TheEconomistDecember 21st 2019 391O
n a crisp clear morning in November
Fidel Baca, a Customs and Border Patrol
(cbp) agent in El Paso, was driving west on
Cesar Chavez Highway, which runs along-
side the Rio Grande. Mexico was just yards
away, behind a few mesh fences and the
reddish-brown trickle of river. An alert
came on the radio telling him that a sur-
veillance had camera had caught four peo-
ple emerging from the river’s concrete
channel on the American side. Stopping by
the side of the road, he pointed first to a
couple of fresh footprints, and then, just
behind them, to fresh wet sand atop the
highway barrier: someone had just jumped
it. The chain-link border fence behind the
barrier showed a fresh cut.
Less than a mile away from where Mr
Baca patrolled, a new wall is rising, and it
will not be so easily sliced through. Ameri-
ca’s new border wall is made of 30-foot-tall
(18 in some places) steel bollards filled with
concrete, sunk six feet deep into a concretefoundation and topped with five-foot slabs
of solid steel designed to impede climbing.
Though American taxpayers rather than
Mexico are paying the bill, and it is far from
“beautiful”, Donald Trump is honouring
his promise to build a wall along America’s
border with Mexico.
Some Democrats argue that Mr Trump is
merely replacing walls that already exist.
That is not true. When a 30-foot wall, im-
penetrable to wildlife and surrounded by a
network of roads and lights, replaces a low
fence, it really is a new structure, in much
the same way that replacing a garden shedwith a ten-storey office block would be. A
journey from El Paso to San Diego makes
clear just how deeply the wall will change
the character of America’s south-western
border. Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Stat-
ue of Liberty welcomes to America the
world’s “huddled masses yearning to
breathe free”. Mr Trump’s wall sends the
opposite message.
On a map, El Paso appears to sit directly
across from Ciudad Juárez. But in many
ways the two cities are really one, separated
by the border. Parents in Juárez send their
children to America each day to private
schools in El Paso, while professionals who
work in Juárez often prefer to live in El
Paso. Each day an average of around 80,000
people cross into America from Juárez by
bus, car and on foot.
As of early December 2019, 27.5 miles of
new wall have been built in El Paso, with
contracts for another 24 miles expected to
be signed soon. The cbpargues that the
wall is particularly important in urban ar-
eas such as El Paso because it buys them
time. When someone crosses a border in a
remote area, Mr Baca explains, cbp has
hours, perhaps even days, to catch him be-
fore he reaches a place where he can blend
in. He recalls that when he was seconded to
a mountainous region in rural West Texas,
“by the time you apprehend someone,
they’ve been walking for three days, maybeThe southern borderBorderline disorder
EL PASO TO SAN DIEGO
Donald Trump’s wall will irrevocably change America’s south-western borderUnited States
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