> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thekadefrequency.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # After the Wall: How 15 Border Walls Became 70 - URL: https://www.thekadefrequency.com/after-the-wall-how-15-border-walls-became-70/ - Published: 2026-08-05T08:00:30.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-05T08:00:30.000Z - Description: How many border walls are there, when were they built, and do they work? Six in ten people now live behind one. Almost all were built after 2000. - Author: A. Kade - Tags: History, explainer, europe **How fifteen walls became seventy, and who they are really built for** --- **They** came with hammers. That is the detail that survives from the ninth of November 1989, not the speeches, not the diplomacy, but ordinary people arriving at a concrete wall in the middle of their own city with household tools, and beginning to take it apart by hand. Some of them stood on top of it. Somebody sold the fragments afterwards. The images went round the world within hours, and everywhere they landed people said some version of the same sentence: **this is the end of walls*.* It was not an unreasonable thing to believe. Within months the other great architecture of enforced separation began to come apart too, six thousand miles south, in South Africa. Two systems built on the principle that certain people must be kept physically away from certain other people, both collapsing inside a single year. You would have to have been unusually sour not to think something had been settled. In the years since, the world has built somewhere **between sixty and eighty new border walls**, the overwhelming majority of them after 2000, and most of them by countries that celebrated in 1989. Six out of every ten people alive now live in a country that has built one. The hammers were real. The conclusion was wrong. ••• Here is the thing almost nobody knows about walls, and it changes how you see all of this. Hadrian's Wall had gates. The Romans built it across the north of England from 122 AD, a hundred and seventeen kilometres of stone from coast to coast, with a garrison in the region of nine thousand men, and everyone remembers it as the edge of the civilised world, the line beyond which lay the painted barbarians. It was nothing of the kind. People walked through it constantly. They brought cattle and grain and pottery through controlled crossings, paid a toll, were written down, and carried on with their day. The wall was not there to stop movement. It was there to make movement *visible and profitable*. The Great Wall of China is the same story at fifty times the scale. It was never one wall, the official Chinese survey, counting every section from every dynasty, puts the total at over twenty-one thousand kilometres, built and rebuilt across roughly two thousand years as a system of ramparts, watchtowers, garrisons and signal fires designed to slow and channel and monitor the traffic between the farmland and the steppe. It leaked constantly. It was supposed to. For almost the whole of human history, that is what a wall was: a customs house you could see from a distance. The idea that a barrier should exist to make human movement *impossible* is barely a century old, and the version we have now was built almost entirely within the lifetime of people currently in middle age. We did not inherit this. We made it. Recently. ••• The numbers, before anyone accuses me of picking the dramatic one: they are disputed, they come from different years, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The Canadian researcher **Élisabeth Vallet**, whose count is the most widely cited in the field, has recorded fewer than five border walls in the world at the end of the Second World War, fifteen or sixteen at the moment the Berlin Wall came down, and around sixty-five planned or erected by the mid-2010s. ***A Walled World***, the 2020 report by the Centre Delàs d'Estudis per la Pau and the Transnational Institute with Stop Wapenhandel and the Stop the Wall campaign, counts six in 1989 and at least sixty-three physical walls along borders or on occupied territory at the time of publication. The Migration Policy Institute, writing in 2022, described more than six dozen, and has referenced counts as high as seventy-seven major or significant barriers with dozens more countries building or planning. The gaps between these figures are not sloppiness. They are definitional, whether a fence counts, whether a sand berm counts, whether forty kilometres of barrier across a two-thousand-kilometre border counts, and they are chronological, since the reports were written years apart and the building did not stop in between. Take the lowest figure in every column and the story is identical. Nobody has ever produced a count that goes down. Two moments did most of it. The first is 1989 itself, the walls started going up more or less immediately after the most famous one came down, which ought to have told us something at the time. The second, much larger, is September 2001\. Damien Simonneau of the Collège de France, who has written a study of the phenomenon, puts the pivot exactly there: after the attacks, the border became associated with an idea of security and control, which, he notes, it simply had not been before. That word is the whole budget. An administrative frontier gets a customs officer and a booth. A security frontier gets a wall, a procurement programme, a surveillance contract, and a minister who wants to be photographed at it. Europe's own contribution is almost entirely recent, and larger than most Europeans realise. Ten European countries have built border fences and walls that together run more than six times the length of the Berlin Wall. Hungary put up a hundred and seventy-seven kilometres along its Serbian border in 2015 and then extended it to the Croatian frontier; Austria, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece followed within months. This on a continent whose single greatest political achievement was abolishing its internal borders, and whose citizens describe the resulting freedom, correctly, as a right. Nor is this a Western habit the rest of the world has been spared. The Centre Delàs mapping puts Israel at the top with six barriers, and Morocco, Iran and India with three each. The oldest functioning security barrier on Earth is Moroccan, a sand berm running more than two thousand seven hundred kilometres through Western Sahara, begun in the 1980s. India's fence around Bangladesh is among the longest ever built and is barely mentioned outside the subcontinent. There is no version of this story in which one kind of country is the villain. Almost everyone did it. That is what makes it an architecture rather than a scandal. ••• Now the part that **should make you angry**, and I am going to state it as flatly as I can, because it does not need decorating. Across exactly the same decades in which those walls went up, the world took the barriers down for everything else. Capital moves now with a freedom that would have astonished a nineteenth-century banker, billions across a dozen jurisdictions before lunch, no queue, no interview, no biometric. Goods move under an enormous treaty architecture built specifically to strip the friction out of their passage. Data moves instantaneously and is barely regulated at all. A corporation can change the country it legally lives in as a tax convenience, and does, routinely, without anyone describing it as a crisis. Every one of those freedoms was created deliberately, by treaty, by identifiable people, over the same thirty-five years. **Only human beings were walled.