena Rodriguez was doing nothing wrong at the time he was shot. He was making his way on foot to a local convenience store where his brother worked when the U.S. guards opened fire from the U.S. side of the border. Now the Mexican teen is dead, one of 42 individuals shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents since 2005. None of the officers has yet been held to account for any of those fatalities, according to a recent investigation by the Arizona Republic. Meanwhile, that grim statistic — 42 dead in the past eight years — goes to show that guns are pretty effective when it comes to stopping people in their tracks, which is more than you can say about walls. People often say that good fences make good neighbours, but that is far from being true along the U.S.Mexico frontier. “On the Mexican side of the border, they hate the
wall,” says Todd Miller, American author of Border
Patrol Nation, an upcoming book about U.S. homeland security. For the most part, say many experts, walls are not even very good at achieving what is usually their avowed purpose — keeping things or people in. Or, more commonly, out. “They are not a solution,” says Élisabeth Vallet, a professor of geography at the University of Quebec in Montreal. “I’m not even sure that walls actually are truly a means of preventing people from crossing a border.” And yet we build them, now apparently more than ever. According to Reece Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii, 27 major new border walls have been constructed in different parts of the world since 1998, compared to just11such barriers built during the Cold War, which extended from 1945 to 1990. They include the barrier that India is building along its border with Bangladesh, as well as the controversial structure — to extend more than 700 kilometres when it is completed — that Israel is erecting in the vicinity of its border with the occupied West Bank. Those walls join a long list of structures that humans have built for their own protection — usually against other humans — going at least as far back as the biblical wall of Jericho in 8000 BC. The list also includes the Great Wall of China (circa 500 BC), Hadrian’s Wall (begun in AD 122), and more recent barriers such as the Berlin Wall or the juryrigged fences that separate Catholics from Protestants in Belfast or rich from poor in Sao Paulo.
Few of the world’s present-day border walls are longer or more elaborate than the 1,130-kilometre barrier that now extends along parts of the U.S. frontier with Mexico, tracing portions of the southern boundaries of California, Arizona and Texas. Do these structures work? Almost unanimously, the experts say they do not.
Consider the U.S.-Mexico barrier, whose construction began in 2006. There is little evidence that the wall — made of steel in some places, concrete in others — is especially effective at accomplishing two of its central goals: slowing the importation of illicit narcotics and thwarting the entry of illegal migrants.
In 2005, when she was governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano famously summarized the dilemma facing those who would build barriers: “Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.”
The U.S.-Mexico border wall is not 50 feet tall, but it is formidable in places and it does seek to address a perceived need.
Driven by a variety of mainly economic factors, the ranks of illegal migrants in the United States have been rising rapidly in recent years, from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center. Those numbers fell somewhat during the two following years and have more or less levelled off since then. Last year, there were an estimated 11.7 million undocumented residents in the U.S.
Proponents of the border wall tend to attribute these most recent shifts to the effects of the barrier, but others say they are wrong.
First, for all its length, the wall covers only a third or so of the 3,220-kilometre span of the U.S.-Mexico border, leaving plenty of open space for people to cross unmolested — if they’re up for a trek. Second, the drop in the ranks of illegal migrants that began in 2007 coincides almost exactly with the ongoing U.S. economic slump and the resulting drop in demand for imported labour.
Financial factors such as these have prob- ably played a far more decisive role in modulating the cross-border flow of illegal migrants into the southern United States than anything constructed of steel or concrete.
As for the narcotics smuggling, the wall doesn’t seem to have had a huge influence there, either.
According to the experts, the barrier merely exhorts the drug-traffickers to be more inventive — digging tunnels beneath the wall or flying above it in ultra-light aircraft, to name just two of the innumerable ploys criminal gangs use in attempts to outfox the American forces of law and order.
More often, however, they simply ignore the wall and head for the legally sanctioned gaps.
