70 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VOL. 45, NO. 3
WE LIvE A wORLd Of bORdERS ANd wALLS.
In addition to the massive and expensive
barrier on long stretches of the U.S.-Mexico
border, in the 23 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 26
other new walls and fences have gone up on political bor-
ders around the world. These walls are built by both totali-
tarian regimes and democracies, including India, Thailand,
Israel, South Africa, and the European Union. Invariably,
the barriers are justified in the language of security—the
country must be protected from the terrorists, drug cartels,
insurgents, or suicide bombers lurking on the other side.
Despite the external focus of these justifications, in
most instances these walls and fences are actually the re-
sult of the internal politics of the state that builds them.
There are three specific reasons for constructing a border
wall: establishing sovereignty over ungoverned or unruly
lands; protecting the wealth of the state and population;
and protecting cultural practices within the state from
the possible influence of other value systems possessed
by immigrants. The decision to build the 664-mile bar-
rier along the U.S.-Mexico border, although often pre-
sented as primarily in response to drug-related violence
and terrorism, is largely due to these internal factors.
THE dESIRE TO ESTAbLISH CLEAR SOvEREIgN
authority over the state’s territory is the first fac-
tor that underlies the construction of a border
barrier. Although we often imagine the territorial outline
of countries as sharply drawn lines where the control of
one state ends and another begins, most borders on the
ground belie this simplicity. The idea that borders (or riv-
ers or coastlines) are lines is a convenience of cartogra-
phy that is established on the ground many years after a
map is drawn, if at all. The oldest political borders in Eu-
rope, for example, are only a few hundred years old, and
most were established more recently than that. Before the
1600s, most states did not recognize each other’s sov-
ereign authority over a territory, and the technological
advances in cartography that allowed fixed borders and
territories to be represented had not been achieved. Con-
sequently, even the simple idea that states have clearly
defined territories that are marked by a linear border is a
very recent development.
The contemporary U.S.-Mexico border was established
on maps at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War by the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo.1 The war settled which territories
the expansion-minded United States could claim and
transferred almost half of Mexico’s territory to the United
States. The last sections of the border were finalized with
the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, which secured mining
rights and a better route for a railroad connection to Cali-
fornia. At the time, the territory was part of the United
States in name only and, despite the enormous land area,
was populated by about 100,000 Mexicans and 200,000
Native Americans.2 Over the intervening years, sovereign
authority over these lands was established by moving
Anglo populations onto the land and by violently sup-
pressing any resistance. Land surveying, creating prop-
erty maps, and the deployment of police forces resigni-
fied the landscape. Yet the line existed on the map and in
the population’s geographic imagination only inchoately,
as the practices and performances of sovereignty slowly
inscribed the different territories onto the landscape.
This process accelerated in the 1990s as funding for
border security increased substantially and the idea of
marking the imagined line with a physical barrier took
hold. When the Border Patrol was established in 1924, it
was tiny and remained underfunded for decades. In 1992,
there were 3,555 agents at the U.S.-Mexico border, but by
2010 there were over 20,100.3 These changes have both
practical and symbolic effects on the hardening of the bor-
der. The additional agents play a practical enforcement role
while the fence project, which passed Congress in 2006,
is much more symbolically significant. Walls and fences
are the most efficient way to mark territorial differences
on the ground because they take the abstract idea of a ter-
ritory and materialize it. The construction of the barrier
is another step in the process of reimaging these formerly
why build a border wall?
Reece Jones
BoRde R WaRs
Reece Jones is Associate Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in
the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
Parts of this article are excerpted from his new book, Border Walls:
Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and
Israel (Zed Books, 2012).
