When the first Emperor of China wanted to keep out the people to the North, he built a wall. It's estimated that the construction of the Great Wall of China took over one million lives and a vast amount of national resources. Ultimately the only thing the wall accomplished was to become a tourist attraction.

During the Cold War, when East Germany wanted to keep people from crossing into West Germany, it built a wall. For the 28 years that it stood, between 133 and 200+ people died while trying to cross the Berlin Wall.  It became a symbol of repression for an entire generation until it was joyously torn down.

Now, on the grounds of "protecting national security," the U.S. government wants to build a wall on the 2,000 mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, with estimated costs ranging between one and eight billion dollars. (For perspective, the first 11 miles of the wall near San Diego cost $42 million - that's $3.8 million per mile.) The government is building this wall despite the evidence, which tells us that the Canadian border is far more susceptible to anti-U.S. terrorist activity than the Mexican border (yet the U.S. is not building a wall along the Canadian border).  The government is building this wall despite the fact that where it has already been built, the wall is woefully ineffective at keeping people out (but very effective at making smugglers rich.)

The Bush administration wants to complete another 670 miles of this wall across the environmentally sensitive Southwest by the end of this year. Unfortunately for the administration, 267 of those miles are being held up by federal, state and local laws and regulations designed to protect our rights. Fortunately for the Bush administration, Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005, which (amongst other things) gave the Department of Homeland Security the ability to waive all legal requirements, as necessary, in order to expedite the construction process. Yesterday, on April 1st (but unfortunately, it wasn’t a joke), the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be waiving almost three dozen laws in order to build those 670 miles. For a partial list of the laws affected, see here.

In addition to the exorbitant costs for something that doesn't work, these waivers are wrong on so many levels. First, they bypass the very laws designed to ensure our safety, including the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.  It means that DHS can build its wall without monitoring the impact that it will have on the Rio Grande, for example. Second, by bypassing laws that protect land ownership/use, DHS can force the rightful owners to sell the needed land. This includes the forced selling of First-Nation-owned, sacred, ancestral lands. Third, it means that wildlife refuges that took years to create by painstakingly purchasing contiguous segments will be cut in half. The wall designed to segregate humans will also keep endangered species such as the ocelot from hunting and mating.

We are talking about a wall here, the construction of which hurts the most vulnerable people and animals on both sides.  As the poet Robert Frost observed, "Something there is that does not love a wall." Man-made barriers tend to crumble, needing to be constantly rebuilt. Nature rebels against the act of segregation. Perhaps there's a lesson in that.