Think Tech Away, Civil Engagement Lives Here. Good afternoon and welcome to an episode of Likeable Science. It's the start of a special series called Likeable Social Science, where I'll be talking with various people from the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii and an amazing group of people that are doing stunning work to start me out the first time here. I have Rhys Jones. Welcome Rhys. Thanks for having me. Rhys is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environment as we were just talking about. A recently renamed department to emphasize the interaction, the more interaction with people rather than just sort of the land and what it is and where it is, right? Yeah, I think people just seem to always be confused on exactly what geographers do. So geography is really about the interactions between people and the environment around them and so we've added environment to the title of the department to kind of capture that broader range of what we do, make it more legible to people. Excellent. And that fits in with our topic on border walls, where, when, and why, right? I mean, it's clear that the people moving across the landscape and migrating from one place to another for a wide variety of reasons as people have always done, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, migration is something that's just a fundamental part of what it is to be a human being to move around. Our ancient ancestors were hunter-gatherers and were always moving from one place to another. But over time some people started to settle down and be sedentary and stay in a particular place. And as they did that, there were increasingly the needs to restrict the access of other people to those spaces. Yeah, and so, right, we've gone through different sort of eras of history where borders have been more or less defined, right? But now we've hit, some while ago, sort of post-war war too, you might say, we really sort of stabilized things out in a way, got pretty well-defined borders with pretty much pretty broad-spread international agreement about where these borders are and agreeing from virtue of your hunch on earth to respect these borders and recognize the sovereign nation on the other side of it. So then, I mean, a quick, obvious question is, aren't border walls sort of outdated then? Yeah, that's a very good question. If you look through the history of borders and of the need to stop people from moving from one place to another, in the more distant past, if you think about the Middle Ages, building a wall was something that was really important for a ruler to do. For example, the city walls that we see in Europe today are clear examples of that, of a way to stop people from being able to access resources and protect a small group of people in a particular place. But you're right, after World War II and with the creation of the United Nations, it was less important to do that. Countries increasingly recognize each other's borders, their sovereignty, and it's no longer that important for states to build these walls on their borders. Right, and indeed, I mean, you point out one of your many articles, and I read a few of them, that at the close of World War II, there were something like five border walls in the world. And by the mid-70s or 80s, they were like 15 and now there's 70 different border walls. Yeah, that's absolutely right. There's been really a fundamental change in the past 30 years around border walls. But let's think a little bit about that previous era and why they weren't really necessary first. Like if you think about in the 70s or 80s, most countries had more or less accepted each other's borders. And so like the border between the United States and Canada or the United States and Mexico, it was no longer a defensive line where a country was worried that someone else would invade. The U.S. is not worried Canada is going to come across that border. That's not really the purpose that that border served. And so during that period, not many countries built these walls. But as you know, in the past 30 years, really it's since 2000. Even as late as the year 2000, there were about 15 border walls around the world. Whereas today there's 70 of them. And so what's really changed is the role that these borders are playing. So what we've seen is over the last 30 years there's been an increase in the number of people moving between different places and moving from poorer countries to wealthier countries looking for better opportunities. Sure. Because of just general poverty, because of local economic conditions, because of warfare, because of climate events and disasters, all of these things drive people to move. Yeah, absolutely. There are all kinds of reasons. In the news in the last few years, we've of course seen Syria as a place that's resulting a lot of people on the move. The United Nations has estimated that there are about 65 million people globally displaced by conflict. But if we look at people who are migrating, that's just the people because of violence that have been fleeing their homes and might be perceived as refugees within the global system. But there's a whole other group of people who are moving from one place to another, looking for better opportunities for their family, looking for jobs, looking for better education for their kids. And those sorts of movements have also increased in the last 30 years. Sure. My work takes me out into Micronesia a lot and they are losing a lot of their youth because you see no future in these small isolated islands in many cases and come here to Guam or to the mainland U.S. and get some education and why would they return back to a tiny isolated island where they could make $5,000 a year, maybe if they're really lucky versus living somewhere else. And so, yeah, there are people who are sort of escaping personal violence, fleeing a domestic situation. There are people who just want to move, right? Just people fleeing political persecution. Yeah, so there are a thousand reasons, right, that people will want to leave a country and go to another country. Yeah, absolutely. There are lots of reasons. With the era of globalization, which scholars generally talk about, maybe since the 1970s, the world has become increasingly connected economically and culturally because new information technologies like television, telephone, and now the internet makes it much easier for people to know how people live in different parts of the world. And so, I think that that also plays a role in creating the idea that there are better opportunities elsewhere, that if