SCARBOROUGH — Some of our illustrious and farsighted leaders in Washington want to utilize our tax monies to build an impenetrable wall along our southern border. They contend this will stem the growing and dangerous immigration “problem.” Unfortunately, it is apparent that these leaders have not read or understood history’s experiences regarding walls.
The vision of a 2,000-mile-long, 30-foot-high wall of unknown construction, costing billions upon billions, is beyond comprehension. In addition, it will have to be constantly manned by thousands of troops or guards far into the future as our leaders visualize.
History has shown that massive walls constructed to keep people out inevitably fail.
The Chinese dramatically attempted a series of massive walls nearly 3,000 years ago. This was the infamous Great Wall, extending its walls and battlements more than a thousand miles. This was built to prevent Mongol immigrants and invaders from entering their fertile lands. China was by far the richest, most advanced nation in the world at that time. Many thousands of its builders died during the wall’s construction, and it bankrupted their people and badly failed – although today it is an outstanding tourist attraction.
About 122 A.D. in northern England was Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans to keep the Picts out of their conquered domain. That failed when the Romans ran out of money to man and maintain it.
More recently, during the Second World War, the French, ignoring history, built the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line to keep out the aggressive Germans. That network of bunkers and fortresses failed in 1940 in just a few days as the German army cut through and around it like butter. France surrendered in a couple of weeks.
Then there was the most recent failure, the so-called Berlin Wall and its extensions separating West Germany from East Germany. Its purpose was a bit different, in that this was designed to keep their people in. In less than 30 years, it would effectively disappear.
The failure of all such wall schemes is that walls are only symbolic in nature and do not address the basic causes as to why immigration or invasion occurs.
Have you ever heard our leaders ask why immigrants over the ages risk death and their families’ lives fleeing from their homes and lands? How can our leaders choose to build walls without first understanding that profound question?
Most of the causes of and solutions to immigration will emerge from understanding of the following premise: Too many people vying for too few resources!
This vying for resources is almost always the prime cause of migration and is always accompanied by terrible, continual, dehumanizing violence. This is the driving force in each instance of migration, except for those caused by natural disasters.
Therefore, solutions for migration will be found only when addressing the root causes of why there are too many people or not enough resources. Building walls does not address migrants’ struggles to live or exist.
We are experiencing migration along our southern border. It is the vying for resources, with its accompanying deadly violence, that is driving migrants to leave their homes, heading north to seek salvation, which they perceive is their only choice. Until the vying for resources and violence are stopped, migration will increasingly cause all great harm.
This is a very complex issue, but building walls will not bring about needed solutions. Migration is not a phenomenon unique to the U.S. It is occurring throughout most of our world and is caused by the same reasons. Basically migrants are fleeing because they wish to exist.
Until our leaders grasp the causes of why migration occurs, flawed concepts like wall building will divert us from finding effective solutions. First, we must consider what is driving people to become migrants. This will not be a popular approach, as many seek a simple solution such as building walls; what’s more, it requires us to consider people beyond our borders. That is where migration is born.
The only thing walls do effectively is to block our abilities to gain wisdom, to be compassionate and, most importantly, to evolve as a species.
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