Making Walls Great Again — The History of Walls as Barriers, and the Challenges of Cross Border Security, Immigration, and the Movement of People and Goods
I ended a recent essay, a reflection on the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, with the Fitz and the Tantrums song, Break the Walls. I used that song as representative of the desire to pursue truth, of breaking down the walls of lies, ignorance, disinformation and misinformation that is prevalent in our society today.
A metaphorical Wall can also exist when it represents the withholding of information, or lies, via “Walls of Deception” in interpersonal communication. In the textbook on effective interpersonal communication, Bridges Not Walls: A Book About Interpersonal Communication, it notes that “Deception can vary from blatant lies to indirect actions such as exaggerations and false implications.” As explained in chapter nine, there are six motives for deception: egoism, benevolence, utility, exploitation, malevolence, and regress. One can take a religious view of these walls of deception, or one can again use art and song as the metal band Deepwater has in its song titled Walls of Deception.
Fitzpatrick seemed to be writing about human-created walls of deception — emotional, and personal and institutional truth telling — His use of Walls and breaking them, is the perfect metaphor as we humans have been building walls, physical ones but also cultural and emotional ones, for thousands of years — “Give me a sledgehammer and give me strength, watch the world come tumbling down. Cut me loose I seek the truth, I beg the freedom will carry me.” Or, maybe it was all just a dream for Fitzpatrick, and the walls were gelatinous cherry jello during Thanksgiving conversations, and we just need to lick them, not break them.
Why This Essay
I decided to write this essay about wall building as a follow up to the JFK essay and Fitz and the Tantrums song reference, after deciding to read the 2019 book, The Great Great Wall — Along the Borders of History From China to Mexico, written by architect and writer Ian Volner. In the book, Volner explores the history of human wall building, specifically the physical walls along borders of communities — cities, nations, and empires. The title of the book comes from what the 45th President, Donald Trump, said in his 2016 presidential campaign. He said he would build a “Great Great Wall” along the US southern border, and have Mexico pay for it. Of course former Mexican President Vincente Fox said “we are not paying for the fucking wall.”
Volner’s book, as he acknowledged, is “well-trod terrain.” The topics he wrote about draw on the work of numerous researchers and writers that have “devoted entire careers” to this topic. As I do in most of my essays, I include relevant “memoir moments” building on my own experiences to discuss related issues to the topic and do so here as it relates to border security and trade. The opinions expressed here are my own and not that of my former employer or customers.
Volner explores other great walls in human history. His book is a historical account of specific walls that have been built by humans. “For ten thousand years, since the end of the early Neolithic period, most human settlements have featured some kind of perimeter construction.” The walls featured in Volner’s book included: Wall of Jericho, Hadrian’s Wall (Roman Empire, England), Great Wall of China, Berlin Wall, Mexico & US southern border fence, patrols and wall, Thier’s Wall (Paris), and Israel’s West Bank wall.
This desire to build walls has many drivers for humans, but the greatest of these are those that separate humans, fear and anxiety. Border walls exist to protect those within the walls from those outside of them. At least that is the common perception of what walls, particularly border walls do and are for. However, as Volner points out in his chapter on the Wall of Jericho, and its history — both actual/archaeological and biblical/mythical, it did not originate in 1500 BCE as written in the Bible in the book of Joshua, it likely was first built ~ 8500 BCE by the Canaanites as some sort of inviting temple, celebrating both the landscape surrounding the wall, accentuating the Sun’s shadow at the summer solstice, and not built for protection for those inside the wall of Jericho.
Volner dedicates a chapter to the Berlin wall, a temporary artifact of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the USSR. The wall was constructed in 1961, and its construction was the result of the ongoing struggle within Berlin, the capital of Germany, after their surrender in WWII and the allies divided the country and the city among themselves. This happened just as the United States was beginning its next conflict, the 45 year struggle of the Cold War. Berlin was one center of this conflict, with clashes occurring in 1948–49, 1961, 1963, 1987, and 1989.
