Umberto Eco said that migrations “are like natural phenomena, they happen and no one can control them”. Fonte:Eco We feel rebellious when we go backpacking around the world. We feel one step ahead of society when we declare ourselves digital nomads and work from Caracas for a company based in Dublin, and yet we are not inventing anything new. From the pinnacle of our “evolutionary peak” we look back to the past, and guess what? Homo Sapiens had already got there before us, about 200,000 years ago, when he moved from Africa conquering Eurasia, meeting the Neanderthals, surviving the ice ages, inventing boats to cross the seas and arriving as far as Oceania, where he met the Denisova; while we feel like seasoned walkers if we take the eight thousand steps a day suggested by our Smartwatch.
Humans have always had the urge to expand in order to survive, to migrate and face obstacles, overcoming barriers that limited their movements, crossing borders and frontiers. But what happens when, after thousands of years of evolution, the barriers that men find themself facing are no longer natural, but political?
In semiotic terms, a migration is “the movement of a large mass of people from one territory to another, in which it is therefore not so important how many people remain in the territory of origin, but to what extent the migrants change the culture of the territories to which they have migrated”. Fonte:Eco What we have come to define as the “globalized world” fuels tensions between openings and closings: on the one hand there are liberalized borders and agile access, but on the other there are enormous flows of resources put into place to prevent the exact same movement of goods and people that open borders promote.
Globalization presents an ever-burning tension between global networks and local nationalisms, between the movement of capital (which wants to be free) and that of subjects (which nationalist forces want to control). A tangible manifestation of this paradox between free movement and control are the new walls that are populating the globe. Wendy Brown in her book “Walled States, Sovereignty in Decline” Fonte:Brown presents an overview of all the structures that have arisen in recent decades to prevent migration flows in the world.
Such as the barrier separating the United States from Mexico, the wall dividing Jordan from Israel, the one dividing south of Jerusalem from Bethlehem, the barbed wire barrier dividing India from Pakistan, which is even visible from space. Then there is post-apartheid South Africa, which has a complicated labyrinth of walls and maintains an electrified barrier on its border with Zimbabwe; or Saudi Arabia, which has funded the construction of a separation structure on its border with Yemen; or again, Uzbekistan, which has walled off Kyrgyzstan; and Egypt, which has a built a wall with Gaza. The list is still long and many walls are still under construction, but the point is that the wall itself represents an economic and political effort of very high proportions, and it is in clear contradiction both with the flow of money, which is instead facilitated to move and migrate, and with the natural predisposition of humans to move.
Despite the different geographical areas, there are three paradoxes that unite all these walls. The first is a political paradox: while on the one hand there are neoliberal, cosmopolitan and humanitarian political tendencies that want a world without borders (a consequence of global markets), on the other hand there are nation-states, Fonte:Forti Fonte:Arendt which want to build walls to protect their status instead, and stop global flows in an attempt to preserve their political independence.
The nation-state, as it had developed since the French Revolution, is the product of two factors: nationality on the one hand and the state apparatus on the other.
The state represents the idea of a space subject to a law, a space in which it is responsible for the legal protection of the inhabitants of the territory.
The nation, on the other hand, identifies a community. A collective consciousness based on a common language or religion, on a shared historical past, on equality of origin.
The internal conflict, which characterized this rather unstable body, was based on the principle of monarchical heritage whereby the State protected all those who were part of its territory, regardless of nationality. This was something with which the national conscience came into conflict, since the state was supposed to guarantee full rights only to those who were part of the “national community”, to the exclusion of others. Hannah Arendt said that the nation-state, structurally, already hosts within itself a contradictory logic, based on the tension of the two constituent elements. Hence the birth of nationalist movements, where the Nation conquers the State. Therefore, the citizens identify themselves as members of an exclusive and excluding national group, generating differences and gaps.
The second paradox is social: in a world apparently dominated by democracy, there are barricades that separate people by social condition and origin. Therefore, on the one hand there is democracy, equal rights and egalitarianism, and on the other hand there are systems that mark differences based on social class or place of birth.
