Razor Wire Won't Fix the Border

The Border and Short-sighted Policy

Sicario, Denis Villeneuve, 2015

The political debate about the southern border in the United States revolves almost exclusively around policies on how the actual border itself ought to be “fixed” to deal with escalating numbers of people seeking to cross into the United States.

I’ll put aside here that I don’t really care if people cross the border. As far as I’m concerned if you want to be an American, I say go for it. Anyone who wants to be an American is an American to me. I’m also not going to get into the problem of things like Fentanyl, because cartels use ports of entry, and border security would have absolutely no impact on this.

However, I do want to spend some time to point out that the entire debate itself is a pointless exercise in futility, in that there’s no actual solution to be found at the border itself.

There is more than enough evidence from the last couple of decades that you can’t effectively stop the flow of migration through “strong” border policies like building walls, or an extensive security apparatus if there are enough people. If it could, we probably wouldn’t be having this endless debate.

When hundreds of thousands of people are seeking to cross into a different country every month, you’ve gone well beyond the organizational capacity of any border security agency to effectively stop people from crossing.

There are simply not enough manhours to deal with that many people, and as a matter of statistical probability, plenty of people are going to get through.

It just won’t work at this scale of migration no matter how much money you throw at the CBP, unless you plan on turning the Border Patrol into an organization on par with the United States Army.

You can build as many walls as you want, and put up as much razer wire as you can budget for, but the southern border is extremely expansive and people will find ways to cross over. You can always make a hole in a wall somewhere.

That being said, the theory behind “strong” border policies is more that by setting up draconian obstacles at the border, you’re going to disincentivize people from attempting to make the crossing in the first place.

The idea is that people will calculate the risk of death or grievous injury is too great and decide that given the odds, they won’t attempt to cross.

The problem is that this completely misunderstands the risk calculus in the first place. You’re often talking about people who have left their entire lives behind, who have spent their life savings to risk journeying thousands of miles, and then finally get smuggled across the border by groups often affiliated with cartels.

The idea that razor wire is a measurable deterrent when people are already accepting this substantial risk to get to the border is ridiculous.

It’s also clearly not effective since despite people consistently dying while attempting to cross where these obstacles have been placed—the number of people seeking to cross the border has only risen.

People—in my experience—don’t tend to just wake up one morning and decide “You know what? I’m going to leave all my friends and family behind and travel thousands to a different country.” You have to face substantial economic and political instability to actually do something like that. People don’t just uproot their entire lives on a whim.

This gets me to my real point here, which is that if you want immigration numbers to come down, you have to work to fix the conditions at home that are causing people to make this trek in the first place.

If Congress wants to reduce migration, it needs to start working on actual policies for economic and security assistance to Central American countries that have faced decades of instability.

You don’t solve systemic issues that drive millions of people from their homes by constructing a fence with spikes.

Take the recent collapse of the Haitian government due to escalating gang violence for instance.

I’ve seen conservatives screaming about how Biden needs to stop potential Haitian refugees from reaching the American border rather than considering that if Haiti were stable there wouldn’t be people fleeing in the first place.

This is the obvious point that continues to be glossed over in this entire debate. Nobody—for good reason—wants to live in a country that’s consumed by violence and poverty.

It’s utterly unreasonable to expect people to tolerate living under a rotating group of gangs that murder without discretion.

Most people want security first and foremost, and if they can’t get it, they’ll go to fairly extreme lengths to get to safety. Razor wire doesn’t mean much when a guy named Barbecue runs your local neighborhood.

The same goes for countries like Honduras, Venezuela, and Guatemala which have long faced governance problems.

The United States has options for productive engagement here where we could help alleviate some problems through USAID programs and State Department assistance.

By this, I don’t mean just token programs that the United States has ran for decades, but actual serious investment in foreign aid to address shortcomings in Central American governance.

This would mean an actual investment to the order of billions of dollars of aid on an annual basis, rather than the tens of millions that we contribute now.

In fact, the total aid for all of Central and South America is only 2.4 billion dollars.

We also have options to expand our security partnerships. SOUTHCOM does exist for more than just hanging out in Florida after all.

While the DoD has a fairly longstanding relationship with many Central and South American countries, we’ve also largely chronically underinvested in these relationships.

Now, I should be clear here, I’m still a very vocal critic of the proposals for the unilateral use of military force that have been thrown around in GOP circles.

The idea of starting some special military operation to de-cartelize Mexico is one of the single most stupid and dangerous ideas that’s been thrown around in recent memory. I am also absolutely not proposing that we go on some Iraq War-style crusade into Central America.

What I mean here is expanding actual train and assist missions to help Central American governments stand up the capabilities to provide security for their citizens on their own.

This is—for what it’s worth—something that we already do with Mexico and some countries in Central and South America. So, I’m not making some radical proposal by saying that we can expand these partnerships.

For instance, I don’t think it’s exactly unreasonable to say that we can play a constructive role in Ecuador rather than sit on the sidelines as their government is forced to declare a state of emergency due to gang violence spilling across their streets.

This is again an area where we should be spending billions of dollars for assistance rather than the extremely limited assistance we provide now.

It would not only help alleviate migration, but it would also go some distance towards measurably improving the lives of our Central and South American neighbors.

This is all without having to get into attempting to fix the almost comically broken American immigration system.

The problem is that these policies take actual long-term commitment from the United States and aren’t what you would call flashy.

It’s hard to capture the effects of spending time on a rotation working with a partner force on organizational capacity, but you can make a clear political message by putting up razor wire on a fence.

Which is the other main problem with any of the discussions over the border. It can’t be separated from domestic political messaging. Besides abortion, there’s probably no other issue in American political life right now that takes on as much political symbolism as the border.

The idea of “the wall” is almost more important than anything else. It’s an immediate representation of someone’s beliefs in a way that few other political images are.

It says something fundamental about what a politician represents, and the wall is functionally a symbol of an entire era of American politics at this point.

Explaining to someone that taking money that would be used for a wall and using it to expand USAID aid for governmental reforms is hardly going to rouse much passion.

So, I sort of get why this entire debate has collapsed into a series of proposals that will ultimately do nothing to solve any of the problems that people want it to. But other options would have an impact if congressional leaders wanted to spend less time getting soundbites for their political campaigns.