At the top of the cruelty list as well are the deaths from exposure, heat stroke, and dehydration caused by wall construction that drives migrants to undertake longer treks through ever more inhospitable terrain. The NGO Humane Borders has cataloged and mapped 3,244 migrant fatalities since 1999 in Arizona alone, but the actual number of deaths is acknowledged to be considerably higher, as many bodies remain undiscovered and unrecorded. What's going on in the desert these days is not a war, but it's producing war-level suffering and casualties.
8. Both Republicans and Democrats have built sections of the border wall
But until Trump came along, both parties ran from the semantics of calling it a "wall." Officially, it was a border fence. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations feared castigation for applying a second-century technology to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century problem. The optics of being identified with other famous wall-builders -- Roman Emperor Hadrian (122 CE), China's Ming Dynasty (14th-17th centuries), the USSR (Berlin, 1961), or even contemporary Israel -- were considered unappealing. Of course, President Trump not only embraced the negative connotations of wall construction, but pretended that the 654 miles of barriers, including approximately 354 miles of wall, erected by his predecessors did not exist.
9. If Trump gets his way, the steel in his border wall will contain a high percentage of irony
The U.S. went to war in 1846, ostensibly to assert that its southern border was the Rio Grande and not the Nueces River, as Mexico claimed. Trump's campaign for a border wall, however, puts the U.S. in retreat, sovereignty be damned, because it effectively returns to Mexico some of the land conquered in the Mexican War.
Let me explain: you can't build a wall in the middle of a river. The river will eventually wash the wall away, or it will make a new channel where no one wants it. It is also inadvisable to build a wall in the floodplain adjacent to the river, because, well, it floods. Moreover, a wall designed to keep humans out can't have big gaps or people will get through, and in a flood small drainage gaps quickly clog with debris, backing up flows, causing property damage, and undermining the wall itself. (Even away from the river, the wall causes flooding and damage in places like downtown Nogales, Sonora, where its design ignored local drainage.)
Because the Rio Grande is a low-volume river with big-river storm flows, new sections of wall are nowadays sited on high ground out of the flood zone and some distance from the main river channel. This means the border will effectively be moved back from its internationally agreed placement in the middle of the river. No deed will change hands, but this de facto relocation of the southern boundary of the U.S. is tantamount to a cession of land to Mexico. One wonders if this matter has received the attention of America's chest-thumper-in-chief.
10. As usual, the environment takes a blow
The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge encompasses a significant chunk of floodplain and adjacent ground where Trump's great wall is to be built. So does the chain of protected areas constituting the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) National Wildlife Refuge, as well as other nature preserves held by private non-profits. Past wall construction has already fragmented portions of the area. Additional wall construction will decimate it. At stake is vital habitat for the last ocelots existing in the U.S., as well as for scores of other species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calculates that planned wall segments will negatively affect 60%-75% of the LRGV's lands. The wall would also plow through the National Butterfly Sanctuary like a superhighway.
Across the borderlands, the roster of species detrimentally affected by Trump's wall amounts to a who's who of southwestern fauna -- from jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, pronghorn antelopes, and bison (yes, there is a wild herd in the Chihuahuan desert) to cactus ferruginous pygmy owls (which fly close to the ground and so can't cross the wall), leopard frogs, and lesser long-nosed bats. The Center for Biological Diversity reports that "a minimum of 93 species at risk of extinction will be further imperiled by construction of Trump's border wall, including impacts to critical habitat for 25 of these species."
11. Defense-in-depth works better
An excellent book on the border is the late Jefferson Morganthaler's The River Has Never Divided Us. Morganthaler explains that, from the Spanish colonial era forward, defending the border as a hard barrier has rarely been an effective strategy. It "seduces us into establishing our own Maginot Line. It lures us into attempting the impossible... and distracts us from more promising solutions." The most appealing alternative, applied in the eighteenth century by Spain's Teodoro de Croix, was defense in depth: addressing "problems at their source and destination, rather than trying to dam them up somewhere in the middle." Accepting amnesty applications at U.S. facilities in the applicants' countries of origin would be a modern adaptation of such a policy.
12. Get ready for the problems of migration to worsen
The president and just about all the members of his administration believe in walls but not in climate change, a guarantee of disaster. It's possible that refugees now appearing at the southern border, who say that the corn they planted last year failed to produce a harvest, are lying or are bad farmers. It's far more likely, however, that they are climate-change refugees. One thing is certain: as climate change intensifies, it will displace ever more people. Subsistence agriculture is always a gamble. When the weather changes so radically that subsistence farmers can't bring in a crop, they have to move. At least in the short term, the vigor and diversity of the U.S. economy will buffer most of its citizens against the full effects of climate disruptions. There will be no such buffer for people hoeing milpas in Central America. This is not a matter of speculation and one consequence is clear. People who lack the means of subsistence will pick up and move. Wall or no wall, a fair portion of them will head northward.
Maybe the best borderland novel of recent years is Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, in which an early scene pretty well sums up future prospects for the southern border, especially if current policies persist. A sheriff and his deputy are near the Rio Grande, inspecting the aftermath of a shootout between narco gangs. They walk past smoldering vehicles and gory corpses. The deputy says, "It's a mess, aint it sheriff?"
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