{"id":6142,"date":"2017-07-04T00:29:01","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T04:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=6142"},"modified":"2017-07-11T00:37:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T04:37:04","slug":"border-walls-are-ineffective-costly-and-fatal-but-we-keep-building-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=6142","title":{"rendered":"Border Walls Are Ineffective, Costly and Fatal \u2014 but We Keep Building Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The border wall between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, Calif. Tomascastelazo\/Flickr, CC BY-SA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It seems like every month brings news of another border wall going up.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s Baltic States, worried about invasive neighbors, are raising a fence along their eastern frontier<\/a>. Meanwhile, in Asia, Chinese President Xi Jinping is calling for the building of an iron wall<\/a> around the Xinjiang region.<\/p>\n

In Latin America, Ecuador appears to have begun erecting concrete panels along the Peruvian state line<\/a>. In Africa, a barrier between Somalia and Kenya, made of barbed wire, concrete and posts<\/a>, is nearing completion.<\/p>\n

This is a far cry from the illusion generated by the fall of the Berlin Wall<\/a> \u2014 and by the utopian dream of a world without borders that emerged in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The Wall: a new status quo in international relations<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the end of the Cold War there were just 15 walls delimiting national borders; today, with 70 of them in existence around the world, the wall has become the new standard for international relations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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More walls in a world without borders.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the proliferation of border walls and their normalization in the rhetoric of U.S. President Donald Trump, democracies have adopted the tactic<\/a> as though it were a classic policy tool in foreign relations and defense.<\/p>\n

And yet these rampant fortifications come at a hefty price, as much for the governments and international relations as for the local economies and populations affected. For those most vulnerable, for the middle class, for those pushed out by the walls (Saskia Sassen\u2019s \u201cexpelled\u201d peoples<\/a>), the cost is exorbitant.<\/p>\n

As symptoms of a rift in the world order<\/a>, as manifestations of the failings of international cooperation, these barriers also come at a cost to those they shut out \u2014 the world\u2019s \u201cuntouchables\u201d.<\/p>\n

The reality is that, despite being entrenched in international law<\/a>, their freedom of movement is not as valuable as others\u2019, each passport carrying its own set of rights<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The financial cost of border walls<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, we must consider the financial cost of border walls. Each one is a boon to the security and construction industries (many players from the former having adapted to changes in the post\u2013Cold War defense market).<\/p>\n

The experience in United States provides many examples of the cost of a massive border infrastructure<\/a>. This typically involves not just a physical wall with stone foundations, posts, and even concrete panels, but also razor wire, cameras, heat sensors, movement detectors, drones and patrol personnel, dogs or robots, among other things.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because a wall, by itself, doesn\u2019t really work: it\u2019s easy to scale it, put up a ladder, place ramps over the barrier to get a car across, fly drugs over it with drones, or use hydraulic fracturing to dig out narrow tunnels to circumvent it.<\/p>\n

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U.S. Border Patrol agents from Yuma Sector\u2019s Yuma Station foiled a smuggling attempt when suspects attempting to drive a vehicle over the border fence fell prey to their own devices.<\/span>
\nCustoms Border Protection<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In fact, in 2009, the U.S. Government Accountability Office placed the cost for building just a fence <\/a>along California\u2019s border at between $1 million Cdn and $6.4 million Cdn per kilometer. In harsher terrain jurisdictionally and geologically, such as the Texas state line, the building cost could be as much as $21 million a kilometer.<\/p>\n

Maintaining it for 20 years will cost an estimated $8.5 billion; it is therefore a massive public infrastructure, akin to a giant highway, that eats away at a country\u2019s public finances and, in turn, at overall disposable income (whether funding comes from public sources or in part from private sources).<\/p>\n

So this financial burden is also an economic weight that drags down the country\u2019s aggregate income as well as the local economy. The latter, often significantly affected by the slowing down and redefining of cross-border activity, legal or otherwise, is sometimes put on life support in the form of an influx of military or patrol personnel, construction crews and staff for related services (restaurants, hotels, and so on).<\/p>\n

Walling our countries in: The human cost<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Migrants near the border wall between Mexico and the United States.<\/span>
\nqbac07\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-NC<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n

There is also a human component to the economic cost. There is, in fact, a proven correlation between the fortification of borders and the number of people who die trying to cross them<\/a>. In the United States, where local advocacy groups actively seek out and disclose this information, 6,000 deaths in the desert<\/a>) along the border have been recorded in the last 16 years.<\/p>\n

Since the tightening of European policies<\/a>, the Mediterranean has become a \u201cdead sea,\u201d to paraphrase cartographer Nicolas Lambert, who maps tragedies befalling migrants in the region<\/a>, where the number of deaths continues to climb despite a decline in the total number of crossing attempts.<\/p>\n

In fact, to get across a fortified and tightly controlled border, the available routes are often far more treacherous, pose greater threats and require resorting to smugglers, who are sometimes linked to organized crime groups like the Mafia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Violence is amplified when the border is militarized. First and foremost, because such militarization legitimizes the perception of the border zone as a theatre of operations, a war zone, where paramilitary groups feel justified to act<\/a>, as in their deployments along the Hungarian border.<\/p>\n

Secondly, by adding military personnel or army veterans to border patrol forces (they account for a third of such teams in the U.S.), the tactics come to match those used in war zones, bringing with them patent impunity and violence, as reported by authors Todd Miller<\/a>, Reece Jones<\/a> and others.<\/p>\n