Why Walls Don't Actually Work
We’re in the midst of a National Emergency. But not because, if climate change continues on its current path, scientists agree that it will destroy the world as we know it within a matter of decades. Or because we’re dealing with an epidemic of gun violence, where shootings keep getting deadlier.
No, we’re in the midst of a National Emergency because the President has decided that he needs to divert money intended to go towards natural disasters to a long-dreamt wall along America’s southern border with Mexico. To say that this is probably based on racist, baseless claims about Mexicans almost goes without saying. But, even if you truly believed that drug traffickers were pouring over the border, even if you bought into Trump’s claims about women being bound in tape and brought over the border for trafficking purposes (this image, which Trump sometimes evokes, seems to have no basis outside of Sicario), then you should still be opposed to the wall simply because walls like the one Trump is proposing do not work. They haven’t worked historically, and they won’t now.
I realize this is not keeping with Trump’s declaration that, “They say walls don't work. Walls work 100 percent."
Speaking as a member of "they," I can assure you, this has never been the case. Even at a time where ground travel was far more necessary, the Great Wall of China-which was intended to be a last line of defense, not the first, when it was built in 221 BCE-couldn’t stand against invaders from the North. Despite taking centuries to complete and costing 400,000 workers their lives, the wall ultimately proved, according to GB Times, “about as useful to China as a Bible on a battlefield. It can give you comfort, but it just won’t stop the enemy.”
In Britain, Hadrian’s Wall, built in 122 CE, was similarly more useful in terms of making people feel powerful than it was in terms of actually stopping invaders. Despite being one of the Roman Empire’s more costly projects, it was overrun within 30 years.
The psychological comfort and sense of impenetrability that the barrier provided people 2,000 years ago might have been in part due to the fact that people on the opposing side of the wall had not constructed a giant representation of a baby peeking over. That mural should, among other things, remind people that we are not dealing with “invaders” as Trump would love people to believe-which these walls in the past were intended to protect against-but, overwhelmingly, people who simply want a peaceful life for themselves and their families.
It’s also important to note that 2,000 years ago there weren’t planes. If there was any great advantage to walls historically, it was that at least you could station guards at an elevated position to see invaders advancing. If Trump’s wall is intended to stop drug traffickers, which he seems to believe it will, he’ll be surprised to find that cartels use both private and commercial planes to transport drugs and that some operate with “impunity at Mexico City airport under the protection of the Mexican government.” So, as Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández noted, “If the corruption is at the airports, both in Mexico and at the airports of the receiving country, then there will be no wall that can reach the height at which an aeroplane flies.”
Indeed, 40 percent of undocumented immigrants are ones who simply overstayed their temporary visas in the country. It’s reasonable to assume that many of those people arrived on a plane and then just didn’t leave. And for those who are more desperate to enter, well, Trump has perhaps not considered the fact that America is a city with two enormous coasts, which immigrants are increasingly turning to for entry. ICE officials report, "They're beating us with low-tech. I'm not saying they can't be detected, but I'm saying they're very hard to detect."
The wall won’t change that. The wall won’t actually improve anything. What it will do is be cripplingly costly at a time when America is already deeply in debt. We’ll use funds that could be applied to natural disasters all to cater to people’s psychological need for a barrier from “outsiders” that is essentially no different from what it was 2,000 years ago.
The only thing this wall will provide is something for our children to knock down to show that they aren’t as terrified of people who live across the border as their parents’ generation was. That is, if those children have been able to survive the ravages of climate change. You know, something that’s actually likely to prove disastrous.
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