The Great Wall of America

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Finding a Way--at All Costs What the fence tells us, then, is that marking the border and aggressively patrolling it can reduce illegal activity. The fence also carries a lesson about limits, for it is only as effective as the force that backs it up. Even the Great Wall of China was not impermeable. Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People will climb over it; they'll tunnel under it; they'll hack through it; they'll float around it.

"We want to secure our borders, but we can't wall ourselves off from Mexico," says Representative Ciro Rodriguez, a Texas Democrat whose district covers 585 miles (941 km) of the southern U.S. border--more than a quarter of its total length. Given the historic ties, family ties and economic ties connecting the two countries, the long-term solution to border security is a robust Mexican economy. "Mexico is the No. 1 trading partner of Texas," Rodriguez says. "If they do bad, we do bad."

Poverty makes people desperate. We got a glimpse of that when we watched a family boost their 10-year-old boy over a 12-ft fence, where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river has been found to carry the germs of tuberculosis, encephalitis, polio, cholera, hepatitis and typhoid. We'd heard stories about people entering the U.S. by floating along this nightmare stream with white plastic bags on their heads to blend into the hideous foam. A CBP agent in a Jeep sat overlooking the spot. We asked him, Does that really happen?

"Every day."

Building a Wall For more photos of life along the border fence, go to time.com/fence