Sensor towers placed along the U.S. border with Mexico are only one part of a new “invisible wall” of technology hemming in the border. (Image courtesy of GovTechWorks.)
President Trump’s contentious border wall has come back into the news recently after the Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. The idea of a physical coast-to-coast wall has fired the imaginations of many Americans, both those for and against its construction.
But a wall is never just a wall, especially with the high-tech available today. Some even argue that a physical border wall is unnecessary.
In a recent statement to CNN, Texas Representative Henry Cuellar said, “Violent drug cartels are using more modern technology to breach our border than we are using to secure it. We can’t double down on a 14th century solution to a 21st century challenge if we want a viable long-term solution.”
To understand how today’s invisible border tech is shaping the way we understand borders, let’s take a quick trip through famous border walls across the centuries.
The Wall of Mardu
Modern ruins of the City of Ur, which the Wall of Mardu was built to protect. (Image courtesy of history.com.)
One of the first defensive border walls we know of was the Amorite Wall, built in the 21st century BCE to keep the nomadic Amorites out of Sumeria. While the wall is almost entirely destroyed today, it’s believed to have stretched for a hundred miles between the…