Walls to separate and to join

by Ben Woodruff

When we look at walls, we must consider what is kept apart but more importantly what is joined together. In the United States, there is great political concern about how labor flows north from Mexico and further south. Through NAFTA there have not been the same barriers for goods and through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund there are few barriers for capital.

This is because the true purpose of walls is not to truly defend a nation or even to keep undesirable immigrants out. Instead the walls hide the fact that the government no longer has power. International agreements have removed power from those elected governments and transferred that to global organizations. The wall then instead serves to define who is "us" and who is "them" in the discourses of power. 

The wall can be physical or metaphorical. Often the barriers are built into bureaucracy on who we allow more free movement and who must struggle to enter. This othering was used by Ahmed to define the hate that another by simply encroaching on one's space "threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject" (43). The other is described not only as being dirty or dangerous but they are an embodiment of that abjection. 

Alabama has been an example of this. There is a great deal of support for a frontier fence along the southern US border but the state also enacted laws to further separate "bad" immigrants from the global south from the "good" immigrants from Germany and Korea.