people can make their way to a different place, that they can also find opportunities for themselves and their children. Yeah, yeah. So, historically, have border walls really ever been really effective on a large scale? I mean, yes, isolated, a fortified town may be effective for some period of time, but, I mean, as I understand from one of your articles, the Great Wall of China really is one much more recent than we generally think of it, and two is believed to have been breached within a matter of a couple of decades after being built at least or had an end run done around it or something, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the effectiveness of a wall really depends on a couple of factors. The first is the scale of it. If you're talking about a short distance of wall, you know, a mile or something like that, for example, around a city in Europe or a prison today is another example of a short wall that can be really effective at preventing people from moving from one place to another, right? But the thing that makes those effective is that they're one, they're short, so it's possible to monitor that large area. But secondly, there are lots of people guarding it, right? So a prison has a lot of guards watching those walls and cameras and security, so it's an observed area. So on small scales, walls can be effective at preventing movement. But on a larger scale, it becomes much harder to make those walls very effective. And we see, if we look at past walls and contemporary walls that have been built over really long distances, they're rarely very effective at completely stopping movement. You mentioned the Great Wall of China. As you kind of implied, we think of it as the way that we visualized a large stone wall that's kind of on the mountains outside of Beijing. That was built in the 1500s, not 2,000 years ago, as we often think with the Great Wall of China. The reality is there were walls built over a 2,000-year period in lots of different places through there, so there was never really a single Great Wall of China. But none of those were really thought of as being very effective. They would go up and within a few years they would be abandoned, because the rulers found that often the horsemen to the north could very easily just hide around the end of it, or find an unguarded section and climb over it. So the Great Wall of China is kind of an early example of the ineffectiveness of walls. And certainly when you look at, take the U.S.-Mexico border, that runs through some very wide open desolate spaces and very rugged terrain. It's going to be highly difficult to staff a wall, basically. And as you say, without people watching your wall, it's not going to be very effective. Somebody's going to figure out how to get up over it, or how to go under it, or how to go through it. Yeah, absolutely. The cliche about border walls is that you show me a 15-foot border wall, I'll show you a 16-foot ladder. So really if there's not someone guarding it, then it's really easy to get over these things. What we see with the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, is that the sections of walls that are built, and particularly the ones that have a lot of agents guarding them, so for example, near San Diego in Tijuana, that part of the border 30 years ago had a large number of people crossing through there. Today, very few people cross the border at that location because it is guarded and the wall is there and it makes it difficult. But that doesn't stop people from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, they're funneled to different locations. Right, exactly. And before the show, we're talking a little bit about sort of the odd political ramifications in a sense that it's driving people into a much more hazardous journey to make this migration they wish to make. Hopefully, in some sense, maybe discouraging some of them from doing it. At least some people would hope that it discourages them. But realistically, many people are going to try to migrate and therefore they're being exposed to much higher dangers. One of your articles quotes the rate of dead bodies being found in Arizona along the border, going from 18 one year to 250 or something the next year? Yeah, absolutely. So that's what we see starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So as these walls are built in places like San Diego or El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border in Mexico, where a lot of people used to cross. As those were closed down, the people find these other routes to go. And so they're forced over this much more dangerous terrain of the deserts of Arizona or more isolated places to cross the border. And that was the intentional strategy because the Border Patrol knew at the time that there was no way that they could completely close the US-Mexico border. They still can't do that. But in the 1990s, they had nowhere near enough agents to come anywhere close to that. In 1990, there were only about 3,500 Border Patrol agents, whereas they're 20,000 now. And so their strategy was to deter people. So to make it hard to cross in the cities, force people over more dangerous terrain with the kind of implicit assumption that that's going to kill some people and that other people in the future won't try to make that journey because they know it's so dangerous. It's sort of frightening to think about this. And the other thing is because there's also been a shift that used to all be done purely as a governmental process. But more and more, it's been privatized, right? And we were talking a little bit about that issue that it almost begins to develop a life of its own once you privatize it where the private prisons and holding facilities were being paid on sort of per head, per night basis, are sort of happy to contribute to this by keeping people there for as long as it takes to process them. Absolutely. A number of scholars have talked about the emergence of a border industrial complex that includes one, all of the infrastructure that goes into building the border, building the wall, but also all of the weapons and vehicles and surveillance technologies that the Border Patrol is using. But also the private prisons that have cropped up around the border. In the past, if people were detained at the border, they would often either be released to their own reconnaissance until they had a hearing date or returned directly to Mexico voluntarily. Instead, they're put into private prisons and the private prisons are happy to have them stay there for long periods of time because they make money for