“Ninety per cent of illicit drugs come through official ports of entry,” says Miller.
As a result, you have to wonder why they bothered to build a wall in the first place. Maybe it’s all symbolic.
“If you consider the purpose of a wall,” says Vallet, “it is to show the population that you are doing something.”
When it comes to border surveillance, activity may indeed be its own reward. Merely glance at a few of the numbers.
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Border Patrol has expanded from a fairly modest outfit of roughly 4,000 agents to a behemoth of about 21,000 agents. Even that figure pales alongside the ranks of the even larger U.S. Customs and Border Protection organization, to which the Border Patrol belongs. That outfit boasts around 60,000 agents. “That’s more than double the army of Ecuador,” says Miller. “They have practically their own navy and air force.”
But Customs and Border Protection represents only one component of the even more formidable department of U.S. Homeland Security.
According to the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, the United States last year spent nearly $18 billion (US) on border surveillance.
“That’s bigger than the big federal agencies such as the FBI and the CIA,” says Miller.
“It’s just towering over these other agencies. You see growth for growth’s sake.”
And you get a powerful impression that something is being done, even if it isn’t really working.
But back to the walls.
Sometimes you see them. Other times, you don’t — although they may well exist nonetheless.
There are at least two kinds of invisible or virtual walls that some countries employ to mark their boundaries. These include both high-tech barriers and legalistic hurdles.
An example of a legalistic impediment is the visa requirement that canada imposed in July 2009 on prospective visitors from Mexico, a measure that sharply reduced the number of Mexican refugee claimants arriving on Canadian soil, while also inserting a continuing irritant into relations between the two countries.
“When we speak about wall, we will al ways say the physical wall is only a part of the equation,” says Vallet.
Prohibitive measures such as visa restrictions can be just as effective as a physical wall and possibly even more effective - at least in the short term but they tend to mask problems rather than solve them.
After all, people who try to cross borders illegally are not behaving randomly.
In most cases, they are poor folk driven by financial pressure or outright desperation. For them, negotiating borders can be both expensive and arduous - not to mention life-threatening — while for the well-off, its easy and cheap.
That is the sorrowful paradox of modern border walls. They are not built to bother the well-to-do. They are built to persecute the poor.
“We live in the most borderless world that’s ever existed for people like you and me,” says Jones at the University of Hawaii. “But it’s the hardest and most bordered world for the poor.”
According to Jones, the countries that have resorted to constructing border walls in the years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have enjoyed an annual percapita GDP in constant 2010 U.S. dollars of $14,067, while the countries on the other side of those walls have struggled to get by on a far lower figure, amounting to just $2,801 on average.
That’s the main motor of the dilemma. Unlike water, the flow of international migrants tends to move from low to higher ground — at least in economic terms.
“The problem of economic disparity needs to be solved,” says Tristan Sturm, a geographer at York University, who believes emphatically that walls are not the answer.
“They are a short-term solution to a longterm problem.”
As for high-tech barriers, they don’t seem to be the solution, either.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security tried that route in 2005, when it issued a contract to Boeing Corporation to erect a virtual wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, a barrier to be composed of cuttingedge devices that included automated cameras, electronic sensors and radar. It didn’t work. After an expenditure of more than $1 billion, a pilot project in Arizona managed to provide inadequate and unreliable coverage for only a single 85-kilometre stretch of the 3,220-kilometre border. The entire project was scrapped in January 2011.
“It wasn’t tailored for the rugged scree you see in the Arizona desert,” says Miller. “Rain would cause fake signals.”
So would tumbleweed. So would undocumented deer.
Some elements of the same system can now be found on the U.S. border with Canada, but it’s an open question whether the approach will ever be fully operational or cost-effective.
Meanwhile, many people in many different lands continue to put their faith in walls, whether they work or not.
“I think, at a basic level, a wall serves a symbolic function,” says Sturm at York. “But no wall is tall enough to keep everybody out.”