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Bothersome neighbours? Build a fence. That's what the United States will do if the House of Representatives gets its way. Try as they will, the authorities seem unable to reduce very much the number of people who cross the Mexican border illegally. They are catching more—over 1m last year—but still they come, so the House has voted to put up some 1,125km (700 miles) of fencing—at a cost, it is said, of $2.2 billion.
The Mexicans think this is all rather unAmerican. Whereas Europeans nearly always mark the boundaries of their property with walls or picket fences—and the unsociable British sometimes retreat behind a hedge of Cupressocyparis leylandii—friendly Americans often erect no backyard barriers. Yet wasn't it Robert Frost, Yankee to the core, who said good fences make good neighbours? And, anyway, there is a homeland to protect these days. So the border will not be marked by a hedge, nor even a line of cactuses. It will get a proper security fence, complete with lights and cameras.
Don't say it won't work. Congressmen are not stupid. They know that the Maginot line, built to guard France's frontier with Germany, did not hold Hitler up for more than ten minutes in 1940: he simply went round the end. They also know that Germany's counterpart, the Siegfried line, did not perform much better, scarcely delaying the American Third Army at all in 1945. They know, too, that the Scots were wily enough to see that, if they scaled Hadrian's wall and jumped down the other side, they were in England, and the Welsh formed the same opinion about Offa's dyke. They know, too, that China's Great Wall proved no impediment to Genghis Khan when he started his big sweep early in the 13th century. In fact, if you take a trip into space, you may look down and see the remains of pointless walls all over the place—in Greece, Iran or Korea—and, if your eyes are good, you may even discern the remains of Jericho and Troy. Remember what happened to them.
Some of those lines and walls actually did do their job for a while, keeping the hordes back, or forcing them along to some spot where guards could resist them more easily, or just causing a bit of alarm and despondency. Even so, Congress was plainly not inspired by them. It obviously took heart from another, better wall: the “anti-fascist protection structure” put up in Berlin in 1961. It performed pretty well over 28 years, allowing only some 5,000 people to cross it illegally.
If Congress wants its anti-Mexican fence to be as effective, it should take some leaves out of the East German book. First, forget about lights and cameras; that's Hollywood stuff. Choose instead bunkers, anti-vehicle trenches, lots of concrete and even more barbed wire. Round all that off with minefields, booby-traps, tripwires and machinegun-posts. East Germany was virtually enclosed, so think big: the border barrier will have to be coast-to-coast, 3,200km long, and in the end a fence will not do. It will have to be a wall, as the East Germans discovered. If the Israelis had a bigger budget for their West Bank barrier, they might have gone straight to concrete for all of it, by-passing old-fashioned fencing altogether.
The downside, of course, is on the public-relations front. This just has to be accepted. In fact, all barriers designed to stop people going from one place to another have turned out to be as much about public relations as anything else. That's why China's emperors went on building the Great Wall long after Genghis Khan had shown it to be an utter failure at doing what it was supposed to do. Congress knows that—doesn't it?
