Issues & Answers / By Bill Winneke

Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors, so our relations with Mexico might be about to improve.

President Bush recently signed into law a proposal to build a 700- mile fence between the United States and Mexico. He says the fence will help the United States curb illegal immigration.

That might be. It makes some sense that a high, ugly metal fence might at least slow border crossers down and make them easier to catch.

And the fence, or, at least, parts of it, may even get built someday. No one yet knows what it will cost and, as I understand it, the president has the authority to move $1.2 billion authorized for border security in the last Department of Homeland Security budget around to where he thinks it will do the most good.

So far, the action hasn’t yet improved our relations, however. Mexican President Vicente Fox likens it to the Berlin Wall, which, of course, is not a very good analogy because the Berlin Wall was built to keep East Germans in, not West Germans out.

But in one sense, Fox is on to something.

In this day of high-tech surveillance, drone airplanes and night-vision goggles, nation after nation seems to be looking to the most low-tech of security devices — a fence — to provide a first line of defense against intruders.

Israel is busy building a fence between itself and its Palestinian neighbors. Iraq is considering digging a moat (which is kind of a reverse fence) around Baghdad. The Berlin Wall is a thing of the past, but it is a thing of the recent past.

The desire to build walls, however, seems part of mankind’s heritage. The best-known wall, the Great Wall of China, stretched more than 4,000 miles across what is now China and was built over hundreds of years, beginning as early as 770 B.C.

Around 122 A.D. the Roman Emperor Hadrian starting building a 73-mile- long wall across parts of England.

None of these walls, including the Berlin Wall, actually worked very well. They provided security for a time, or at least seemed to do so, but the underlying problems of the dynasties that built them made them ineffective in the long run.

President Bush, to his credit, understands that. He’s been trying for years to promote a broad-based policy that will incorporate Mexican and Latin American immigrants into our society through legal procedures.

He’s been thwarted at every turn by a Congress that thinks it can make more hay by demonizing poor Mexicans. Now, he’s making lemonade from his failure and proclaiming the fence will help secure the border.

Again, it might . . . for a while.

In the meantime, if the new fence is going to be anything like the fence we already have between parts of the United States and parts of Mexico, it will be an ugly metal barrier that gives lie to the inscription on our Statue of Liberty that we want to be a haven for huddled masses yearning to be free.

If we must build a fence, perhaps we ought to take a page from China and build one that has some architectural merit that might outlive the purpose for which it is built.

Reach Bill Wineke at bwineke@madison.com.