The Wall Already Exists

A portion of the existing wall separating the United States from Mexico.

A vast inland ocean once split the continent of North America in two, but sometime in the late-Cretaceous period, the movement of tectonic plates caused the seafloor of this ancient ocean to begin moving skyward. This so-called Laramide orogeny (which totally should have been the name of my high school ska band) transformed what had been the seafloor into the towering Rocky Mountains. It also formed the dramatic cliffs through which the Rio Grande would (much later) carve to create the Santa Elena Canyon that exists today.

The idea of a small river carving a deep canyon seems as improbable as the bottom of an ocean becoming the top of a mountain. And yet this is what happened. The idea of constructing a “smart” border wall along where a 1,500-foot-tall limestone wall already exists (and is itself surrounded on either side by several hundred miles of arid Chihuahuan Desert) seems just as improbable, and yet that is what is being proposed.