Perspectives on the Border Wall
April 4, 2008
The wall along the United States-Mexico border, growing in fits and starts, is both championed and attacked in Congress. We asked professors in several disciplines: What does the wall represent? Their answers: A false security blanket, a waste of money, but also a rallying point that inspires acts of protest and border culture.
“The U.S.-Mexico border wall is wasteful and a bad idea — not too dissimilar to creating a wall to prevent American companies from leaving our soil,” says Apichai Shipper, assistant professor of Political Science and International Relations at the USC College and an expert on immigration politics and international migration. “It only creates a false sense of security. Foreigners, including undocumented ones, are good for our economy and democracy.”
“Building a wall between Mexico and the U.S. is misguided policy, a very expensive and ineffective way to deter migrants from crossing the border,” says Thomas W. Ward, lecturer in anthropology at the USC College and an expert on the globalization of gangs. “A wall might serve to win some votes for politicians, but no serious person thinks that it will effectively keep ‘illegal immigrants’ from crossing the border. Some undocumented Mexicans will find it more difficult to enter the U.S. and will seek more dangerous ways to cross, meaning that more lives will be lost in the attempt.
“The huge economic disparity between the countries and the plethora of jobs waiting to be filled in the U.S. guarantee that Mexicans and other Latinos south of the border will continue to come to this country seeking a better life,” Ward adds. “The U.S. needs to consider more rational, cost-effective and humanitarian ways to deter undocumented immigration.”
“It’s a living, breathing and perilous symbol of U.S. fear and U.S. mismanagement,” says Josh Kun, associate professor of Communications and American Studies and Ethnicity in the USC Annenberg School and an expert on U.S.-Mexico border culture. “I think it’s a grave mistake to be increasing surveillance and security there: It’s leading to a full-scale militarization of the area.” The current situation is a much more intensified version of policies that began during the Clinton administration, Kun believes.
“I find it unjust and a bit scary that the budgetary flows that contribute to the border wall and its surveillance meet up at the confluence of the U.S. Defense Department budget and the immigration budget, so that the same impulses and technologies used on prisoner populations are then applied to border populations,” Kun adds.
“I think the impact of surveillance and the militarization of one’s environment inevitably has an effect on people, on how they feel about themselves,” Kun says. “The growing militarization over the past 20 years has not killed border culture. On the contrary, like most forces of oppression, it helps target and focus cultural workers to understand their role with a much clearer vision. Whenever a new wall or a new fence goes up, those walls and fences become possible stages for artistic intervention.” He cites art installations such as the placement of coffins and crosses along the wall to represent those who died at the border, or the artist who cannonballed over the wall.
Even the way in which we talk about the wall is an area for concern, according to Kun. “One of the problems in the U.S. discourse is that we conflate the border with the wall. The border is not the wall,” he says. “It’s a real mistake, and a real cultural and political myopia, to think that the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico border can be understood as something to be walled.”