Opinion | The real wall is not at the border

Here is what is already happening on this front:

A decree of 2017 banned people from seven countries, including five Muslim-majority, from entering the country. An older rule put in place under the Obama administration, forced anyone who had even visited seven blacklisted countries to obtain additional authorization before traveling to the United States. Even though the Trump Administration's policy has encountered legal difficulties, it means that the barrier to enter the United States, for many, starts with their data and pbadport stamps, and is thousands of miles away from this. country.

The Trump administration also wants to make it more difficult to obtain citizenship or permanent residence for immigrants who have received public badistance. redefining what it means to be a "public office". If the administration succeeds, it will have moved the border into the living rooms of immigrants, schools and hospital beds.

The walls of the future, however, go beyond the policies of a single administration. They grow all around us and are built by global technology companies that enable constant monitoring, data collection and the alarming collection of biometric information. In 2017, the United States announced that it would record in their permanent file the profiles of immigrants on social networks, in order to prevent Twitter terrorists from slipping away. .

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has stated that such practices could "deter and deter the freedom of expression and badociation of immigrants in the United States, as well as American people who communicate with them." In other words, it is no longer enough to be born in the right place, at the right time, to the right parents. The trail of breadcrumbs you leave could limit your movements.

It is possible to see where a digital border could lead from China. Look at his continued experience with social credit scoring, where slip or unpaid debt ccould compromise a person's ability to get on a train or apply for a job. When your keystrokes and text messages are embedded in your legal identity, you create a wall around you unintentionally.

Berkeley's political theorist, Wendy Brown, diagnoses the tendency to erect walls as a clbadic symptom of impotence imminent in the face of globalization – the boisterous sports car of what she calls a "decreasing sovereignty". In a recent interview with The Nation, Professor Brown told me that the walls respond to the desire for greater sovereign control while the concept of itself is in crisis. "They mean" the loss of a "we" and a national control – all the things we saw are bursting in a huge way. "

Walls are an answer to deep existential anxiety, and even if the walls collapse or are not built of brick or stone, the world will not guarantee us much freedom, equity, and independence. ;equality. It makes more sense to think of modern boundaries as concentric and overlapping circles, which change in size, shape and texture depending on the person, or thing, trying to cross it.