History is full of examples of great walls that all failed to do as intended. The Great Wall of China failed, the Berlin Wall fell and the Roman built walls across England couldn't keep the Barbarians out. The Walls of Constantinople failed to stop the Ottomans. The Walls of Jericho came tumbling down. I could list hundreds of failed walls-- even the Alamo had a wall that couldn't keep the Mexicans out.
And don't you find it interesting that money and goods are allowed to cross borders but people are not? Borders are in-fact a means of establishing political districts to determine who gets our taxes but borders with walls are a means of forcing us to pay those taxes even if we'd rather pay our taxes somewhere else. It's all about control and only the wealthy are free to live anywhere in the world. Don't believe me? Try it.
In Morocco they erected a wall 2,700 km-long (1,677 miles) with observation posts, groups of solders, RADAR and land mines and still illegal immigrants and guerrilla fighters find their way in. Oops!
Of course we all know how those walls Israel erected solved all their problems, right?
There are walls being built all around the world but is anyone citing any evidence that they work?
"The border between Mexico and the United States is 3,200km (1,988 miles) long.
The US government has built a metal wall along a third of it, at an estimated cost so far of $2.5bn (£1.5bn), to prevent the arrival of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
The first barriers actually began to appear in 1991, but in 1994 the US officially decided to step up their surveillance and expanded the wall under Operation Guardian.
According to the Mexican National Commission of Human Rights, more than 5,600 illegal immigrants have died trying to cross the border in the subsequent years.
The majority died as a consequence of the high temperatures in the desert.
As well as the wall itself, there are also three metal fences in some places along the border, preventing any kind of contact at all. Its average height is 4-5m (13-16ft).
Construction of a “virtual wall” has also recently begun.
This comprises a series of technological devices such as infrared sensors, cameras, radar, watch towers and ground sensors."
To answer my question, from the same article:
"Israel built a stronger corrugated sheet metal and barbed-wire barrier as part of a larger 2 to 300 metre buffer in the Philadelphia corridor during the Palestinian uprisings of the early 2000s.
One purpose of the Philadelphia Route was to prevent the movement of illegal materials (including weapons and ammunition) and people between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Now Palestinians, in cooperation with some Egyptians, have built smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphia Route to move these into the Gaza Strip.
Since this time Egypt has constructed a steel wall underground in order to prevent tunnel building and smuggling, but this hasn’t deterred the tunnel builders who dug deeper."
Since my readership is mostly here in the USA, 20 meters is over 60 feet. We have tunnel diggers on the US/Mexico border as well-- lots of them. Perhaps a better solution than building walls that must go farther down than up would be to stem the flow of American weapons south and take a very hard look at what we can do to make them better off to stay where they are. After all, we don't have much of a problem stemming the flow of illegal immigrants from Canada, do we? What can we do to make Mexico more like Canada?
Oh, and vote for Mark Walker for Congress. North Carolina needs an honest man in Washington, one who understands the solutions are sometimes more complicated than sound bites allow.