Before its destruction in 1989, we had President John F. Kennedy noting in 1961 that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than (nuclear) war,” and he famously went to Berlin in 1963 to give his “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) speech, claiming western solidarity with the people of Berlin, East Germany, and all of the oppressed people under autocratic Communist control. President Reagan, in 1987, gave his famous speech and exhortation to Soviet Premier Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Gorbachev did not, but also did not stop the East Germans, who did so in 1989. There are many stories of how the wall fell. It started from an innocuous change in policy by the East German government, with an announcement that people could now cross into West Berlin. Then, the flood gates opened. The 35-year old Angela Merkel, who was to become the Chancellor of Germany, who at the time of the announcement was relaxing in a spa, threw a coat over her nightdress, walked into West Berlin, and spent the night having beers in a strangers apartment and noted later that it was “one of the happiest moments of my life.”
In 2017, as Trump was having his “Great Great” wall constructed, the Reverend William J Barber II, of NC, when at US Border Monument #1, made reference to, and quoted from Reagan’s famous saying, to tear it down. After having a wall of separation for thirty years, after its fall and the reunification of Germany, the German people still had to deal with the aftermath of the wall, as a psychology of the wall, or a “wall in the heads” or Ostalgie had taken hold and it was harder to get rid of.
Since this book was published in 2019, Volner only briefly noted that the Israeli Gaza fence was initially built in the 1990s after the Oslo accords of 1993, before the West Bank wall he does discuss was built. Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to the Gaza fence as a “physical mechanism for peace.” Beyond that brief mention of the Gaza fence/wall, he did not write about it. It was breached in the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, resulting in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, resulting in the deaths of over 20,000 people, and still ongoing as of this writing.
Since the initial effort with the Gaza fence in the mid-1990s, modern day Israel has built the “Gaza fence” into a high-tech, “smart fence” Iron Wall along its border with the Gaza strip. Using a well planned and executed attack by the terrorist group and ruling party Hamas of the Gaza strip, the Gaza “Iron Wall”was breached on October 7, 2023, resulting in the slaughter of 1200 Israeli Jews and the taking of hostages, and the resulting on-going war in Gaza.
Israel knew of this Hamas plan for over a year ahead of the attack, claiming they believed it to be only aspirational. The Code Name Israel used for this Hamas plan was “Jericho Wall.” PBS ran a documentary on this — Failure At the Fence. Even “Texas Paul,” whose Republican Governor Abbott has declared the crisis at the southern US border an “invasion”, notes that Governor Abbott does not get that building walls did not stop Hamas, and do not stop people motivated to breach them.
More is required of government than building physical barriers, but for an indicted Reality TV star, it is a simple story to tell his faithful true believers. Volner, referencing the British philosopher John Roberts (not the Supreme Court Justice), quoted him — “The reasoning of unreason is far more insidious and reasonable than the return of tribalism in the 21st century.” We can have a philosophical debate about that, many believe that tribalism has never left us.
9/11/2001 Terrorist Attack on America, and the need to transform immigration, border security, the migrant crisis and global drug and sex trafficking trade.
While Volner discusses the history of the southern Mexican-American border, and the various conflicts and initiatives in the 19th and 20th centuries, he spends much of the time in the book on the “Great Great” wall idea that was adopted and promoted in 2015 by Presidential Candidate, Real Estate and Reality TV tycoon, then 45th President, Donald J. Trump. It was certainly not an original idea, it had previously been proposed by Boeing in 2005 as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Border Initiative (SBI),” which I worked on when I worked for IBM. Prior to Boeing’s contract, there had also been previous border defensive construction along the US-Mexico border.
Boeing, an airplane manufacturer, was the winning, and only contractor to propose building a wall for the solution to the SBI RFP from Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Every other team, including the Raytheon team that IBM was part of, proposed a combination of ground and aerial sensor technology, along with forward intelligence vetting and surveillance systems to monitor, control and apprehend illegal entries into the US, assisting and integrated with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Boeing had done its homework, however.
