Migrants, the ‘war of the walls’ and the barriers that already exist

“There has been talk of physical infrastructure, but I have been very clear that there will be no funding for barbed wire fencing or walls.” So yesterday the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, clarified that there will be no European funds for the construction of walls on the external border of the European Union to strengthen the control of the smuggling of irregular migrants. The ‘war of the walls’ comes 60 years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the division of the world into two blocks, east and west, a planet in which today safety and separation barriers are not only on the books and in which the at the end of 2020, the number of people fleeing persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations reached 82.4 million (UNHCR annual Global Trends report). Earlier this month, interior ministers from 12 member countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia) had asked the European Commission to finance the construction of border walls to block the entry of migrants arriving from Belarus. Between 2000 and 2021 in the world, the number of border walls completed, announced or for which work has begun has more than fivefold, from 16 to over 90, according to data collected and published last August by Deutsche Welle. According to a report last year by the Transnational Institute (Tni), 63 walls have been built in the last 50 years, 14 in 2015 alone.In Europe, among the countries that have erected barriers are GREECE, on the border with Turkey , HUNGARY, on the border with Serbia and Croatia, and BULGARIA, on the border with Turkey itself, which in turn is ‘armored’ on the borders with Iran and Syria. In the two Spanish enclaves of CEUTA and MELILLA located in African territory , beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, two barbed wire barriers have been built – 8.2 km and 12 km respectively – on the border with Spain to block the mass arrival of migrants who want to reach the EU. Built in the late 1990s, they have since been raised to a height of 6 meters. Last August, the LITHUANIAN Parliament gave the go-ahead for a law allowing the installation of a fence to stem the flow of Belarusian migrants . Flow that also wants to stop POLAND, with the construction of a wall whose expected cost is over 350 million euros. Last week, the lower house of parliament in Warsaw approved a bill, which will now have to be examined by the Senate. The border between the two countries is 3,200 km long and the US government has built a barrier along part of the route to block immigration from Mexico and other Central American countries. The first barriers appeared in 1991, but in 1994 the United States formalized the strengthening of surveillance operations and widened the wall within the framework of Operation Guardian.