Name: How Walls Ended Up Along the U.S.-Mexico Border | NYT News
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:31:19.000Z
Duration: 7 min 13 s
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This is what part of the U.S. and Mexico border

Adverbs of degree

looked like in 1898, just an open strip of land with train

Here’s what that same stretch looked like 110 years later,

So how did we get here — from open desert

to a patchwork of highly politicized border barriers?

To understand, we’re going to focus mostly

What happens here tells the story of the border’s

The United States has just defeated Mexico

Mexico is forced to sign away more than half its land

includes today’s border, but there’s no fences

First the border just gets marked, in many places

that we’re going to focus on, outside a saloon in Nogales.

There’s essentially free movement back and forth.

But these rocks hardly mark the border accurately.

The border stays like that for 43 years until 1891.

That’s when the U.S. and Mexico set out

to define the border with better accuracy.

Stone monuments go up at regular intervals

If we go back to the saloon, Monument 122

The monument will remain, but the saloon will be torn down.

In 1897, the president orders that several buildings

be demolished in order to clear a 60-foot-wide path

The path is cleared to make smuggling easier to spot.

Not drug smuggling — this is smuggling of everyday goods

Still, there’s no border fence in Nogales, not yet.

But in rural areas, there’s a problem only a border fence

In the early 1900s, ticks are causing disease

Those cows are crossing back and forth over the border.

So the first-ever border fence is actually

built to keep cows from spreading disease.

There are three big reasons the U.S. invests

culminating in the first permanent fence.

Number 1, racist attitudes towards Chinese people

had led to law banning their immigration to the U.S.

The law was enforced mainly at water ports,

So going through Mexico became an easier way

Chinese people could avoid the ban and still enter the U.S.

But the large number of people showing up

Then in 1910, a revolution breaks out in Mexico.

That leads to reason Number 2 for a security buildup.

Here’s that monument I showed you earlier,

where the saloon once was, this time in 1913.

There’s paranoia in America that German spies might cross

All this violence and intrigue creates a tense atmosphere

Small gunbattles erupt between jittery American and

So here’s where the first permanent border fence

You could easily climb over the fence if you wanted to.

But its purpose isn’t to wall off the two countries.

The fence is a way to diffuse the tension

and control the flow of growing border traffic.

So yeah, a lot of American visitors go there.

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How Walls Ended Up Along the U.S.-Mexico Border | NYT News

depression

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