All the Walls in the World, Mapped

0:01 This is the Berlin Wall.

0:03 This wall symbolized a divided world.

0:06 In 1989 it came crashing down.

0:08 This sparked a dream of a world with open borders.

0:12 A dream that quickly turned into a nightmare.

0:14 35 years ago the world had less than 12 walls.

0:18 It now has more than 70.

0:20 You've heard of an orange American that loves walls.

0:23 But most walls are actually found in Asia.

0:26 You know European fences that closed the continent to foreigners.

0:29 But migration is just a part of the story.

0:32 In this video I want to show you how we got addicted to walls.

0:39 I first saw this map in a historical atlas.

0:44 It shows that the Berlin Wall coming down actually was an exception.

0:48 Since then we have been building a lot of walls.

0:51 I wanted to see if there were historical trends that explain

0:54 why we are now building more walls than ever before.

0:58 But first, what is a wall?

1:01 In history we have some great examples.

1:04 Like the wall of China.

1:05 A marvel of engineering, built to stand for the ages.

1:09 Others are less impressive.

1:10 Walls show what you think is yours.

1:14 Or they try to keep others out.

1:17 But what should we count as a wall?

1:20 Sometimes it's obvious.

1:21 A wall separates the two Koreas.

1:23 But sometimes not.

1:24 Australia guards its border with armed forces.

1:27 And a highly controversial detention system that violates human rights.

1:31 Is this a wall?

1:33 In this video walls will be physical barriers

1:35 that are placed on borders and can't be easily moved.

1:38 That does mean that some of these walls are actually fences.

1:41 With mapping these walls I found out how

1:43 the fastest growing group of walls is actually invisible.

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3:37 As empires came down, walls went up.

3:41 In 1945, the newly founded United Nations had 51 member states.

3:46 In 2024, we have 193.

3:48 A big reason we are building so many walls is

3:51 that we have just a lot more nations than we used to.

3:54 More nations means more borders.

3:55 More borders means more potential to disagree over the border.

3:59 The end of colonialism and the end of the Cold

4:02 War have led to a lot of border issues.

4:04 And some nations have more issues than others.

4:06 For a long time, the Indian subcontinent was ruled by the British Empire.

4:11 When the British left in 1947, they hastily divided it into India and Pakistan.

4:17 That was itself later divided into an East and West.

4:21 This division resulted in a battle over borders.

4:24 India built a lot of walls.

4:27 Today it has around 15.000 kilometers of borders.

4:31 It has walled 45% of these.

4:33 This makes it a country with the longest stretch of walls.

4:37 So India and Pakistan can't agree on their borders.

4:39 Although, here it's actually clear.

4:41 India is so proud of it, they make sure you can see it from space.

4:46 But here it goes wrong.

4:47 These dotted lines show how Google is insecure about where to put the border.

4:52 But India, they feel very secure.

4:54 They have built 800 kilometers of garden furniture to mark their border.

4:58 On the other side of the country,

5:00 they're walling the entire border of Bangladesh.

5:02 They say it's because of terrorism and smuggling activities.

5:06 But that's probably just part of the story.

5:09 Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

5:13 Or the first, if we're counting real countries.

5:15 Some estimate that in 2050 up to 18

5:18 million people from Bangladesh will have to migrate.

5:21 And India is making sure they don't go there.

5:25 The second event that led to more walls is the end of the Cold War.

5:29 Since the end of the Cold War,

5:31 more than 26.000 kilometers of new borders have been created.

5:34 I know that doesn't give you much info,

5:37 but that's more than half way around the equator.

5:39 The fall of the Berlin Wall was just the start of a great unraveling.

5:43 The Iron Curtain was lifted.

5:45 The Soviet Union and its system of alliances came crashing down.

5:49 Out of the Soviet Union, 15 states emerged.

5:52 And these former friends don't always get along.

5:56 In Central Asia, almost every state has been walling its borders.

