I was just listening to a clip from one of Trump’s Arizona speeches yesterday, and something struck me. He was declaiming about how we need a wall along the Mexican border, because without a wall, “We don’t have a border, and if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.”
The United States has had a border with Mexico (or its predecessor, New Spain) ever since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. There has NEVER been a wall, and there has ALWAYS been a great deal of undocumented movement across the border. Many people living in the area have families on both sides of the border, and especially in areas like southern Arizona, where official border crossings are few and far between, people have long crossed at unofficial border crossings to visit friends and relatives. I have personally known a very successful Mexican-American in Texas whose grandparents forded the Rio Grande in a covered wagon.
So if Trump is right, we’ve never had a “real” border with Mexico (in the sense that it was a border that nobody would be able to cross other than at an official crossing. And if we’ve never had a real border with Mexico, then we’ve NEVER been a country — or at least we haven’t been one since 1803.
What’s more, even if he builds his wall, there will still be numerous places along the Canadian border where one can easily cross at will. This means that we don’t have a real border with Canada, and we still won’t be a country unless we build a YUGE, BEEUTIFUL wall along our northern border, as well as our southern one.