Boeing likely knew the sense of the Congress, where it and President Bush were heading, which the following year passed the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which called for, well, building a fence along the southern border. The SBI program was cancelled in 2011 after multiple failures, which was well documented by GAO. There are many challenges with attempting to build a physical barrier along a 2200 mile border. These include legal authorities such as different state property laws, state and federal environmental laws, all spanning multiple jurisdictions, requiring DHS to seek authorities to circumvent or address these in order to build a section of the wall.
Fortunately, DHS and Customs and Border Protection have not stood still in performing their mission, and neither has technology or those looking to circumvent our protections and cross our borders illegally. Following the strategy that was proposed by the Raytheon-IBM team and other bidders in 2005’s Secure Border Initiative Network (SBINet), but rejected at that time, CBP has been exploiting Drone surveillance and building a “virtual wall” at the southern border using Big Data to integrate multiple sensor technology. CBP has just awarded another contract for Drone surveillance. to Teal Drones, in January 2024. However, what is good for CBP is also good for the Drug Cartels, who are sponsoring the mules who charge migrants to enter the US. They are also using this technology.
Trump and Israel’s Prime Minster Netanyahu were of like, complimentary minds in the wisdom of building physical barriers as a way to ensure safety of their populations to keep people out. Trump probably seized on the idea because of the Breitbart 2015 story (founded by Trump advisor Steve Bannon) about the death in San Francisco of Kathryn Steinle, who was killed by an illegal alien resident in the US, and labeled it as part of a “war on white people”. Trump has run with this theme and continues it today. He has had great success too, with now nearly 50% of Americans buying into his fascist, racist rhetoric of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of Americans.
As Volner covers throughout the book when discussing the history of the US-Mexican border, there have been many changes to defining the border and then delineating it and defending it, with many books and essays that have written about this history, which were sources for Volner’s book. Since the end of the Mexican American war, the US and Mexico have mostly been friendly neighbors. The same is true for the US northern neighbor Canada, a nation that has never been at war with the US other than as a supporter and colony of Great Britain during the War of 1812.
After the 9/11 attacks on the US, in 2003 I joined IBM’s extended team that supported the Department of Homeland Security, which was created in response to those attacks. As the NORAD Commander, General Ralph Eberhart, noted in a briefing to contractors in 2003, prior to 9/11, the US national defense strategy was based on the post WWII Cold War strategy and consisted of stopping a nuclear missile and bomber attack from the USSR over the North Pole and stopping a USSR tank attack across Europe. That’s it. There were no other conceived attacks that would occur against the USA, because frankly, those threats did not exist when the strategy was conceived, but certainly did by the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
With two large oceans for the USA’s Eastern and Western borders, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with a large US Navy patrolling those Oceans, and these two friendly nations along the US northern and southern borders, there was no need for significant border fortifications or a specific defense plan to protect the homeland. As noted by the general, the US defense strategy was to “play and win the away game”, while not having to fight at home. This meant engaging known and potential threats elsewhere and fighting “over there” before they can land at our shores and borders here.
However, the threats to the US homeland crossing our borders today are not from nation state invading armies, but from:
- external terrorists seeking to enter the US illegally via subterfuge (see 9/11);
- from global crime syndicates for the drug and sex trafficking trade bringing illegals and illicit drugs into the US;
- from desperate people looking to escape the global traumas in their host countries;
- from cyber-attacks entering via open and poorly secured networks;
- from social media manipulation for disinformation and misinformation campaigns aimed at Americans;
- and finally from adversarial nation states that use all of the above to enter the US with the intent of weakening and taking down the US Empire without having to confront its military directly in a kinetic fight.
The global drug smuggling and human trafficking enterprise is a huge illegal business. It relies on large and sophisticated criminal networks to control manufacturing and distribution of products and people. Coyotes are a key part of strategies to enable refugee migrant passage into the US, building off well worn paths of drug smugglers.
All of the above is exploited and amplified as part of nation state Gray Zone conflict.
