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Trump Wants a Border Wall. See What’s in Place Already. (Published 2018)

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President Trump says construction for the wall is underway. We mapped the current fencing and what his administration has done so far.

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Click on n°1 and then play the slide show. In pairs, discuss  about the different reasons why countries have walls built

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Click on n°1 and then play the slide show. In pairs, discuss  about the different reasons why countries have walls built

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Security fears and a widespread refusal to help refugees have fuelled a new spate of wall-building around the world

A third of the world's countries have completed or are building barriers - compared to 16 at the fall of the Berlin Wall

They include Israel's 'apartheid wall', India's 2,500-mile fence around Bangladesh and Morocco's huge sand 'berm'

Experts are dismissive, saying: 'Their main function is theatre. They provide the sense of security, not real security'

Globalisation was supposed to tear down barriers, but security fears and a widespread refusal to help migrants and refugees have fuelled a new spate of wall-building across the world, with a third of the world's countries constructing them along their borders.

When the Berlin Wall was torn down a quarter-century ago, there were 16 border fences around the world.

Today, there are 65 either completed or under construction, according to Quebec University expert Elisabeth Vallet.

From Israel's separation barrier (or 'apartheid wall' as it is known by the Palestinians), to the 2,500-mile barbed-wire fence India is building around Bangladesh, to the enormous sand 'berm' that separates Morocco from rebel-held parts of the Western Sahara - walls and fences are ever-more popular with politicians wanting to look tough on migration and security.

US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has made plans for a wall along the border with Mexico - to keep out what he called 'criminals, drug dealers, rapists' - central to his inflammatory campaign.

Yet experts say there is little proof of their effectiveness in stopping people crossing borders.

In July, Hungary's right-wing government began building a four-metre-high (13 feet) fence along its border with Serbia to stanch the flow of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

'We have only recently taken down walls in Europe; we should not be putting them up,' was one EU spokesperson's exasperated response.

Three other countries - Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - are all constructing border fences in a bid to keep out jihadist groups next door in Somalia, Iraq and Syria.

Seven miles of barrier have already been erected along the border at Reyhanli town in Hatay province - a main point for smuggling and border-crossing from Syria - the private Dogan news agency said.

The fence in Turkey will eventually stretch for 28 miles along a key stretch of its border with Syria.

But the Turkish wall pales into insignificance when compared to the multi-layered fence which will one day stretch 600 miles from Jordan to Kuwait along Saudi's border with Iraq - a line of defence against ISIS.

But in spite of the aggressive symbolism, it is not clear that walls are truly effective.

'The one thing all these walls have in common is that their main function is theatre,' said Marcello Di Cintio, author of 'Walls: Travels Along the Barricades'.

'You can't dismiss that illusion, it's important to people, but they provide the sense of security, not real security.'

The limits of their effectiveness are visible everywhere - not least, with the migrants and refugees sitting on top of the fence along the border with Morocco and the small Spanish enclave of Mellila, on the North African coast.

Even the fearsome Berlin Wall with its trigger-happy sentries still leaked thousands of refugees even in its most forbidding years.

Supporters of walls say a few leaks are better than a flood. But, Di Cintio argues we must also consider the psychological price they exact.

He cites the Native American Tohono O'odham tribe, whose elders started to die off in apparent grief when the Mexican border fence cut them off from their ceremonial sites.

Their story carries shades of the 'wall disease' diagnosed by Berlin psychologist Dietfried Muller-Hegemann in the 1970s after he found heightened levels of depression, alcoholism and domestic abuse among those living in the shadow of the barricade.

Di Cintio also talked to Bangladeshi farmers suddenly cut off from their neighbours when India erected the simple barbed-wire fence between them in the last decade.

Within a few months, he said, they had started expressing distrust and dislike for 'those people' on the other side.

'I was struck every time at how a structure so simple as a wall or fence can have these profound psychological effects,' says Di Cintio.

At a localised level, a wall offers more security than no wall.

But they do little to address the roots of insecurity and migration - global asylum applications and terrorist attacks have risen hugely despite the flurry of wall-building.

Rather, they just force groups to adapt.