each night that they're there. Yeah. So that really, that again sort of suggests that we should be rethinking this whole thing, right? And be sort of new ways. And I know you point out that the U.S. Border Patrol maintains a fleet. I think you set up eight predatory drones along the U.S. Mexico border. A tremendous number of quite capable of keeping track of, I imagine, a big deal of the time, and presumably reporting back whenever they're spotting people moving towards the border so you can direct agents strategically, right? Yeah, there's been an effort on the Port of the Border Patrol to turn to these new technologies to surveil the border. They have lots of sensors and cameras at the border to look for movements. But generally, those have actually proved to not be very successful because many of the technologies have a hard time telling the difference, I mean, like a cow who might set off a sensor or just the wind blowing tumbleweed through an area in an actual person crossing in that area. So I think that from the Border Patrol's perspective, those can often be frustrating because it sends them to many locations where there's nothing because it's a fault signal. Wow. We're going to dig into this more deeply and look into the future then since we've examined a little bit of the past. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science here, Likeable Social Science. Rhys Jones is my guest today and we'll be back in one minute. Hi, my name is Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review, coming to you from Honolulu, Hawaii right here in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Asian Review is the oldest of the 35 of our socials broadcast by Think Tech Hawaii. We've been in production since 2009. Our goal is to provide you, the viewer with information, breaking information about events in Asia. There should be anything from Hawaii west of Pakistan, from the Russian Far East, south to Australia and New Zealand. We hope to see you every Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. And you're back here on Likeable Science with Ethan Allen here on Think Tech Hawaii. With me in the Think Tech studios is Rhys Jones, professor of geography in the environment from University of Hawaii at Manoa, College of Social Sciences. This is a whole new segment on Likeable Social Science. That border wall is when, where and why. And so we were talking a little bit about the US-Mexico border using that as a sort of current case example. It's been in the news a lot. So about how much that border is currently fenced effectively. A lot of people are often surprised how recently much of the US-Mexico border was fenced. So as late as the early 1990s there was no federal fencing anywhere on the US-Mexico border. There was barbed wire in some places by a local landowner, for example, to control their cattle or something like that. The first fencing was built in 1994. Some short sections in San Diego and El Paso. The large section of fencing that exists now on the border was built after the Secure Fence Act past Congress in 2006. So the border is about 1950 miles long. And the Secure Fence Act authorized 670 miles of fencing on the border. And that was finished by about 2009. So exactly what that fencing looks like varies in different places. In some places it's a 20 foot high steel fence that's designed to stop a truck driving 60 miles an hour slamming into it. In other places it resembles more like a guardrail essentially. So it's just designed to stop a truck from being able to just drive freely across the border in a remote section of desert. It's out there on the border. But the reality is that about two-thirds of the border is still completely unfenced and doesn't have any federal fencing on it at all. And the cost for building these walls is really enormous. I mean particularly if you want to do something more than just a guardrail which probably you could put up fairly cheaply. But to build a significant wall such as has been recently proposed you said the latest estimates that they saw were about 30 million dollars per mile? Yeah, so it varies. I mean the Trump administration over the last few months has had lots of different proposals for different lengths of walls here and there. The last time that I fact-checked it was roughly 30 million dollars per mile and that was going to be to build about 500 new miles of fencing on the border. 30 million dollars per mile. That's amazing. You could do a lot of social good measures, right? You could send a lot of kids to school. You could put a lot of youth through college. You could feed a lot of hungry kids. A comparison that a number of people have made is that the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States has a budget of about 150 million dollars per year. Right? So six miles of border fence or wall would be equivalent of the entire budget of that organization. So given that and then there's a whole other area we didn't talk about, right? The environmental costs of building pretty good. You could start putting solid walls and you're really changing the, restrict the movement of animals, perhaps plants, perhaps water. All of these things begin to get costly in other ways too, but beyond the monetary costs. But so let's think creatively here and what is, what are people considering as alternatives? I mean there must be a wide slew of people who recognize this that we can't spend that kind of money on an ongoing basis to build a wall and then maintain the wall and staff the wall and I mean that's sort of crazy, right? I think it is, but I mean I would say that right now in the political sphere that there seems to be general support for that at least in one political party in the United States. I mean the, certainly Donald Trump staked his entire presidential campaign essentially on the slogan of build a wall, right? And it seems like he's quite determined to make that happen in some way or another. You talked about the, before we think about alternatives you talked about the environmental impacts of building border walls something that a lot of people aren't aware of so the 2006 Secure Fence Act allowed for the construction of the wall on the border that exists today but there was a 2005 law that had one clause in it which gave the government the ability to waive any laws in order to construct the fence and so since then the Department of Homeland Security secretary is the one that has this authority has waived 47 federal laws so things like the Environmental Protection Act, the Antiquities Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act