** **Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto of the Centre Delàs**, lead author of the most thorough survey of the subject, puts it in one sentence: in this walled world, commerce and capital are not restricted, yet it increasingly excludes people on the basis of their class and origin. And notice what that does to the standard defence, that a wall is simply sovereignty made visible, a nation asserting control over its own territory. If that were true you would expect the assertion to be symmetrical. You would expect the same governments to be fiercely protecting their sovereignty against foreign ownership of their housing stock, their water companies, their ports, their farmland, their newspapers. They are not. They signed those away, often enthusiastically, sometimes in the same parliamentary session in which they voted for the fence. Sovereignty was invoked for the one category of border crossing carried out by poor people, and waived for all the others. That is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is accidental. This was a choice about which kinds of freedom of movement are valuable, made by people who knew exactly what they were choosing. ••• **Do the walls work?** Here I have to slow down, because the honest answer is not the one either side wants, and a piece that pretends otherwise is worth nothing. The case for them is real. A state that cannot control who enters its territory is not fully a state, that is close to a definition rather than an opinion. Barriers genuinely do reduce crossings at the stretch where they stand; this is measurable and it is true, and people who deny it are arguing with a fact. And governments that build them are usually responding to sharp, sudden increases in arrivals that their populations were never asked about and did not agree to. That anger is not manufactured and it is not stupid. The case against is also real, and it is mostly about physics. A wall does not reduce the pressure behind it. It moves it. People go around, through the sections that are unwalled precisely because they are remote, or mountainous, or underwater. The reliably measurable consequences of a new barrier are a rise in what smugglers charge and a rise in the number of people who die making the attempt. And in most wealthy countries a large share of irregular migrants never crossed a border illegally at all, they arrived at an airport with a valid visa and stayed. Against them a wall does precisely nothing, at any length, at any cost. Simonneau, after studying it properly, reaches a conclusion blunter than either camp: **the building of walls against immigration is more a matter of political display than of controlling mobility.** Which brings us to what they are actually for. ••• A wall is a bad way to stop a person and an outstanding way to be seen. Think about what else a government could do about migration. Bilateral readmission agreements. Visa processing capacity. Labour market regulation, so that undercutting stops being profitable. Development spending. Wage enforcement. Every one of these is more effective than a barrier and not one of them can be photographed. You cannot hold a press conference in front of a functioning administrative system. You cannot campaign on a well-run consulate. **You can campaign on a wall. It is the only migration policy visible from a helicopter.** And now watch the sequence, because it is the same one everywhere, and it is not really about migration at all. A population is failed. Wages that have not moved in fifteen years, housing that has become arithmetic they cannot solve, a hospital that used to be closer, a town centre that used to have something in it. The anger is justified and the causes are diffuse, decisions taken over decades, in rooms they will never see, by people whose names they will never learn. That anger has nowhere to go. And then someone builds a structure at the edge of the territory, points at it, and says: *the problem was that it was open.* The wall is not aimed at the man trying to climb it. It is aimed at the woman watching it on the news. It is built to be seen by people whose lives it will not improve, in order that they do not ask the other question, the one about why their wages stopped rising, and who benefited when they did. That is why they keep going up while the evidence on whether they work stays ambiguous. Their function was never to stop the crossing. It was to end the conversation. ••• I should tell you where I am standing when I write this. I was born behind one of the walls. Not the Berlin one, the same system, the eastern end of it, the part with fewer television cameras. My family lived their whole lives inside a country you could not leave, and they organised their thinking around that fact the way you organise a house around a load-bearing column. When I was a child the wall came down, and then our own regime came down a few weeks later, and the adults around me could not entirely believe either thing had happened. I grew up afterwards being told what all of us in that part of Europe were told: that walls were what the losing side built. That free countries did not need them. That the openness was the proof of the system's superiority, and the concrete had been the proof of the other one's failure. I live now in one of the countries that taught me that. It is a good country and I chose it. And in the years since I arrived, this continent has put up hundreds of kilometres of new barrier, and its politics has gradually filled with people explaining that the openness was always naive. I do not think Europe is becoming what my parents fled. It is not, and I have no patience for people who say so; the difference is enormous and I have spent my life on the right side of it. But I know what it feels like when the argument for the wall starts