>>>ICE just isn't working:
>>>
>>>http://www.kjct8.com/global/story.asp?s=6772183
>>
>>
>>You are so right, Tracy. If not for illegal immigrants there would be no crime in this country. Let's put up a wall!
>>
>>OK, I'll drop the sarcasm. But all this talk about building a wall really does have me scratching my head. Think about the precedents for building walls along a border. The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall. (Are there others you can think of?) Is that the kind of company we want to keep? It would be an admission of utter failure to fix the situation by any other means.
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>>Let's build walls around ghettoes while we're at it. Whoops, back to sarcasm.
>
>Bad historical analogies -0 or at least probably not the ones you want to make. Great Wall of China was built to keep out hordes of invaders and under the Qin was very effective in keeping out invaders from the north and two thousand years later the expanded version protected the Ming against the Manchu until a traitor opened the gates.
>
>Berlin Wall, of course, completely the opposite as it was built to keep people in, not out.
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>Border security is by no means an unreasonable requirement of any society. Of course our real problem is our ambivalent attitude about our southern border and the vested interests that profit from the status quo.
>
>Actually being able to control the border though would seem a pre-requisite of any rational immigration policy.

Tragically the Great Wall isn't faring so well against the modern "vandals":

http://compiledby.spikesource.com/greatwall.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2092911,00.html

Although the wall survived the Mongol hordes, it has fared less well against sandstorms, erosion and human activity. Much of it is now little more than rubble. Four years ago, the World Monument Fund put the wall at the top of its list of the planet's most endangered architectural sites.

The section along the northern Shanxi border is among the worst affected by development. At Yulin, part of the wall has been knocked down and replaced by a row of shops and apartment buildings.

According to the state media, officials fined the Hongji Landbridge Investment Development 500,000 yuan (£30,000) last December for pulling down a 2,200-year-old section of the wall for road access and landfill. When officials from the local cultural relics department tried to stop the destruction, a village leader resisted, saying the wall was "just a pile of earth".