6:00 According to them, to stop migration and the smuggling of drugs.

6:05 Independent movements and Russian aggression led to walls in Georgia.

6:09 And in Europe, states that were once part

6:12 of the communist sphere see history a bit different than Putin.

6:16 If you don't mind, I will take only 30 seconds

6:19 or one minute to give you a short reference to history.

6:24 For giving you a little historical background.

6:28 Please.

6:29 The Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine have all

6:32 been walling themselves off from the former empire.

6:34 And so we see that with the end of empires,

6:37 we just get a lot more countries and a lot more borders.

6:40 And all these new nations, they want to stake their claim to their territory.

6:44 For some states, these modern conflicts have

6:47 led to being completely surrounded by walls.

6:53 This is the Middle East.

6:57 It might not surprise you that Israel has

7:00 the highest number of walls on its borders.

7:03 Some walls have been built after wars with neighboring states.

7:07 Closer to home, the walls are erected citing security concerns.

7:11 According to Israel, the wall around the West Bank is

7:15 to stop suicide bombings and attacks from terrorists.

7:18 The International Court of Justice has deemed this wall illegal.

7:22 85% of it is built on land that belongs to Palestine.

7:25 I went there some years ago and it was wild seeing these huge walls.

7:29 It felt like something from a dystopian film, but it was right in front of me.

7:37 What this impressive architecture doesn't show is

7:40 just 65% of it has been finished.

7:43 And that at many places it's just a fence.

7:46 Before the 7th October attacks,

7:48 Palestinians cut the barbed wire to illegally work in Israel.

7:52 Often border guards didn't really interfere.

7:54 It shows how these walls are not always what they seem.

7:59 Israel also built a wall around Gaza.

8:01 Israeli companies used to sell their services

8:04 in Europe and the world based on this feat.

8:06 They said that anybody can give you a very nice PowerPoint.

8:09 But few can show you such a complex

8:12 project as Gaza that is constantly battle tested.

8:15 In practice, this wall turned out to be less effective.

8:19 The border was easily destroyed by the Hamas

8:23 attacks against Israeli civilians on October 7th.

8:26 Israel has walled itself in, but Syria has been walled in by its neighbors.

8:30 The civil war and the rise of ISIS are reasons that Syria's

8:34 neighbors very much wanted to keep all that away from their doorstep.

8:39 Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq all erected walls.

8:42 Only Lebanon didn't.

8:43 Civil war in Syria led to migration to Europe.

8:47 Walls would come up across the continent.

8:49 But long before that, the old dream

8:51 of a world without walls had been challenged.

8:54 So when the Berlin Wall came down, walls were just not cool for some time.

8:59 The EU was busy taking down its internal borders.

9:02 They were promising travel without passports.

9:04 And then 2001 happened.

9:06 Suddenly foreigners were seen as not so nice.

9:10 Muslims in the Western world were being equated with terrorists.

9:13 State surveillance was ramped up.

9:15 This is Bush signing the Patriot Act.

9:17 Who knew that spying on all your citizens was so much fun?

9:20 Borders became thicker.

9:21 Arab security was ramped up to protect people from real and imaginary threats.

9:27 So in times of crisis, closing down your borders was hot again.

9:32 Spain was the first country in the EU to build walls to keep migrants out.

9:37 Then no one really thought that would catch on.

9:41 But in 2015 things changed.

9:43 Migrants headed through Greece and the Balkans.

9:46 Borders were erected all over Europe.

9:49 Belarus weaponized migration by shipping migrants to the Polish border.

9:53 Because of this migration and Russian aggression,

9:55 the last 10 years the total length of border

9:58 fences in the EU rose from 315 to 2163 km.

10:04 Another 245 km will go up this year.

10:09 In the US, Trump has completely claimed border defense as a political issue.

10:15 But constructing walls to stop migration began on the Clinton in the 90s.

10:20 It has been continued by every president since.

10:23 Trump actually built just 140 km of new wall.