After the Civil War, the post-Civil War Reconstruction era Congressional Posse Comitatus Act forbade the use of US federal troops (aka the US Military) “policing” within our domestic territory. The military and Intelligence agencies when formed after WWII were only to be used outside of US borders. This meant that the US military divided the world into regional commands — Central Command, Pacific Command, Southern Command, but it had no Command in charge of the defense via direct invasion of the Homeland because of Posse Comitatus (Thanks, Southern, racist, traitorous insurrectionists!). Sure, there were and are dozens of US military bases in America, but no need for them to plan for an invasion across the US borders.
After 9/11, in 2002, there is a story involving the then US Coast Guard Commandant, VADM Thomas Collins, when asked about an incident in Miami Harbor. Several drug-running speed boats had come into Miami harbor, got out, shot up some people, then sped off without being stopped or apprehended. Collins was asked by a reporter how they “got through” (American defenses). Collins asked the reporter, “got through what, sir?” Subsequently, the US Coast Guard embarked on ramping up its capabilities in support of its mission of Port Security via a program called Maritime Domain Awareness. As IBM pursued this initiative, the team I led contracted with former USCG officer, Homeland Security expert, and now Global Resilience Institute Director, Dr. Steven Flynn. We also subsequently hired retired USCG Admiral Erroll Brown.
NORAD, The North American Aerospace Defense Command, which was strictly for air defense, was all we had prior to 9/11 for defense of the homeland. So, after the attacks of 9/11 the Northern Command was created which is now the military unit responsible for the defense of the homeland from invasion. But there is a catch, the invasion must be from a hostile country and their invading forces — air, land and sea, otherwise Posse Comitatus means that the states, with their “well armed militias”, aka the National Guard, and federal agencies of Homeland Security are responsible for monitoring the borders, Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western, along with protecting critical infrastructure, including key digital networks and protecting them from cyber warfare.
The National Guard, which are under the control of the Governor in each state, but can be, and have been nationalized by the President in times of national conflict (see Iraq and Afghanistan), the US Coast Guard (part of DHS post 9/11) and Customs and Border Protection, with the Border Patrol, which are part of the Department of Homeland Security, along with other agencies such as Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies CIA, NSA, and FBI were and are used to track and monitor threats to the homeland that may cross our borders. This is a defense in depth approach, and the “away game strategy.” Many have criticized the results of this strategy since 1945 as producing “endless war,” primarily for the benefit of the companies that supply the armaments for that war. This is what President Eisenhower was speaking of with his famous speech in 1961, handing the problem over to his successor, John F. Kennedy.
Prior to 9/11/2001, and ongoing to this day, the biggest “invasion” of the US homeland is the massive shipment and “imports” of illegal drugs by the major drug cartels of the world. Even our own CIA has benefited from this off the books form of fundraising for illicit, covert operations. This has been occurring at least since the Viet Nam war.
The Reagan Administration created the Joint Interagency Task Force South, or JIATF, to enable greater inter-agency coordination to bring all available US resources to bear in interdiction of this illegal drug trafficking trade. There has been at least a half dozen or more good movies describing all this. Three of my favorites are: Traffic, with Michael Douglas and Benicio Del Torro; Blow, with Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, and The Counselor, with Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardim, and Cameron Diaz.
While there have been many successes in illegal drug interdiction, the overall effort has been a failing one. American society keeps producing addicted drug users and great demand, which produces market opportunity, great illicit profit opportunities, and death and societal breakdown. As part of my job at IBM, I visited JIATF south HQ in Key West, FL in 2005 and got to see firsthand the work that they do there.
This Congressional Research Service report gives a good overview of the President’s authority for military and national guard usage to secure US borders. “Securing the borders” is but one function for the federal government to manage for the secure and timely movement of people and goods across them. This cross-border drug trade over the southern border with Mexico has tremendously strained the bi-lateral relationship, with some politicians calling for the use of US military inside Mexico to attack the drug cartels.