They are mostly effective against the poorest and most desperate, says Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii professor and author of 'Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel'.

'Well-funded drug cartels and terrorist groups are not affected by walls at all because they have the resources to enter by safer methods, most likely using fake documents,' he said.

Shutting down border crossings only 'funnels immigrants to more dangerous routes through the deserts of the US southwest or on rickety boats across the Mediterranean.

'The substantial increase in deaths at borders is the predictable result,' said Jones.

More than 40,000 people have died trying to migrate since 2000, the International Organisation for Migration said last year.

Real border control comes only through the slow, exhaustive work of building ties and sharing information with other countries, says Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, from Canada's University of Victoria.

'But with the intense flows of people we see today, walls are perhaps necessary for politicians.

'They tap into old myths about what borders should be - the line in the sand - which humans relate to,' he said.

'It's a lot more difficult for people to accept that diplomatic cooperation and sharing databases are much more effective in the long term.'

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How 65 countries have erected security walls on their borders

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Security fears and a widespread refusal to help refugees have fuelled a new spate of wall-building across the world, even if experts doubt their long-term effectiveness.

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Trump's order to begin building the wall

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Trump's order to begin building the wall

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Source: BBC news, 30 october 2020

Between

The wall

Source: RTL, published in october 2017

A photomontage about the prototypes of Trump's anti-migrant wall on the Mexican border

Source: LESECHOS

On december 8, 2018, workers on the border between tijuana (mexico) and san diego (Us).

Source: 20 minutes, on March 19, 2019

Migrants are trying to illegally cross the border between Mexico and the US.

Source: Figaro, in July 2019

Artists transform the wall between the united states and mexico into a children's playground

Source: Figaro, in october 2017

JR's giant picnic to make people foget the wall between the US and mexico

Source: The New Yorker, September 11, 2017

The Artist JR Lifts a Mexican Child Over the Border Wall

Source: Hyperallergic, June 24, 2019

3,800 Volunteers Have Joined an Artist to Challenge Trump's Idea of a "Big, Beautiful Wall" on the US-Mexico Border

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Source: BBC news, 30 october 2020 Between The wall Source: RTL, published in october 2017 A photomontage about the prototypes of Trump's anti-migrant wall on the Mexican border Source: LESECHOS On december 8, 2018, workers on the border between tijuana (mexico) and san diego (Us).

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CO part 1 (costs and benefits of immigration)

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CO part 1 (costs and benefits of immigration)

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CO bac anglais: the hidden life of a US undocumented immigrant (with script)

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Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with a pledge to bring down illegal immigration, famously blaming undocumented migrants from Mexico for a host of problems, including drugs and crime. In the four years since, how has this rhetoric translated into a wider immigration policy?

The number of foreign-born people living in the US has risen by about 3% from 43.7 million the year before Mr Trump's election to about 45 million last year.

But this rise conceals a big shift in the largest group by far within this population - those who have moved to the US from Mexico. Having remained at nearly the same level for years, the number of people living in the US who were born in Mexico has fallen steadily since Mr Trump's election.

While this dip was more than offset by an increase in the number of people who have moved to the US from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demographers at the US Census Bureau have estimated that net migration - the number of people moving to the US minus those moving out of the US - has fallen to its lowest level for a decade.

This is partly due to lower levels of immigration, but also because more people who were born outside the US are moving back overseas, according to Anthony Knapp of the US Census Bureau.

Beneath this trend there are some important changes to the visa system.

Mr Trump has allowed more people to come to the US temporarily for work, but made it harder for people to settle permanently in the US. The reduction in permanent visas, from about 1.2 million in 2016 to about 1 million in 2019, has primarily affected family members of US citizens and residents hoping to join their relatives, with the number of permanent visas sponsored by employers largely unchanged.

Although more people are affected by this, in percentage terms his most significant change to immigration policy has been to lower the number of refugees admitted to the US.

The number of people admitted to the US as refugees each year is determined by a system of quotas, the size of which are ultimately defined by the president. People seeking to move to the US as refugees must make their applications from outside the country, and need to convince US officials that they are vulnerable to persecution at home.