10:28 Biden stopped that construction when he came into office.

10:32 But since then he has started to build again.

10:34 And he invested in a smart wall.

10:36 It has these autonomous towers with night vision and radar.

10:39 Don't you love it when tech comes to the rescue?

10:42 The fact that every president has been developing the wall shows

10:46 the success of what has been called the border industrial complex.

10:49 The border security industry has been lobbying very hard to make

10:52 politicians think that migration is something you can fix with more gear.

10:57 Top security companies spend more than 5

10:59 million dollars on a 2020 Biden campaign.

11:02 And they're making a lot of fucking money.

11:04 It's because building a fence is just not good enough.

11:07 You need virtual wars, monitoring, and sniper cameras, land raiders,

11:11 and wireless telecommunications technology,

11:13 carbon dioxide programs, and immigration databases.

11:15 It's one reason why this stretch of wall that is

11:18 not even 70 km long cost 1.28 billion dollars to build.

11:22 This is more money than the United States

11:25 spends on maintaining all of its nature parks.

11:29 The issue with these walls is that they are sold as a way to stop migration.

11:35 For Westerners that feel their way of life threatened by migration,

11:38 this might seem like a good solution.

11:41 But does it actually stop it?

11:43 In Europe, walls definitely slow people down.

11:46 But migrants haven't stopped coming.

11:48 The spokesperson of Frontex, the agency that guards European borders, said,

11:53 "Any kind of physical obstacle in one

11:56 area just shifts the movement to other areas".

11:59 Like the more dangerous Mediterranean route.

12:01 It gets people in contact with criminals.

12:03 It led to more than 20,000 deaths since 2016.

12:07 If we look at the figures for 2022, when it comes to irregular migration,

12:13 300,000 people got caught crossing the border.

12:16 But 360,000 came here on a visa and just never left.

12:19 And of course you can't count the people that didn't get caught.

12:23 In the United States,

12:24 the measures don't seem to have stopped migrants trying either.

12:28 Now, it could very well be that these numbers could be higher without a wall.

12:31 But regardless of where you stand in migration,

12:33 walls don't address the root causes of it.

12:36 It's like treating depression with pills without advising therapy.

12:40 And because these walls are not working,

12:42 politicians are now resorting to building invisible walls.

12:45 They have been making deals with Egypt and Tunisia to keep migrants away.

12:49 And the US is selling gear and money

12:52 to make Central America a virtual border zone.

12:55 These invisible walls might move the burden to other countries.

12:58 The question still remains if this is going to make a difference.

13:02 Walls are as old as the world.

13:05 As long as people have built them, people have also tried to get around them.

13:08 You might say that the Berlin Wall was

13:10 a very successful example of keeping people inside.

13:13 It just needed a project that cost billions.

13:15 It employed tens of thousands of border guards.

13:18 And it had a police state that spied on every citizen.

13:21 But that wasn't enough.

13:23 It also worked because life in East Germany wasn't as bad as you think.

13:26 After a rough start, people had enough to eat.

13:30 Free childcare, free healthcare, free education,

13:32 a low cost of living and no war.

13:34 These are things that are definitely not available

13:37 in the countries where people are fleeing from.

13:39 I definitely don't have all the answers.

13:41 But should we be spending billions of dollars

13:43 on walls that fight only the symptoms of migration?

13:46 Especially when many experts say we need

13:48 migration to deal with the West's aging population?

13:50 Or should we invest in ways to help people in their country of origin?

13:54 Maybe allowing them to work legally for a time in the West?

13:57 These are hard questions that a video on YouTube won't answer.

14:01 But a YouTube video can tell you how the Berlin Wall worked.

14:05 It's a fascinating story that is the topic of my friend Neo's new video.

14:09 I wrote a script for the video and I'm very hyped about how it turned out.

14:12 It will be out in about a week or so.

14:16 So go check it out if you want to know more about how the Berlin Wall worked.