The third paradox is the most obvious one. We live in a historical period in which humans are able to build technologically advanced infrastructures, so advanced as to explore space, but at the same time we build walls made of bricks, bags of earth, cement, sometimes just barbed wire. With all the technology we have at our disposal, we still build retrograde and obtusely physical structures like walls. At the same time as we are preparing to go to Mars, there are governments investing in digging medieval moats filled with crocodiles.
This paradoxical survival of the archaic in the hypermodern provides the key to today’s vicissitudes of sovereignty. Fonte:Fornari Fonte:Senato. Sovereignty arises from the subdivision -by means of walls- of what was previously common.
The example of the wall between the United States and Mexico helps to understand the three paradoxes we described earlier. It is massive, expensive and its “official” objective is to block the flow of drugs and illegal immigration from Mexico to the States. The U.S. Border Patrol began its construction in 1990. The work was repeatedly blocked by protests by environmentalists but it was resumed after 09/11, ignoring no less than 36 legal provisions (relating to water pollution, air, protection of species, preservation of historic sites, agricultural land and protection of sacred sites). Fonte:Bush
To date, there are more than 3,000 km of wall, including barbed wire parts, temporary barricades, cameras, control blocks, bulldozers, steel plates stretching 100 meters into the Pacific, and concrete structures up to 10 meters high and 3 meters deep. The total cost of the structure is uncertain, as different Presidencies have succeeded each other in its construction and the figures and forecasts have changed depending on the Government and its interests. During the Trump Administration, the estimated figure for the continuation was between $25 and $38 billion. Fonte:Kakaes The only thing that is certain is that it is a ridiculously high price, especially given the complete lack of effectiveness of the barrier as a deterrent.
In fact, since the construction of the wall, smugglers have resorted to increasingly sophisticated techniques, moving into mountainous desert areas or digging tunnels, such as the one discovered in 2015. It is 500 meters long, 1.20 meters high and 90 cm wide, complete with rails, lighting system and ventilation ducts. Fonte:Mastro These tunnels connect with the underground drainage channels that cross the border, drilling into the ground for about twenty meters and building outlets directly into the large warehouses close to the border. While in 2020 Trump, visiting the Arizona border, was asking to paint the wall black so that it would burn in the sun, a few kilometers down the road yet another drug trafficker was sawing one of the poles of the barricade with a tool that cost less than 100 euros. That’s how it works.
There can be no precise statistics on how many people made it through the wall. However, the data on arrests, provided by the Border Patrol [9], are a good starting point. In the first six months of 2021, about 58,000 people were apprehended, twice as many as in 2020 and more than the 53,000 in 2019. In June alone, there were 178,000 detentions along the border, 5% more than in 2020 and 23% more than in May 2021. Fonte:US Since the beginning of 2021, the count has already reached one million people.
Precisely because of the diversion of migratory flows to more inaccessible areas, there has been a dramatic increase in deaths among migrants and an increase in the rate of permanent migration compared to temporary migration. During the first ten years of “life” of the wall, about two thousand people died trying to cross the border. In the same period, about 700,000 migrants were arrested by the border police. In 2004 the bodies of 1086 migrants were recovered in the desert of southern Arizona, who died probably while attempting to cross the desert. A similar thing happened in 2003, when between 43 and 61 people died attempting to cross the Sonora Desert. In 2016, there were 396 fatalities. With Trump’s inauguration and increasingly restrictive measures, crossings were reduced but deaths increased.
President Biden blocked construction of the wall with an executive order in January 2021, his administration promising a turnaround on immigration policies. For now, however, verification on the ground tells a different story. U.S. Border Patrol patrols continue to do exactly the same things, with innovative solutions such as whips and horses. In the meantime, criminal organizations simply open new channels: recently, boats of “fake fishermen” appeared, and human trafficking by sea has increased. Fonte:Sarcina These solutions in turn increase law enforcement countermeasures and the general level of violence and crime in border areas, eventually affecting places that were previously peaceful. Drug and human trafficking currently produced an annual turnover of over 6.6 billion dollars. Fonte:UN This is the summary of a paradoxical situation in which a wall built to block a movement ends up increasing it. Here is where the first paradox mentioned at the beginning becomes evident: the United States, a democratic country, world leader in the economy and member of a global market, is also a nation-state, in part a spokesman for that nationalist and xenophobic viewpoint that erects walls to defend itself from the enemy in order to concretize its power.