Mr Trump's hostility to any immigration from Muslim-majority countries is well known - he once pledged to enact a "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" - and a reduction in refugee quotas proved easier to implement than an outright ban, which became mired in legal challenges.

As a result, the number of refugees admitted from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Iraq, Somalia, Iran and Syria, fell almost to zero soon after he took office.

Curbing visas and refugee admissions is not the only way to reduce the number of people entering the country, and Mr Trump has also sought to make it harder to move to, or remain in, the US without any relevant documentation.

However, this is more difficult than it might seem. To understand what has happened during President Trump's tenure, we first need to get to grips with what the official statistics on deportation mean, and they are broken down into two categories.

People are said to be "removed" if they are taken out of the country under the authority of a court order, and people are "returned" if they are refused admission while trying to cross the border, or asked to leave the country without a court order.

Being removed has a lasting legal consequence, making it much harder to gain re-entry to the country. But many people who have been returned across the US-Mexico border simply tried to enter the US again at a later date. President Obama escalated a policy enacted by his predecessor, President George W Bush, to step up removals - particularly of those who had been accused or convicted of criminal offences.

President Trump has not brought about any significant changes to the number of people in either deportation category compared with his predecessor.

The US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, which handles most deportations, has described the current rate of removals as "extremely low", blaming a lack of resources and "judicial and legislative constraints", among other things.

The agency is also under pressure at the Mexican border, where the administration's changes to asylum policy have resulted a long backlog of cases, sometimes with families separated and children held in detention centres, and asylum seekers being returned to Mexico to await the processing of their claims.

Despite widespread media coverage of the border crisis, the data for 2019 suggests that would-be migrants have not been deterred - the number of detentions at the border was more than double the number for the previous year, driven largely by a large rise in the number of families attempting to get across.

This shift is likely to translate into a significant rise in the returns numbers for 2019, which are due to be released in the next few months.

One interesting question is whether President Trump's tough stance on immigration is still a major selling point among his supporters. The number of people telling pollsters that immigration is a bad thing has fallen steadily since he took office, with many former detractors apparently now believing it is generally good for the US.

Although there remains a gulf between Democratic and Republican voters on the issue, with Republicans far less likely to see immigration in a positive light, and far more likely to want stricter curbs on illegal immigration, the trend among both groups is the same.

Mr Trump will be hoping that there remain enough Republican supporters of his approach to help push him past the winning post on election night.

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US election 2020: Trump's impact on immigration - in seven charts

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Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with a pledge to bring down immigration. Did it happen?

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"Severely neglected" children detained in what have been called squalid conditions, as well as deaths on the US-Mexico border, have brought the treatment of migrants into focus in the US.

Lawyers who visited a border patrol facility in Clint, Texas, have described overcrowded cells, with children locked up without adult supervision or sufficient access to food or showers.

The border authority has said it is trying to provide the "best care possible", but that it "urgently" needs additional funding to help the children, some of whom entered the US independently, and some of whom have been separated from their families.

But why this is happening, and why now? Here, we have looked at three key pieces of context that will help you understand the fuller picture.

1) Growing migrant numbers

The numbers of people from Latin America seeking protection in the US and being held at the border are rising.

There is not one specific reason why people are leaving Central America and Mexico for the US. But there are a few that are cited regularly.

"We leave our countries under threat. We leave behind our home, our relatives, our friends."

"Many people think we left because we are criminals," Ms Flores told the BBC at the time. "We're not criminals - we're people living in fear in our countries. All we want is a place where our children can run free - where they're not afraid to go out to the shops."

Rights groups cite the influence of armed gangs who act with impunity - as well as the targeting of women and LGBTI people - as key factors for the high homicide rates.

Among the most prevalent groups is MS-13, a brutal street gang that started in the US but is now thought to have at least 60,000 members in Central America.

The gang is said to recruit at-risk and poor teenagers and demand they commit murder as an initiation rite, often using a machete. In El Salvador, MS-13 controls entire neighbourhoods.

Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people travelling to the US because they fear persecution by gangs like MS-13.

While persecution is not the only reason people from Central America migrate to the US - economic volatility, natural disasters and the desire to join family members have also been cited by aid groups - there is evidence it is a growing factor, and a credible one.