to sound reasonable, and when **the people on the other side of it stop being described as people**, and I notice that I recognise the vocabulary before I recognise the policy. The hammers in 1989 were not a metaphor. Somebody's actual hands were cold on the handle. They believed they were dismantling the last one. They were dismantling the fifteenth of seventy. ••• ## Frequently Asked Questions How many border walls are there in the world? Estimates range from about sixty-three to seventy-seven, depending on how a wall is defined and when the count was made. A Walled World (Centre Delàs and the Transnational Institute, 2020) recorded at least sixty-three physical walls along borders or on occupied territory. The Migration Policy Institute, writing in 2022, described more than six dozen and has referenced counts as high as seventy-seven major or significant barriers. The researcher Élisabeth Vallet, whose figures are the most widely cited, recorded around sixty-five planned or erected by the mid-2010s. The disagreement concerns whether fences, sand berms and partial barriers should be included. Every source agrees the number has risen steeply since 1989\. How many border walls existed when the Berlin Wall fell? Fifteen or sixteen, according to Vallet; six under the narrower definition used in A Walled World. At the end of the Second World War there were fewer than five. The overwhelming majority of the world's border barriers have been built since 2000\. How many people live in a country with a border wall? Six out of every ten people in the world, according to A Walled World. Which countries have built the most border walls? The Centre Delàs mapping places Israel at the top with six barriers, and Morocco, Iran and India with three each. The oldest functioning security barrier in the world is Morocco's sand berm through Western Sahara, which runs for more than 2,700 kilometres, figures cited for its exact length range from about 2,720 to 2,800 kilometres. How much of Europe is walled? Ten European countries have built border fences and walls that together measure more than six times the length of the Berlin Wall, according to research by the Transnational Institute and the Centre Delàs. Most were built from 2015 onwards. Hungary's fence along the Serbian border, begun in 2015, runs a hundred and seventy-seven kilometres. Do border walls stop illegal immigration? The evidence is mixed. Barriers do reduce crossings at the specific stretch where they are built. They do not appear to reduce overall migration pressure: movement is displaced to unwalled sections that are typically more remote and more dangerous, which reliably raises both smuggling prices and death rates. Walls are also useless against visa overstayers, who make up a large share of irregular migrants in many wealthy countries and who arrive by air. Several researchers, including Damien Simonneau of the Collège de France, conclude that the primary function of anti-immigration walls is political and symbolic rather than practical. Were ancient walls built to stop migration? Generally not. Hadrian's Wall, begun in 122 AD, worked largely as a customs and monitoring system: people and goods crossed regularly through controlled gateways, where they were taxed and recorded. The Great Wall of China was never a single continuous structure but a system of ramparts, watchtowers and garrisons built over some two thousand years to slow and channel movement rather than seal a frontier. Historically, walls taxed and monitored movement far more often than they attempted to prevent it. ••• **Sources** **Counts of border walls.** Élisabeth Vallet's figures, fewer than five at the end of the Second World War, fifteen or sixteen in 1989, around sixty-five planned or erected by the mid-2010s, are drawn from her work on the subject, including *Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity?* (Ashgate/Routledge) and *State of Border Walls in a Globalized World*, in *Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities* (Routledge, 2020), and have been widely reported by AFP and others. The figure of at least sixty-three walls, the count of six in 1989, the finding that six out of ten people live in a country with a border wall, and the mapping of barriers by country are from Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto, Mark Akkerman and Pere Brunet, *A Walled World: Towards a Global Apartheid* (Barcelona: Centre Delàs d'Estudis per la Pau, Transnational Institute, Stop Wapenhandel and the Stop the Wall campaign, 2020). The figures of more than six dozen and up to seventy-seven major or significant barriers, and the observation that most were built since the turn of the millennium, are from the Migration Policy Institute, *The World Is Witnessing a Rapid Proliferation of Border Walls* (2022). Readers should note that these counts were produced in different years and on different definitions, which accounts for most of the divergence between them. **Effectiveness.** The evidence on displacement, smuggling costs, deaths and visa overstayers is surveyed in the Migration Policy Institute's *Borders and Walls: Do Barriers Deter Unauthorized Migration?* **The security turn after 2001, and walls as political display.** Damien Simonneau, *L'Obsession du mur* (Collège de France), and his subsequent interviews on the subject. **Capital and people.** Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto, in *A Walled World* and in interviews on its publication. **Europe.** The finding that ten European countries have built barriers totalling more than six times the length of the Berlin Wall is from the joint research of the Transnational Institute and the Centre Delàs, as reported by CBC. Hungary's 177-kilometre Serbian border fence and the subsequent barriers in Austria, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece are documented in contemporaneous reporting and in the European Parliament research briefing *Walls and fences at EU borders* (2022). **Historical walls.** Hadrian's Wall: the standard archaeological literature, including the Vindolanda tablets, which record the movement of goods and people through the frontier. The Great Wall of China: the 2012 survey by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage, which put the combined length of all sections from all dynasties at 21,196 kilometres. ••• [***The Kade Frequency***](https://www.thekadefrequency.com/about/) *is an independent investigative publication. No sponsors. No filters. No propaganda.* By the same author ### Two books in restrained literary nonfiction A. Kade's companion volumes, a meditation on thinking and character, and a meditation on love, real and imagined. 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