The World Is Witnessing a Rapid Proliferation of Border Walls
MARCH 2, 2022
FEATURE
By Élisabeth Vallet
In a matter of months in late 2021, Poland’s parliament approved the building of barbed-wire fencing along its border with Belarus, the governor of Texas inaugurated sections of 30-foot-tall steel-bollard barriers abutting Mexico financed by state and private funds, and Israel completed an underground “iron wall” equipped with sensors on the edge of its border with Gaza. Around the same time, Turkey reinforced its stone wall on the Iranian border, while Greece completed a 25-mile steel wall separating itself from Turkey and made plans to appeal to the European Union for support to add even more sections.
No continent has been spared from the reinforcement and fortification of borders, which has come to define the beginning of the 21st century. Seventy-four border walls exist across the globe, most erected over the last two decades; at least 15 others were in some stage of planning as of this writing. A large share of these walls, particularly the new ones, are designed to prevent illegal immigration, although they have not proven wholly effective in this regard. But walls can also mark the legacy of wartime defenses, aid the halting of smuggling, and seek to prevent terrorist attacks.
While the idea of barriers between countries is centuries old, the phenomenon has taken on a scale unprecedented in history. There were fewer than five border walls globally when World War II ended, and less than a dozen at the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War, which seemed to mark the victory of democracy and foretell the obsolescence of borders in favor of an era of expanded capitalism and liberalism. Sometimes seen as mere lines between two sovereign states, sometimes not even clearly demarcated, borders were previously somewhat (albeit not always) more flexible and permeable than they are today. This was the case especially in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-proliferation-number-border-walls