The 9/11/2001 attacks, after the fall of the USSR ended the Cold War, created the Global War on Terror and enabled continuous wars in the middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, where the US still has troops stationed today. The FBI, in conjunction with local and state Law Enforcement agencies have the responsibility to track internal threats from within the USA, which have been rising since 2016 and are now among the greatest threat to the US, along with the political and cultural polarization that is driving a great division within the country.
Since IBM in 2002 was an Information Technology products and services company that did significant business with the US federal government, our Homeland Security account team worked to develop strategies to assist it in shoring up the nation’s homeland defenses, post 9/11. We leveraged our existing relationships and business with DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection, as the prime contractor for their Automated Customs Environment, and along with many other contractors, looked to expand their business as DHS looked to build out US capability with its expanded mission.
The terrorists in the 9/11 attack and their financiers exploited holes in the then-US defense and intelligence strategies and capabilities, and used existing immigration, identification, and authentication capabilities to enter the US and use its own aviation systems as weapons of mass, suicidal bombs of destruction. After that “surprise attack,” everything needed to change about immigration and border security policy, including identification and authentication of individuals, along with Intelligence capabilities that identified threats to the homeland and to American interests. The Congress passed multiple changes in law and funding increases for security that were unprecedented.
At our best, the United States is an open, democratic, welcoming society, and needs to have the ability to ensure the secure movement of people and goods across our borders daily. As Steve Earle has written and sung, we are all immigrants. There are broadly two types of people within US borders at any time — citizens and non-citizens, some of whom are attempting to legally become citizens, and many (~ 12–15M) that have arrived here illegally. The global trading system, with the globalization of the economy, and legal immigration, requires the US to be able to track and manage all people and goods moving in and out of the US, while also ensuring that none of these people or goods pose threats to the health and well-being of the US and its people. Additionally, US foreign policy must address the ongoing global migrant crisis and associated political and hardship refugees. Our system needs to be able to handle seamlessly and securely all of the above.
All of this produces a tremendous transactional workload of immigration case management, supply chain, and security and health threat tracking that must be managed with proper and necessary funding for the federal agencies entrusted with executing this mission. This was the business sweet spot of IBM and why they were able to support the DHS in this mission so well. To be able to perform this mission, the DHS and nation needs expertise, personnel, and robust Information Technologies to accomplish this, all of which requires strategy, leadership, management and most importantly, funding and legal framework from the United States Congress.
One can read about, and assess the performance of this mission, the statistics involved, how DHS slices and dices the cases, and quantities of goods and people, discerning class for each, while ensuring a seamless functioning economy while maintaining security, by visiting their web sites for this:
- Immigration Enforcement Stats
- Immigration 2022 yearbook format for stats CBP stats
- Customs and Border Protection statistics
To look wholistically at this entire system, one must take a “System of Systems View” of it and develop policy and solutions that can address this entire system in the most cohesive fashion. Given the design of our current Constitutional representative democratic republican system, this is a difficult and contentious system to manage among the fifty competing state’s and politician’s personal interests.
IBM called on another subject matter expert hire to put together a team to develop and promote such a system-wide view and strategy. Scott Gould, a former Navy Captain and future Obama Administration Deputy Secretary for Veterans Affairs, was hired into IBM’s business consulting division and led a team of us in 2005 to develop the strategy and paper titled Global Movement Management, which resulted in an integrated IBM campaign to assist US and indeed, other global policy makers and agency administrators think through the challenges of managing this complex ecosystem.
Congress Must Act
The responsibility to enact programs and funding to address this lies with not only with the President, but more importantly with the US Congress. The American people who vote for their representatives in Congress must ensure that their representatives act in the best interest of the nation. If the Congress does not act, then issues with this system will and have festered and been exacerbated and stressed because of the changing global crises of climate change, wars, terrorism, global drug and human trafficking trade, and autocratic dictatorial regimes oppressing people in multiple countries which in many cases have resulted in famine and extreme cases of hardship that refugees are seeking to escape to Europe and America.
