41 separation walls have been built so far. Some of them have been built on the border between 2 countries. Others within disputed territories. On a smaller scale, more and more walls are also being built around privileged communities. We call them « gated communities ». Including or excluding, all these walls separate and stand as cold physical realities between people.

This sentence comes from the metaphorical poem « Mending wall », written by the American poet Robert Frost, and published in 1914. According to Frost, men continue to need marked boundaries, even when they find it difficult to justify their existence. The saying "Good fences make good neighbors" can be traced to the Spanish, "Una pared entre dos vezinos guarda mas (haze durar) la amistad," which goes back at least to the Middle Ages.

The idea of building a wall to keep someone out is not a new phenomenon. But since 9/11 attacks, there has been a predominance of security answers to global challenges such as terrorism, immigration or poverty.

Approximately $17 billion are spent each year by the U.S. Federal government to build, strengthen and maintain the wall and to fight illegal immigration.

The Tohono O’odham people, accustomed to having free access to their land, now suffer constant scrutiny, sometimes even being detained for simply traversing their legal territory. Once a single, unified nation, the construction of a fence has resulted in the Tohono O’odham nation being broken into four separate tribes, each politically and geographically separate.

The virtual fence would consist of watch towers, equipped with radar and video cameras. Anyone with an Internet connection would be able to see what is happening along the border. The Federal government tried to construct a “virtual fence” along the border but it abandoned the project in 2011 after spending more than $1 billion on a faulty system. In 2014, a new “virtual fence project” has been approved by a Senate committee in Arizona.

Officially speaking, about 400-500 migrants are dying each year. But some organizations are saying that in reality, two or three times more people are actually losing their life along the US/Mexico wall.

More than 50% of the migrants try to reach the US for work. Lately, a surge of unaccompanied child migrants has been crossing the US-Mexico border and seeking refuge in the US. Most of these unaccompanied children don't migrate for economic reasons, but flee from threats and violence in their home countries, such as Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras.

Costs vary widely based on the mode of transportation, distance travelled, the number and characteristics of those being moved, price discrimination, and local conditions like the cost of avoiding detection by immigration authorities. Unauthorized Mexican immigrants usually pay $4,000 to cross the border on foot. The smuggling fee for unauthorized Central American migrants can go up to $7,000 to $10,000.