While the idea of barriers between countries is centuries old, the phenomenon has taken on a scale unprecedented in history. But walls can also mark the legacy of wartime defenses, aid the halting of smuggling, and seek to prevent terrorist attacks. A large share of these walls, particularly the new ones, are designed to prevent illegal immigration, although they have not proven wholly effective in this regard. Seventy-four border walls exist across the globe, most erected over the last two decades at least 15 others were in some stage of planning as of this writing. No continent has been spared from the reinforcement and fortification of borders, which has come to define the beginning of the 21st century. Around the same time, Turkey reinforced its stone wall on the Iranian border, while Greece completed a 25-mile steel wall separating itself from Turkey and made plans to appeal to the European Union for support to add even more sections. In a matter of months in late 2021, Poland’s parliament approved the building of barbed-wire fencing along its border with Belarus, the governor of Texas inaugurated sections of 30-foot-tall steel-bollard barriers abutting Mexico financed by state and private funds, and Israel completed an underground “iron wall” equipped with sensors on the edge of its border with Gaza.
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