A border wall is always more than just a wall. It is one of the most inflammatory and powerful political symbols of our time, standing for much more than its own physical existence of steel, concrete, and wire. The case for a wall, or even one along the United States-Mexico border, is a multifaceted battle over ideology, identity, national security, and economics. And to know this argument is to know that the battle is not so much over whether the wall succeeds or fails, but over what it signifies: sovereignty, security, and a nation's identity and position in the world. The politics of a border wall lay bare the nation's greatest hopes and fears and render it one of the most potent issues in the political arena.
The politics behind a border wall are founded on the doctrine of national sovereignty and the principle that borders must be secured. Proponents maintain that by definition, a nation-state can and should define who and what crosses its borders. A physical wall is given as the most concrete exercise of that prerogative. It's framed as a weapon of national necessity, a weapon to shut down illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. The wall is so much an object as it is a symbol for a government that's acting aggressively in clear sight to protect its citizens. It simplifies something complicated into something that citizens can see and understand. To its supporters, the wall is a reclaiming of control, an assertion that the government is finally taking a stand for itself and standing by its own laws and the interests of its own nation. It is an appeal to a more positive narrative of preserving culture, the desire to cling to a national identity, and to resist the wave of demographic change perceived to be rapid and confusing.
Its political opposition, too, is symbolic and potent. Critics also argue that the wall is more of a political statement, rather than an effective one. They point to studies that suggest illegal immigration is occurring largely at legal ports of entry where visitors on a visa are overstaying their permitted time, as opposed to enormous expanses of desert. They argue that a wall is an outdated response to a 21st-century problem that can be easily bypassed by ladders, tunnels, and bribes. To detractors, the wall represents something else: xenophobia, isolationism, and giving up America's original tradition as an immigration country. It represents racism and xenophobia, a physical sign of inward turns and wall-building, physical and symbolic, against the rest of humanity and particularly non-European immigrants. It is also a struggle for the soul of the nation, in defense of its values of openness, diversity, and compassion.
The logistical challenges of building a monster wall are astounding and immediately become political fault lines. There is, first, the eye-popping cost. Installing scores of miles of fence on some of the continent's most terrain-hostile and inhospitable terrain costs, and that figure costs billions of dollars. It evokes a hot debate over government spending and priorities immediately. Its opponents wonder whether all that money cannot be better allocated to resurface portals with state-of-the-art screening, hiring additional border patrol agents and immigration judges, or to fund infrastructure, health care, and schools here. The battle for money is now government shutdowns and cliff-hanger legislative showdowns, as politicians hardened their positions over the wall's symbolic importance versus other national priorities.
The second largest political and practical challenge is eminent domain. The border between the United States and Mexico is not an empty government-held line. It cuts through dozens of private ranches, farms, and homes, and spiritual Native American tribal lands. In order to build a wall, the federal government would have to take this private land by eminent domain in the courts. This creates enormous political opposition from landowners, farmers, and indigenous peoples who view the wall as an incursion upon their property rights and patrimony. They are often members of another party's base of voters who otherwise would have voted for it but are sucked into a nasty conflict with their own government. The idea of the federal government taking people's property to build a barrier is an effective political oxymoron and becomes a tool to rally demands that the project is an overreach of federal power. In addition, the environmental price tag of a permanent border wall is apocalyptic and is the target of political stump speeches.
It is not a wasteland desert; it is a lush, fragile ecosystem that is inhabited by many species. The wall is a debilitating obstacle to animals, separating animal migration routes, fragmenting populations, and leading to loss of genetic variability. It disrupts nature's water cycle, inducing increased flooding on one side while infusing dryness in the other. Scientists and ecologists have vehemently criticized the wall because it delivers perpetual environmental harm for dubious security gain. This politicizes the debate further, setting against each other an ascetic, hard definition of security and a loose, ecological one. In another world, constructing a wall along a border is a serious diplomatic gesture.
It sends a message to an adjacent country: we see you as something to fence against, not as something to be negotiated with. This has a very negative effect on bilateral relations, and it will become increasingly difficult to work together on matters of significant importance like trade, drug eradication, and regulation of legal immigration. The wall also stands as a symbol of hostility and suspicion, and addressing the root of the immigration issue—violence and economic unrest in Central America—will be more difficult through cooperative, diplomatic methods. It's a unilateral act of pure gesture that can undo years of careful diplomacy. The politics of the wall, at last, are the politics of show.
Its power lies in its simplicity. It is a simple symbol that politicians can say is proof that they are "doing something" about a nasty and frightening issue. To extremists, it is an emblem of toughness, order, and security. To its critics, it represents xenophobia, fear, and policy failure. The emotional politics of the wall suffocate more complex, less dramatic, and potentially superior alternatives, such as immigration reform, spending in Central America, and making the process of legal immigration easier. The wall is a powerful symbol that dominates the conversation, not necessarily because the wall is a good policy. The wall issue is really a sideshow to the larger national discussion on identity, security, and values in an era of globalization.
It's a fight about what type of country we're going to be: open or closed, welcoming or exclusionary, forward-looking or mired in the past. The wall, steel and concrete, is only the concrete manifestation of this larger, larger political fight. Its true cost cannot be tabulated in dollars, but in the splits it wins and the controversies it settles. As long as such profound anxieties about national identity and security remain, the politics of the wall will be a pervasive and explosive force on the political landscape.