Lauren Markham on Border Walls
Journalist Lauren Markham addresses the “strange history of our futile border fortifications” for Harper’s Magazine in If These Walls Could Talk. She focuses on this unusual paradox: Walls “have never really worked,” but we keep building them “again and again.”
Markham traveled to Norwegian-Russian border looking for answers. You may recall this post from 2015 about migrants crossing from Russia into Norway on bicycles because of Russia’s rules against migrants crossing its border with Norway on foot and Norway’s rules against drivers ferrying unauthorized migrants.
It turns out Norway was pretty annoyed by this, feeling that Russia was exporting its migrant problem. Eventually, two countries agreed that “any migrant trying to cross without the proper papers would be stopped by Russian authorities.” Once this became public knowledge, migrants stopped coming across this particular border.
Still, Norway decided to respond to this no-longer-a-problem by building a wall. Well, more of a fence. A modest one. Six hundred feet of chain link.
Markham’s piece is ambitious. She talks about this particular wall (now something of a tourist attraction – Spring Break in Norway, y’all!), the mythology of walls, the history of various border walls, scholarship about the efficacy of such construction, and even the relationship between borders and identity.
It’s a great piece. One that would be good reading for a class about the border wall.
-KitJ