The Beautiful Wall Imagined by Trump

Talk of a “great and beautiful wall” on the border has become synonymous with Donald Trump’s presidency. It is the leader’s promise that fills his followers with the most excitement and his opponents with the most fury. And it is today what has almost completely paralyzed the federal government and withheld paychecks from federal workers for weeks.

The potential of Trump’s wall, in his mind, is enormous. And at the same time very simple: If it is built, the United States will be saved, everything bad will end, and this country will go back to being sovereign and wonderful. The president is convinced that the southern border is a threat, the most vulnerable place in the country, since according to him all evil forces enter through it: criminals, drugs, fictitious terrorists from the Middle East and above all, unwanted immigrants.

That’s how, in the president’s mind, the solution is to build the wall and build it now. Otherwise, if the Democrats don’t agree to give him the money, the government will continue to be shut down indefinitely. What’s intriguing is how if the wall is really the answer to all these bad things, why didn’t Trump seriously insist that they give him the budget [for it] in the first two years of his term, when Republicans controlled both chambers and would have provided it immediately?

The president only decided that the wall was urgent when the influential ultra-right publicly began to make fun of him for not fulfilling his promise, putting the support of his conservative base at risk when his re-election comes up.

The idea that the wall will save this country from all danger is a fantasy and a dangerous illusion. To close off a nation to the outside world is not possible or desirable. It is really an irony in the history of the United States that the nation that accelerated and promoted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, now, 30 years later, is the country where the idea of sealing the border with Mexico by building a similar or worse barrier, like Trump wants, is talked about and applauded daily.

What the president in the White House does not understand is that an impenetrable border or a 100 percent inviolable wall has never existed. The Great Wall of China, with its 5,369-mile reach, was not, nor the wall that divided Germany, nor the entire Iron Curtain, which all along Europe had mines, barbed wire, watchtowers and guards with orders to shoot to kill.

And the border wall will definitely not do and be these things either; Trump has recently said the wall will be made up of a cover, metal bars, a wall, but that it would divide and be constructed along the 1,988 miles that separate the United States from Mexico. An absurd and useless project that was already started, under other administrations, by building fencing along various kilometers of the border, separating Tijuana from San Diego, California, the border most walked across in the world, through which every year 50 million people and 17 million automobiles pass legally.

The physical barrier that separates it from its neighbors is sadly what Tijuana has in common with places like Baghdad, in Iraq and with Jerusalem. But they are not the only ones; walls dividing nations exist in India, Afghanistan, Spain, Morocco, Thailand, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, among others. They all have the same objective: contain enemies and impede the entrance of invaders, hungry immigrants and smugglers.

Those in favor of those walls say “a good fence makes a good neighbor.” Its critics argue that walls are the paradoxical result of globalization that allows the free exchange of goods, commercial items and capital but impedes what people do, above all for immigrants in search of a better life.

Latin American politicians in general and Mexicans in particular consider the border wall an offense. Something that breaks with the philosophy that led then-President Ronald Reagan, Republican idol, to, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, yell to his Soviet counterpart to tear down the wall, which fell two years later.

The Iron Curtain was passed through by way of tunnels, with stairs and hideouts, in cars. The same tricks that are used today. Ironically, in those cases, those who managed to cross were considered heroes of liberty. Today they are seen as a threat, a burden, an invasion.