so what all that means is that we really don't know the environmental impacts of constructing these walls because the government hasn't had to do that. They've waived all of those requirements that would be in place before they carried out a big construction project. They're typically very sensible and they're designed to protect the environment and ensure that we don't have bad erosion and wipe out species and destroy habitat and reduce the viability of ecosystems and so one can only presume if these are being waived right and left that those kinds of things are happening. Yeah well we don't know but I think it's safe to say that particularly for the ranges of a number of large species that live in the deserts of Arizona for example that traditionally have gone across the border when you put up a big fence if the fence stops a human it's also going to stop any other animals that are larger than the size of like a rat or a bunny or something like that. The Border Patrol did at least to their credit when they were constructing it there is a little gap at the bottom of a lot of the fencing that's maybe about 6 inches high that's designed to allow animals to move back and forth across that but larger animals like deer, mountain lions those sort of things obviously can't cross it either. There's all kinds of evidence from building just roads in habitat that animals cross that the roads become huge barriers and the animals are reluctant to cross the roads they had to in some cases now go back and build raise the roads and build sort of passes under trying sort of funnels trying to get allow animals passageways so they will actually move freely so obviously you're not going to do that if you have a border wall. Anything that would allow an animal to go through could allow a person to go through as well and on top of this now basically the classic example it's given is that all the 9-11 hijackers had entered the US legally with visas basically they didn't sneak across the border to our system perfectly openly. What is being considered in terms of these alternatives now? The thing I would say with border walls is that they're often the main purpose that they serve is they're symbolic and I think that the Trump campaign demonstrated that. There were all these other issues that people were concerned about whether it was the outsourcing of jobs whether it's the idea that immigration is going to affect the culture in the United States so a whole series of things but it gets simplified down to the symbol of the wall that by closing the border it will address all of these other sorts of issues but the reality is the border doesn't really have that much of an impact on many of those things and with immigration the evidence is quite clear so in the US right now there are about 11 million undocumented people in the US and more than half of those people came with valid documents across the border whether to be a student or as a tourist and it simply overstayed them so building a wall on the border has no impact on any of those sorts of movements it's the same thing for drugs you often hear people who are in favor of building the border wall use drug smuggling and cartels is the thing that they talk about but most of the drugs that enter the United States also come through the crossing points many of them in containers because containers I don't have the exact number but it's something like only 5% of containers that enter the United States are searched and so the drug smugglers know that they're going to lose some of their shipments to those that are searched but the vast majority are going to come through so that's where most of the drugs come through as well the only drug that usually comes across the border itself is marijuana heroin and a lot of the prescription drugs as well those are coming in containers so again it just suggests that this excuse me a futile cycle here actually if you think about it from the perspective of cartels it's often an advantage for the cartels for it to be harder to cross the border if anyone could make it across the border with drugs and sell them then there wouldn't be that profit for the cartels so more walls and more security actually benefits cartels because they're the only ones that can actually get stuff across the border they're the ones that have those networks they're the ones that have bribed the guards to get through, they're also the ones with the tunnels at the US-Mexico border the border patrol since 1990 has found 227 tunnels under the US-Mexico border so if they found 227 you'd have to imagine there's probably a good number more that they haven't found the wisdom of maintaining any system that is supported by both organized crime and law enforcement if both those parties want the same thing there's something a little odd going on, right? yeah it gets back to your idea of the border industrial complex right now are these people just mutually reinforcing the need for one another and help drive each other's business I don't know yeah absolutely I mean I've argued in some of my work that a lot of the violence that surround the border is produced by actually having the border the wealth inequalities that we see across it is because of these different administrative systems the existence of drug smuggling is because of these different rules about using those drugs people wouldn't smuggle those drugs if there was not a border across which to smuggle them right yeah it's very odd very odd to think about that the tensions that that creates the symbolism that they present to people reminding them just what they can or cannot do making some people feel safe and other people purposely feel excluded it's a very interesting area so before we wrap up here I'm in a completely different subject off subject entirely if you could have a superpower of either being invisible which would you choose and why okay that was unexpected so I guess I would fly I mean that seems like it would be pretty fantastic to be able to head up into the sky and see the world from the perspective of birds okay great I'm doing a little survey okay but excellent so this has been a fascinating discussion here we are running out of time very rapidly so Reese I want to thank you so much for coming here you've taught me a lot today I know you've taught our audience out here too so this is all great thank you very much and I wish you much luck in the pursuit of your research thank you thanks for having me on okay and I hope you'll come back and join likeable science next week until then Ethan Allen your host signing off