Somewhere along the border between two countries, a child stares through slats of steel, wide-eyed and sunburned. A few miles away, an American citizen posts a meme about “illegals” stealing jobs. One is seeking hope. The other is clinging to fear. And between them stands a wall—concrete, metal, ideology. It’s sold as protection, but like most things in politics, the packaging rarely matches what’s inside.
Walls are seductive in their simplicity. They promise safety, order, a clear division between us and them. They suggest control in a chaotic world. But what they often deliver is isolation, dehumanization, and a cold, hard distance from compassion. I’ve never seen a wall solve a humanitarian crisis. But I’ve seen it ruin families, sever history, and silence the stories we don’t want to hear.
I’m no stranger to the invisible walls people build around others. As a biracial, gay man raised in ultra-conservative West Texas by family who weaponized religion and shame, I was taught that certain people deserved exclusion. I lived in the margins while being told it was for my own good. Those lessons are hard to unlearn—but I did. And now, I see that the physical walls we build as a nation aren’t just about geography. They’re a mirror reflecting what we fear most: being vulnerable, being outnumbered, being changed.
Let’s stop pretending the modern obsession with building walls is really about security. If it were, we’d be equally panicked about the opioid crisis, domestic terrorism, or climate disasters. But we’re not. Because those threats aren’t easily scapegoated. They can’t be blamed on “others.” They don’t fit on a bumper sticker.
A wall is a tidy solution for people who don’t want to confront messy truths. It says, “This isn’t our fault.” It says, “We’re not responsible.” But the truth is, we are. The United States has long interfered—economically, politically, and militarily—in the countries many migrants are fleeing. Our policies helped create some of the instability they’re now running from. And now we build a wall to keep them out? That’s not protection. That’s evasion.
The financial cost is staggering—billions of dollars that could be spent on schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and yes, actual border security measures that work. Instead, we pour money into a monument to paranoia, while underfunding the immigration courts and asylum processes that could actually bring order to chaos.
Then there’s the environmental cost: disrupting wildlife migration, desecrating sacred Indigenous lands, and contributing to ecological degradation. But the most harrowing cost? Human lives.
We’ve seen children die in detention. Families separated for years. People abandoned in deserts by smugglers, dehydrated and hallucinating, some never found. We’ve heard the stories—if we were willing to listen. But many aren’t. Because walls don’t just block people—they block empathy.
I remember watching a clip of a politician proudly slapping his hand against the wall, grinning like he just won something. All I could think was: what are we celebrating here? That we’ve out-engineered desperation? That we’ve turned tragedy into applause lines?
It’s hard not to see the racial undertones. Let’s be honest: if these migrants were blonde and European, would the outrage be the same? Would we be chanting “build the wall” if they spoke perfect English and came from Canada? Probably not. Because this isn’t just about borders. It’s about who we think deserves to be here. It’s about what we define as American. And for far too many, that definition has a skin tone, an accent, a zip code.
Walls, in this context, are less about security and more about supremacy. They become symbols of who matters. Who is feared. Who is deemed expendable.
But there’s another kind of wall we never talk about—the psychological one we build inside ourselves. The one that lets us sleep at night while others suffer. The one that tells us poverty is a personal failure. That migration is a crime. That brown people begging for asylum must be lying.
These walls are harder to tear down because they’re built with bricks of comfort and privilege. But tear them down we must.
Every road trip I take through the American South, I pass by small towns that are more immigrant than not. Mexican grocery stores next to Baptist churches. Vietnamese pho restaurants beside gun shops. You know what I see? Harmony. Not always perfect, but real. People making it work. People coexisting. These are not scenes of invasion. They’re snapshots of America—messy, colorful, and deeply human.
So when people say, “We need walls to protect our way of life,” I want to ask: what life, exactly? The life where we pretend we were never immigrants ourselves? Where we forget that many of us arrived here because someone let us in?
My ancestors didn’t come here through Ellis Island. My heritage is a complex web of stolen land, enslaved bodies, and survival. So no, I won’t cheer for a wall that further erases that story. I won’t pretend we’re protecting something noble when what we’re really doing is walling ourselves off from growth.
A truly strong nation doesn’t need walls. It needs bridges. Systems. Policy rooted in empathy. Leadership unafraid of nuance. And people brave enough to say: “Maybe the way we’ve always done it isn’t working.”
Because the real cost of building walls isn’t just what we spend—it’s what we lose. Compassion. Community. The chance to live up to our ideals.
And when the last brick is laid, the last flag waved, the last angry chant shouted across the desert—what’s left behind may look like a fortress, but it feels an awful lot like a cage.