Congress has not acted for forty years. In Volner’s book chapter describing the initial 2017 efforts of CBP to build the “Great Great Wall” after Trump’s executive order to do so (“Trump Wall”), they ran a competition to build prototypes. One of the twenty responding contractors had this to say about the effort, which nicely sums up what our Congress has been doing, and continues to not do on this American issue — “The lack of coordination, the lack of funding — they’re just not ready for prime time.” However, not being ready for prime time, on this issue, for over 40 years, means we have arrived at a state where our entire democracy might get cancelled.
There can be no doubt that a crisis of humanitarian proportions exists at the southern border, and that the Congress is not acting. The inflow of an overwhelming number of people continues today. There were 2.5M people crossing illegally in 2023, with 250,000 migrants crossing in December of 2023. With 2024 being an election year, the pressure on President Biden to do something is coming from Republicans and Democrats, although the Biden administration has previously proposed legislation, has done so again, and has requested additional funding for border security, and is actively negotiating with the Senate on a bi-partisan proposal, but continues to be held hostage by the radical MAGA right wing of the Republican party in the House of Representatives.
Retiring Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said on Face The Nation that it is an emergency that is the nation’s biggest problem to address now. When he visited the US-Mexican Border near El Paso/Chamizal Mexico, conducting a Mass in February of 2016, Pope Francis said: “We cannot deny the humanitarian crisis which in recent years has meant the migration of thousands of people.”
Independent Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made this a major campaign issue and produced a documentary on the subject. Here he is talking about it on Tucker Carlson, discussing Trump’s Great Great Wall, stating physical barriers are needed, but not a 2200 mile barrier. He proposes “closing the border” immediately. The last time the US border “was closed”, or nearly closed, occurred after 9/11/2001. The migrant humanitarian crisis needs urgent attention and does pose a threat to US society across many vectors. In the absence of Congressional action, an executive emergency action is likely going to happen if Biden is defeated in 2024, or if he is reelected and the Congress continues with inaction and bluster only.
It seems pretty clear that the Republican party has politicized this issue and wants to continue to do nothing so that they may blame this solely on the Biden administration and Democratic party, as part of their 2024 election strategy, with the GOP-led House of Representatives continuing to reject proposals from the US Senate to address the crisis. They have a coordinated plan of obstruction for any solution to the problem. It is “a campaign by influential conservatives that includes misinformation, public pressure and behind-the-scenes lobbying aims to get House Republicans to oppose any deal the Senate reaches,” all supported by the right-wing media echo chambers, specifically Fox News. This will be an issue in the 2024 election. The result of the Iowa caucuses have 90% of participants saying immigration is the greatest challenge, and they want it cut, and a wall built.
Republican Governor Abbott continues to both spend over $8B of Texas taxpayers money for Operation Lone Star using the Texas National Guard to work the southern border, with aggressive marketing and promotion of these efforts, while often fighting with the Border Patrol, preventing them from doing their jobs and creating a major internal conflict for political theater and MAGA posturing, including the loss of innocent lives resulting from Abbott’s program. Abbott has ordered his Texas Military Department to make arrests and is now in conflict with DHS/Border Patrol, which will end up in courts, or result in a worse conflict between law enforcement authorities of the United States, local state vs national (like 1860, again started by a southern state).
The Way of Walls
In the Introduction of his book, Volner noted that in history, Walls were an “Invention of Difference” and were a key aspect at the beginning of human tribalism. Walls are a kind of “Sui generis” or one of a kind of human culture. As Volner noted, in recorded history, the wall of Jericho was the invention of difference for human beings.
The last section of Volner’s book carries this title — “The Way of Walls.”
Walls are often mutable, depending on the story one is trying to tell. Volner could not visit the Great Wall of Gorgan, located in Northeaster Iran, near the Caspian Sea. Alexander the Great “is thought by early Muslims to have passed through the Caspian Gates on his hasty march to Hyrcania and the east.” This resulted in developed myths with the “Mythical Gates of Alexander” driving numerous stories — medieval Germans thought they held out Rote Judan (hated Red Jews), Marco Polo “claimed they held back the Turkic hords.” Alexander’s gate served to enhance his legend. The “great conquerer of Europe, tamer of the savage East, remained a cultural common denominator in the West for centuries.”
