Do walls work? Wheels?

The Great Wall is not just where Matt Damon fights an army of lizards.  It's what POTUS wants to build on the Southern border.

There's a fascinating new article by Pamela Crossley in FP on the history of border walls and their effectiveness, I highly recommend a read in its entirety.

"The security aspects of walls have always been problematic. Today they’re even weaker than in the Middle Ages, suggesting that the immaterial benefits of the wall are what really attract the president. Like that first emperor of China, Trump has used the prospect of the wall as a tool to demonstrate his coercive power and tighten his grip on income and expenditure, to the point that the government has been throttled into unconsciousness. Perhaps the president imagines himself on video, gesticulating benevolently while superimposed on a panorama of a glinting razor wire trammel studded with surveillance scaffolds, each proudly flying the Stars and Stripes, as an ecstatic chorus belts out the national anthem. 

The president might think of history for a moment. That first emperor of China, the one who conceived of the so-called Great Wall, had a very brief rule; the people rose up angrily against his fiscal and labor demands. The Yongle Emperor, the Ming leader most associated with aggrandizing the wall, had his outsized ambitions repudiated after his death. Public scorn of his budget-busting vanity projects was so thorough that he was denounced as a tool, and possibly an active agent, of the most imposing Ming hostiles—the Mongols. 

And the American public in their turn would do well to remember the one thing that walls have actually proven effective at: keeping people in. Medieval tyrants used them to keep the yeomen from deserting, every serious prison or internment facility has one of some kind, the Berlin Wall worked on most people, and Israel uses one to keep Palestinians in their place. Modern wall-building does not have to be physical: It can be economic, cultural, and psychological."

So that sounds better than POTUS' walls vs wheels monologue; although it could be his fancy-schmancy Wharton education talking.