The wall between the U.S. and Mexico intensifies the crime and violence it claims to curb, thus fueling the need for further fortifications and controls, while declaring itself a symbol of peace, order and security.
The fact that nation-states need to build a wall derives from the fact that their sovereignty in the last fifty years has been threatened by the growing flows of capital, people and ideas, which have endangered an absolute sovereignty consecrated by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, when the nation-states were born. And this explains the walls’ paradox: a manifestation used by sovereignty to proclaim its strength, but which at the same time reveals its weakness in relation to the great global powers. Fonte:Brown Because in the end, if you don’t feel threatened or weakened, you don’t build a wall.
Neoliberal politics recognizes as sovereign only those who are in charge of corporations. Nations make international political pacts and alliances among themselves (EU, International Monetary Fund, etc.), while the forces that used to sustain sovereignty, such as nationalism and imperialism, are diminishing. The change lies in the fact that States and Sovereignty are not two elements that dissolve, but rather that are disjointed: States continue to be political actors, but are no longer sovereign. The only thing left in a post-Westphalian order for nation-states is to continue to be symbols for national identification.
Walls are an icon of the erosion of sovereignty, the demonstration that migration is such a strong phenomenon, as Eco argued, that it erodes any obstacle, even the power of nation states.
The wall represents the division between individual identity and global identity. It is the dividing line between who is inside and who is outside, between the ally and the invader. Those who stand beyond the barrier are the other, the different, the stranger compared to those who belong to the community protected by the wall.
As Massimo Leone argues in “Semiotics of Crossing”, Fonte:Leone a person becomes aware of an environment of belonging not when he contributes to its creation, but when he experiences the opposition between his environment of belonging and an opposite environment of non-belonging”.
Borders are not only an entity that regulates the relationship between two different cultural areas or geographical zones. They are also a means of crossing, a method to meet. From a semiotic point of view, the origin of any relationship of belonging to a place can be defined as a spatial stance. As Leone explains, this stance is realized through the presence of three pivotal elements:
–The borders and boundaries of a space of belonging, e.g. “my neighborhood”;
– the consequent opposition between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging, for example “my neighborhood vs. another neighborhood”;
– the relationship between the two subjects who belong to the two environments, for example “me and the person who lives in the other neighborhood”.
For example, citizens do not realize that they belong to a neighborhood until they separate from it, moving to another place. Migrations are therefore fundamental for the awareness of one’s own spatial identity, but if they are blocked by structures such as walls, the process of identity construction is replaced by that of “exile/invasion”. Let’s imagine a situation in which initially there are no barriers between two states and it is possible to move freely. Suddenly a wall is built, and those who want to continue to cross it are seen as “the invaders” by those on the other side of the barrier, who feel the need to defend themselves from this flow of people. A bit like what happened with the wall between China and North Korea. First these two nations were allies, then in 2003 China decided to build a wall along its borders to stop the flow of North Korean refugees seeking political asylum during Pyongyang’s rule. Today, leaving North Korea without official permission is a crime that is punishable by capital punishment. Fonte:Post China fears the invasion of the growing flow of North Korean refugees, seeing them as “the other”. On the other hand, North Korean refugees see their status as a consequence of China’s hostility and attachment to the place they belong. All this happens because it was decided to block a natural phenomenon with a wall. This creates a circle in which similarities inspire trust and differences inspire fear.
The history of man is a history of migration that began in Africa around 7 million years ago. Over time, migration has been a guarantee of survival and a sign of evolution, and it has led men towards new frontiers, new obstacles and new barriers. Whether these are insurmountable or not, only time will tell. For a long time we had a perspective that did not go beyond our dimension. Now that we have the opportunity to look at our planet from the outside, when you see a photograph of the Earth taken from outside, pay attention to it: because some walls are visible from space. Seen from up there, who is the one on the outside?
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