In our human imaginations, “great walls” can separate “us from them.”
The heart of national sovereignty, and the delineation of one nation from another, are a nation’s physical borders. These are political constructs of separation from other humans. They have always been changing, usually as the result of wars, with the winners re-drawing the political maps. Of course there is usually and often are disputes about these borders, often long standing. Returning to where this began with the Wall of Jericho, in 2023 UNESCO named the ancient city of Jericho’s Tell es Sultan archeological dig a World Heritage Site. Which brings us right back to today’s ongoing and continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people.
As with that conflict playing out between Israel and Hamas, and realizing the futility of border walls, it should be noted that Hamas spent nearly all of its aid money received since coming to power building an extensive 350 mile network of underground tunnels, from which they can run their terrorist operation in attacking Israel, each of which Israel is now attempting to clear of Hamas. Similarly, along the southern border of the USA, the Mexican drug cartels have built an elaborate set of 170 tunnels, totaling 190 miles, to go under the “Great Great” border wall and pop up in US territory, to continue the shipments of their profitable drug and human trafficked “products” inside the US (we are a consumer society!).
For the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, and its relationship to the plight of the Palestinians, Volner said this: “Thanks in no small measure to the (West Bank) wall, Israeli settlements will continue to expand in the West Bank; yet as they do so, they will make it progressively harder to see the wall as separating two nations. Rather, it will divide a single nation, with two peoples living in it. As the Israeli Arabs can attest, these two peoples could yet learn to live together — however uneasily — and the wall then loses its reason for being.”
Volner notes that in her 2010 book, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, political theorist Wendy Brown has observed that “the weakening of state sovereignty” has given rise to “tremulousness and vulnerability” with the result being nations everywhere proliferating the building of walls as border barriers. Since the turn of the 21st century, most of these have been erected, between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, South Africa and Zimbabwe, India and Bangladesh, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Hungary and Serbia, in France between Calais and the Channel Tunnel, Tunisia and Libya, Ecuador and Peru, Norway and Russia, and the US and Mexico.
Raul Grijalva, Congressman from Arizona’s 7th Congressional district, which is one of the largest border districts, stretching 300 miles along the Mexican border, said “People’s understanding of immigration, borderlands — it’s shallow. They’ll jump on walls as the end-all, be-all. It’s a convenient and easy political posture.” This concisely summarizes the futility and Big Con of the entire MAGA premise, 1st postulated in July of 2015 by then future and now former POTUS D. J. Trump.
Fortunately, there are people that focus on, and specialize in, the life within the Borderlands. There are the elected representatives from the borderlands that deal directly with these issues daily. There are professional academics that specialize in this topic, Volner interviewed several of them. The Association for Borderland Studies is “the leading international scholarly association dedicated to the systematic study and exchange of ideas, information and analysis of international border, and the processes and communities engendered by such borders.” It’s membership “encompasses scholars, experts, and professionals in universities, international organizations, citizen associations, and governments in 55 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.”
As Volner notes, “in the years to come, increased migrant flows due to climate change and escalating wealth inequality — combined with the slow-motion breakdown of international institutions and collective-security arrangements — only threaten more trenches, more earthworks, more concrete and razor wire,” and all of this will be futile because this approach is the proverbial finger in the dike which is not addressing underlying issues.
For the United States and the other nations of the world to ultimately thrive, prosper, and meet the existential challenges of our times, they are going to need to Break Walls, not build them, and build bridges, not burn them. To solve the complex challenges of maintaining a fluid global movement of goods and people securely, it is time to elect leaders that are serious about solving the totality of the problem, rather than engaging in theatrical political posturing. We need to put adults back in charge.
Volner closes by noting that Sparta, “a city that eschewed walls, was famed for its strength.” A Spartan lawgiver name Lycurgus of Sparta said: “A City will be well fortified which is surrounded by brave men and not by bricks.” Lycurgus could have added “or brickheads.”
The time to start summoning courage and acting wisely is now.