People seeking asylum in the US can request a "credible fear" interview if returning home would put their life at risk. An asylum officer then tries to establish if their request is based on a fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political beliefs or membership of a particular group, including a gang.

Far from striking down credible fear applications, the Trump administration is granting them at an unprecedented rate. But Mr Trump has been keen to raise the threshold for what counts as "credible fear".

"We hear repeatedly from people requesting refugee protection, including from a growing number of children, that they are fleeing forced recruitment into armed criminal gangs and death threats," a UN statement said.

As the number of people requesting credible fear interviews has increased, so too has the number of people being detained at the US border.

Reason two: Escaping poverty

But 68% also said they were moving for better labour opportunities, and 12% for education opportunities.

Countries in Central America are among the poorest in the world while the US is one of the richest, with the world's largest economy (by GDP):

President Trump has repeatedly condemned economic migrants, saying two months after he launched his candidacy that "they're taking our manufacturing jobs, they're taking our money." However, many studies say that immigration produces net gains for the US economy.

Those entering the US for a better quality of life are not considered refugees.

However, US and international law currently says that people can seek asylum if they fear persecution at home on the basis of their race, political opinion, nationality, religion or because they belong to a particular social group.

Five more things to read

There's another factor to bear in mind too: climate change. With economies that are heavily reliant on agriculture, Central American countries are particularly vulnerable to changes in temperature and the weather.

A number of recent reports - including a series by the New Yorker magazine - have acknowledged the role climate change is already playing in driving people from Central America. But one World Bank report last year said the number of people displaced because of climate change in Latin America could rise to 2.1 million by 2050.

To understand the zero-tolerance policy on immigration, it helps to understand who is behind it.

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the White House on 16 June, 2015, he set the tone for how he would later approach the presidency.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

And so, in early 2018, Mr Trump announced a "zero tolerance" policy to prosecute all adults who try to cross the US-Mexico border illegally, including those who planned to seek asylum in the US.

Mr Trump often cites the dangers of MS-13, which sprung up among Salvadorean immigrants in 1980s Los Angeles and has since spread to at least 46 states. Mr Trump has called them "animals" and threatened to rid the US of their influence.

However, the same poll found that his approach was less popular with Americans overall - with 44% of adults saying his approach made them more likely to oppose him, compared with 31% who were supportive.

Mr Miller, one of the president's few original aides to keep their job, was the person who put together the ban on immigrants from majority-Muslim countries announced soon after Mr Trump came to office.

The New York Times reported that in April 2018, when it became clear that the number of people being held at the border was growing significantly, Mr Miller pushed for a harder line on immigration.

His position in 2019 is even more secure than a year earlier when the border crackdown began, thanks partly to the departure of immigration officials who supported less restrictive policies.

Is it legal to separate families and detain children in poor conditions? This question goes to the centre of the debate on immigration and is not as easy to answer as you may think.

So why are some families still being separated?

There is also significant debate about the conditions under which people are being kept. This too is because of a lack of clarity in the law.

A 1997 court decision, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, sets a standard which the US government must follow when it comes to treating migrant children.

But the Department of Justice has sought to amend the agreement to allow it to hold children for longer, and has disputed interpretations of the 1997 court decision - most notably, when a government lawyer argued in June 2018 that the order does not specify that detained children be given showers, soap or toothbrushes.

As long as children continue to be separated from their families, the legal challenges from both sides are likely to continue.

But aside from the loopholes and the legal disputes, plain old bureaucracy also appears to be a problem.

Unaccompanied children are by law supposed to be detained for only up to 72 hours. But several reports say many are being kept in detention centres - often in squalid conditions - for much longer, as government agencies struggle to process the vast number of people being held at the border.

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Migrant children in the US: The bigger picture explained

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"Severely neglected" children detained in what have been called squalid conditions, as well as deaths on the US-Mexico border, have brought the treatment of migrants into focus in the US. Lawyers who visited a border patrol facility in Clint, Texas, have described overcrowded cells, with children locked up without adult supervision or sufficient access to food or showers.