Migrants are often forced to find alternative means of crossing a border, and the new routes are often more dangerous, even deadly, Jones said.įor example, in the 2000s, more than 2,000 migrants a year died trying to cross into the U.S. “What scholars have found is that walls and barriers seem to have very little impact,” Jones said.Ĭountries are “investing a lot of money on something you can go over, under or around,” Vallet said. “The other being somebody you don’t know, somebody you fear … the fence being the solution.” “It’s the fear of the other,” Vallet said. Vallet said Trump was using the theory of the “clash of civilizations” - that in the post-Cold War world, the main course of conflict will be over cultural and religious identity. It’s a powerful symbol of action to counter the things that people are afraid of.” Jones, the academic from Hawaii, noted that “a wall symbolizes action. “It’s not about stopping people it’s about communicating.” “What politicians want is to communicate to the electorate that something is being done,” Madsen said. “Today, the walls are really between countries that have economic discrepancies.”īarriers also are being used to send a message, not only to outsiders but to a national audience, border experts said.ĭuring his election campaign, Trump said the U.S.-Mexico wall would be built to keep out Mexicans he described as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.” Madsen, associate professor in geography at Ohio State University at Newark. “What would be unusual would be to have a wall between countries that are equivalent economically,” said Kenneth D. Typically, the goal is to prevent people from poorer nations of the global South from entering the more wealthy and industrialized nations of the North, experts said. “Democracies are picking up on the idea of keeping people out.” “It’s more of an effort to control migration than for peacekeeping,” Vallet said. Though most barriers - concrete walls, barbed-wire fences and sand berms - were constructed to deter trafficking and terrorists, newer barriers aim to stop migrants.
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