There are people who want the United States to have secure borders. Few of them understand what such a project would cost, and fewer still understand what goes into border security.
My home town is considering spending $20 million to renovate our police station. From flood control and mold remediation to a bigger locker room for the growing number of women on the force, to a fence for the parking lot and an indoor firing range and more, the town hopes that this hefty investment will mean the station doesn’t require further money years from now. $20 million for peace of mind for the police for a couple decades, and peace of mind for the police is peace of mind for citizens.
A few years ago the number that was estimated for these renovations was $5 million to $7 million — as recently as October of 2023, the expectation was that the bill would come to $10 million to $13 million. Labor’s getting more expensive, and so is the cost of materials.
All this to effectively headquarter and base 56 police officers for our town of 28,000, size: 28 square miles.
Why am I talking about my home town’s police station in an essay about border security? To add some context to a discussion that rarely penetrates further than an idea. Ideas are always different from implementation — one reason communism failed so spectacularly in the 20th century. When the original architects of the police station imagined how it ought to look, for example, they didn’t take into consideration how water would flow downhill and into the station’s basement. They didn’t imagine the growth of women on the force, or how policing itself would change, making it difficult to modify the existing station without spending lots of money.
Here’s what people who are arguing for border security say, and why what they say is far less practical than they’d have you believe.
#1: Border security is simple, all countries do it
Border security is complex and costly, which is why countries over time try to reduce or eliminate as much of it as possible. It costs a lot of money to train personnel, field them, and administer them properly. It costs money to pour concrete and fabricate and install fencing and surveillance — money that doesn’t come back, sunk costs you’ll never retrieve.
Up to a certain point, border security is necessary. But one is always grasping to reduce it — to do the minimum necessary. This is why states in the United States of America tend to reduce border security to collecting tolls for the use of their roads, and why one of the first things the European Union did was to take down the customs checkpoints that used to crisscross Europe when I was a young adult.
You don’t spend money surrounding your country with fences and walls unless absolutely necessary, because otherwise, it’s wasted money — twice over, the money you spend, and the money you lose when people do business elsewhere because it’s such a hassle and pain to get into or leave your country.
#2 For thousands of years, countries have done border security
Comparisons that reach back thousands of years are tricky, and almost impossible when it comes to conceptions of citizenship and migration. Prior to the 19th century countries didn’t worry much about people coming into their country or leaving it — linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, and a far higher bar for leaving or entering societies that largely depended on kin groups dissuaded widespread migration. When we’re considering the modern problem of border security and migration, we must acknowledge that we’re really only looking at countries and nations over the past 200-250 years.
Nations, empires, and kingdoms of the past were concerned primarily about their borders in military terms, rather than as physically defined legal spaces affecting where citizens of various countries could or could not go. The Great Wall of China was built and garrisoned to protect China from raiders to the north (it famously failed to accomplish this modest task). Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall were Roman attempts to do the same, against the native tribes of northern Britain and Scotland. These were not fortifications designed to keep merchants or travelers out — countries were not very interested in who was traversing their land, unless that who was working for a hostile power.
Not only were kingdoms and empires generally unworried about foreigners coming into or going out from their domains provided that those foreigners weren’t bent on conquest, they often recruited skilled experts or even unskilled laborers to build or settle — this is how the map of Europe circa 1900 came to be so speckled with German settlements. There is to this day a population of Germans residing in Romania (much smaller than they were in 1945), some of the people who were invited to farm and protect what were then Hungarian lands in the Carpathian mountains, centuries ago. Modern day fans of horror know this region — Transylvania — for the mythical vampires that inhabited these German-built castles. It’s also how Yale and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor came to look the way they did — expert Italian stonemasons brought over to build in a style that American workers could not, many of whom subsequently settled in New England.
Before the 19th century, few kingdoms or countries worried much about who was living or working within their territorial borders. They worried primarily about borders in military terms.
Some ancient or pre-modern states did actually worry more about border security more than usual and in terms more or less comprehensible to modern thinkers. Those that would presumably be held up as examples by the people in the U.S. talking and thinking about border security all collapsed shortly after focusing on committing to controlling or policing who lived inside their borders. The act of fully committing to border security seems to correlate with kingdom or empire collapse. While I can’t claim a causal relationship, it’s worth noting that when a nation or people or kingdom focuses their treasure and energy on building walls and actively patrolling their borders, that seems (for whatever reason) not to lead to more productive outcomes, culturally, socially, and economically, let alone militarily.
