Echoing My Sentiments

The US does some stupid things. Building a border with Mexico (and even more bizarre, with Canada) has to top the list. Here are some thoughts by Nathan Myhrvold on this subject from a blog entry at the Freakonomics site. These comments start with his experience of the Great Wall of China but then veer off into the US and its mania for building a "great wall":

And I really mean snake. It is amazing how twisted the path is, turning back on itself again and again as it fades off into the distance. In the section I visited, the wall is in such rugged terrain that it begs the question of what hordes it could possibly be stopping. Troops of Mongol mountaineers perhaps? Herds of nasty mountain goats?

Besides, what enemy could be terrifying enough to concern a society with the economic might to make such a wall? Climbing over it, although not easy, is surely many orders of magnitude more simple than building the wall. The judgment of historians is that it played an important defensive role, and perhaps that is true; but at the same time, it must have been very expensive to create. It is a very strange state of affairs that would make it worthwhile strategically and economically.

Of course, that said, my own country has been contemplating a giant fence to try prevent impoverished Mexicans from pursuing the American dream. How hard should we work to repel the people who harvest our food and do a thousand other necessary tasks that our own citizens don’t want to do?

Terrorism is cited as a non-economic reason for the wall; this from the same government that renewed the visas of the 9/11 hijackers months after they died, and the same government that protects us by confiscating nail clippers at the airport. Perhaps we need to be jealous of hard-working restaurant dish washers, or worry about mad manicurists running amok, but neither seems to me to be the top priority. If the U.S. builds a border fence, it will be due to internal politics and the perception that “we need to do something.” Perhaps that sort of thing is a rule of human nature rather than an isolated peccadillo of American politics. Maybe the Great Wall was more about internal politics or perceptions in Imperial China than the product of any rational calculus.