The Trump Wall in a not-so-flat world

This may be the information age but the lure of brick and mortar is not diminished. Donald Trump and his idea of a “beautiful” wall on the United States border with Mexico brings alive the idea that nothing is as concrete as concrete. As Republicans push for funding and Democrats hold out, the resultant government shut down has become the longest in US history. A nation at the forefront of technology, the superpower that sends out spaceships to distant planets and beyond, has been brought to its knees over the setting up of a physical barrier to stop immigrants from crossing over.

It was a little over a decade ago that the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman declared that “The World is Flat”, the book whose title was inspired by Nandan Nilekani’s words that “the playing field is being levelled”.  Friedman had interviewed Nilekani for a television series, and those conversations produced a book that went on to become an influential account of how barriers were going down in a world connected by technology. In fact, Friedman’s “flattener” number 1 is about a wall – the Berlin Wall that went down in November 1989. Friedman said it defined the “new age of creativity: when the walls came down and the windows went up.”

Now the walls are coming up again in the very nation that argued for them to be torn down. It was Ronald Reagan, who as the US President gave this call standing against the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Today, the funding for the Trump Wall isn’t in place, the structure is a long way from being built, if at all, but the wall is up and strong in the minds of Americans. Of course, there is a huge opposition to it but the bitterness of the dispute, the shutdown of citizen services and the Republican rhetoric on the subject has ingrained a very wrong idea of immigrants in the collective conscience of America. It marks a new decline in the way in which the country looks at immigrants. It will have consequences, still not understood, of relations with Mexico and several other nations as a variety of trade barriers are put in place. Mexico isn’t exactly powerless in this dispute. But the raging debate sends out the larger message that the idea of globalisation is and always was grounded more in the narrow interests of a powerful few rather than in any principles of free trade or open opportunity for all.

In fact, a globalised world with open borders, free trade and unrestricted movement of people, goods and services was a romanticised idea even when the “world-is-flat” idea was in vogue. A rather telling graph points out how the number of walls have grown after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It debunks the idea, loose and fuzzy though, that the end of the Cold War would deliver a borderless world and the rise of a new era of cooperation between what used to be two sides, represented by two superpowers, locked in as sworn enemies.

At the end of the Cold War, there were just 15 walls delimiting national borders, according to a much-cited study by the Centre for Geopolitical Studies, Canada. Today, there are as many as 70. The Wall is back with a bang on the global stage, the US giving the idea a new sense of urgency that is bound to be adopted by even more regimes across the globe. We can expect militarised borders and all that goes with it – increased spending, rising tensions and a state of conflict as gangs try to smuggle and military hardware trains weapons on intruders and contraband. In many parts of the world, it prompts corruption, violence against vulnerable populations and a dehumanisation of the regions.

There are good arguments to make over why the Wall will not solve the problem, among them being the fact that many Mexicans enter the US on a visa and simply don’t return, or that the pressure to immigrate will continue as long as the US economy looks to the illegal “aliens” to work at very low wages.

This is apparent on any visit to the US-Mexico border. Some 18 years ago, this writer was part of a team taken on a trip to the San Diego-Tijuana border, escorted by the US Border Patrol. Across the international boundary was the town of Tijuana in Mexico. But driving along the fenced border, the officer could point to people moving around, waiting for dark as they tried their luck at crossing the border and taking the chance that might change their lives forever. Illegal crossings dropped as a result of a new plan to tighten supervision but subsequent reports indicated that the immigrant pressure shifted to places where the border was less policed. On the US side, motorists were warned with traffic signs to watch out for illegal immigrants who might dart across in their bid to escape and run the risk of being hit by moving vehicles. This is on a well-patrolled border post, the one that might be showcased for a visiting journalist. The cat-and-mouse game was never ending. The Wall is a simplistic answer to this complex problem. It cannot solve the underlying issues that bring this flow.

Consider what happened just about a month ago on the border. On Dec. 18, 2018, El Centro Sector Border Patrol agents tracked an ultralight aircraft that made a cross-border incursion from Mexico and landed in the United States on a Tuesday morning. Agents arrested two Chinese nationals and a Mexican national in a waiting vehicle who were suspected of being part of the human smuggling event. This was two days after agents reported that they tracked an ultralight aircraft that resulted in the arrest of two and the seizure of more than 125 pounds of methamphetamine. These reports and what was found in investigations remains not updated due to the lapse in federal funding – fighting over the Wall to protect the border has, at least for now, crippled at least a part of the Border Patrol service itself!  

Trump may or may not get his way, but the Wall now stands tall and strong in the minds of Americans and Mexicans. It has been built, even if not physically, and tearing it down and the prejudices it brings will take more than it took to bring it up. This can be seen in some data just released by the Pew Research Centre: The vast majority of immigrants in the U.S. are in the country legally – but fewer than half of Americans know that’s the case.

(The author is a journalist and a faculty member at SPJIMR. Views are personal)