Six Historians on Why Trump's Border Wall Won't Work
President Trump’s promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was a defining and divisive talking point throughout the 2016 campaign, rallying his conservative base enough to help win him the election. In trying to fulfill one of his most popular campaign promises, President Trump has halted the U.S. government in the longest federal shutdown in the country’s history, demanding more than $5 billion in funding for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But experts point out to Rolling Stone that border walls have failed time and again throughout history — whether it’s the fall of the Berlin Wall or the penetration of France’s Maginot Line in World War II — and they’ve even failed at the United States’ southern border, where the Clinton administration began constructing barrier fences in the early 1990s.
So, why have governments continued to fall back on the idea of erecting such physical barriers? Some of the world’s leading border experts say the reasons range from a rise in nationalism in response to globalization, a dramatic increase in population, racism, and the looming threat of terrorism in a post-9/11 world. The common thread being fear.
Since the turn of the century, more walls have been put up around the globe than at any other time in modern history. “It’s clear most of the fortified border barriers built since the end of World War II have actually been built in just the past few decades,” says Peter Andreas, a border wall expert at Brown University. Rolling Stone spoke with Andreas and other border historians – including University of Quebec professor Elisabeth Vallet, Vassar College professor Joseph Nevins, University of Oklahoma history professor Janet Ward, University of Hawaii professor Reece Jones, and Eastern Connecticut State professor David Frye – through individual interviews about the growing number of border walls, how the purpose of these barriers have changed over time, and what we should know about the history of walls and how they fail.
The first border walls were used to thwart invasions. Are we still able to compare border walls of the past, like the Great Wall of China or even the Berlin Wall, to the wall being proposed at the U.S.-Mexico border?
Elisabeth Vallet: The comparison is interesting in one regard in that the Great Wall of China never served the purpose for which it was built. Neither did the Maginot Line, for instance. So, those walls obviously didn’t work because they didn’t prevent what they were supposed to prevent. If you look at more recent walls, actually, none of them have worked in the way that they were meant to, mainly if we speak about “anti” — anti-immigration, anti-smuggling, anti-terrorism walls. People go around or under, or [the wall] will be overwhelmed in one way or another, like the Maginot Line.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/why-border-walls-dont-work-782449/
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The Great Wall of China. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and conscripts and several centuries to build it. It was built on the border between China and Mongolia. It was built to keep the Mongols out of China.
Kublai Khan. The first MONGOLIAN EMPEROR of China.