TLDR; for thousands of years, states have done border security as little as possible. When they do sometimes focus maniacally on securing and militarizing their borders, they often end up collapsing (often violently) and disappearing soon thereafter.
#3 Border security won’t break the bank
I’ve done border security — on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — so know something of what goes into the process. For the type of tight border security required by people serious about border security — for a *militarized* border, here are some of the requirements.
- An area covered by lines of barbed wire, fencing, lights, surveillance cameras, and, ultimately, a physical wall. That area should have a depth of at least 100m, and ideally more like 300-500m. Think about that band running along the U.S. border with Mexico and Canada.
- Sufficient personnel to patrol that border; every portion of the wall ought to be physically patrolled (to supplement cameras) by team-size elements, with larger groups standing by as QRF. An obstacle isn’t an obstacle if it’s not observed, and even the most sophisticated fixed or drone-mounted cameras are only *deterrents* — for security one needs armed border guards. How many guards would be needed? An army’s worth. In the hundreds of thousands. To say nothing of those required to patrol the waters that also make up a large portion of American borders. Don’t believe me? We had 300 soldiers in Afghanistan along a mountainous 40-mile-long border and might as well not have been there in terms of how many people we were able to disrupt. Of course, we weren’t trained for border security — we were trained for airfield seizures and offensive operations, and, to a certain extent, counterinsurgency. Border guards require their own training and administrative apparatus.
- A band of 20-25 miles free from habitation that is essentially defensible / prepared terrain, in which to conduct military exercises. A “militarized” border is a border the military is prepared to defend, and that preparation means moving all civilians out, and creating space in which units can conduct defensive and offensive operations.
- A much beefier law enforcement set within 25-50 miles of the border, both the land borders with Mexico and Canada, and every inch of coastland. This zone will require special identification, and people living there should be subjected to frequent and random searches, both of their persons and their homes — this area of border, while not militarized, will be where people covertly flying, tunneling, beaching, or being smuggled into the country will arrive, and it is there that anti-immigrant policing should focus much (though not all) of their efforts. And yes, as soon as it becomes very difficult to bring people into the country, there will be a huge financial incentive to smuggle people into the country, so the country will have to take that threat seriously.
- 1-4 (especially 4) will require changes to important laws, including but not limited to rights guaranteed in the Constitution (most obviously the 3rd, 4th, and 14th amendments).
Considering these points, which are preconditions for true border security — not false or incomplete border security (incomplete border security being a dangerous illusion, or a lie), what would be the costs? At least tens of billions of dollars per year to maintain, and hundreds of billions or more to build. To become completely, perfectly secure, we’d need to invest a ton of resources, labor, and ingenuity in that one specific task, securing Alaska, the Continental U.S., and Hawaii.
One likely objection, easily dismissed
is that the U.S. only needs to secure / militarize its southern border with Mexico. Of course, once that happens people will simply go in through Canada, which lacks robust border security with the U.S. and also around its own territory. My friends and I used to cross over into Canada illegally while boating on the St. Lawrence River, not through any malice or deliberate attempt at mischief but because we were on jet skis and not paying close attention to where we were. A border that is not patrolled will quickly become a route by which people make their way into the U.S., no matter how unlikely it may seem to people at present. There were tens of thousands of border crossings on foot by Afghans and Pakistanis near where our post was, and that was at 8,000 feet above sea level, in the mountains, without roads. What seems like an insurmountable impediment to a person living in suburban comfort is a mild inconvenience to a dedicated migrant.
It is possible to secure the U.S. border and militarize it — though the cost would be great, perhaps even greater than the cost of colonizing the moon or Mars. And there is a further cost to doing business that way; when one becomes focused on security, and walls, one atrophies as a culture — one begins looking inward, rather than externally, for answers and opportunities. While this might be satisfying on a spiritual level, for a country such as the United States — a nation built on connections and commerce, dedicated to profit through trade, and the free, meritorious exchange of capital — such an evolution would be a serious blow, perhaps even a fatal one.
Border security is a contentious political issue, not only in the U.S., but also globally. Countries have become increasingly concerned about controlling their borders, and in ways that are very new, relative to the age of civilization. When one considers the costs (money, creativity, flexibility) against the benefits (the halt of almost all illegal immigration), it’s difficult for a reasonable person to conclude that a “militarized border” and border security the way advocates mean is truly a worthwhile endeavor. Unfortunately, I doubt very much that this will stop people from complaining about it as an issue. After all, it’s easier to complain about a thing than to fix it.
The Local Blind Spot 