Mexico is building its wall — and the U.S. is paying for it

The thing is: It’s a good idea.

Of course we are not funding a literal wall on Mexico’s southern border. Mexico already has one of those — not a coast-to-coast border wall but miles of fencing in and around populated areas and popular crossing points, rather like what exists on the U.S. border with Mexico and what will exist there irrespective of the outcome of the current debate about funding “the wall.” But the wall is not Mexico’s preferred instrument of immigration control — nor the one the U.S. government prefers for it. Under Programa Frontera Sur, a 2014 initiative supported by the United States, Mexico relies more on stepped-up police and military interdiction and internal checkpoints, a strategy that has led to a large increase in deportations.

It may be hard on the pride of some of our more enthusiastic neo-nationalists, but paying Mexico is a better policy than trying to wring money out of it for symbolic purposes — and the same is even more true for the poorer nations to Mexico’s south.