Better in their words…

I sort of remember the Berlin wall being built.
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A few years ago, a friend who lives in Arizona near the Mexican border took a group on a drive though the countryside near his ranch. After about 40 minutes of bumping through the hills, he braked the Jeep and told everyone to get out. “There it is,” he said.

“There’s what?” I asked.

“Mexico. You’re looking at Mexico.”

Mexico was a hill on the other side of a small wooden fence, which stretched to the left and the right to the horizon. We were in a vast, empty place.

Through two presidential elections and up to this moment, it has been an article of faith among much of the Republican base that the U.S.’s border with Mexico must be made impossible to cross illegally—sealed and secured.

Inside this issue sits one fact that will never change: The measured distance of the border between the U.S. and Mexico—from Tijuana in the west to Brownsville, Texas, in the east—is 1,969 miles.

It’s longer than it looks on a map because the border’s path is so erratic.

If you were to lift the Texas end of that border, like a string, and move it northward toward the Great Lakes, the length of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, as noted on the nearby map, is about the distance from San Diego to Chicago. That “border” would cross California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois—most of the American continent. How would we secure all of that?

In the GOP primary debates, I always got the impression that the moderators looked forward to asking the mandatory “Will you secure the border?” question, because the squirming candidates either understood their commitment was impossible or had no idea what it meant.

The congressional Gang of Eight’s compromise immigration bill is explicit on virtually sealing the border. It defines the Southern border as “the international border between the United States and Mexico.” The meaning of “border security” and “effective control” is precise: It is “the ability to achieve and maintain . . . persistent surveillance; and an effectiveness rate of 90% or higher.” This means the wall between the U.S. and Mexico will have to stop more than 900 of any 1,000 people trying to cross it illegally.

Congressional Republicans are now offering amendments to further define how this will be done and at what cost. On Tuesday, Sen. John Thune, from South Dakota, offered a “double-layered fencing” amendment that failed 39-54. Other Republicans will try other routes to their fence.

The idea of sealing the border with Mexico against illegal entry originated years ago with citizens in communities in southern Arizona and Southern California, where violence and murder accompanied illegal crossings. Residents there were under siege. In time, the desire of these people near the border to be protected from unlawful cross-border flows was expanded by party activists beyond a policy goal into a commit-or-die litmus test, like opposing amnesty, for any Republican presidential candidate. This symbol sits in the middle of the Senate immigration bill.

The details of what the U.S. has already attempted on border security are relevant, because any conceivable measures passed by Congress will be an extension of these earlier efforts.

In 2006, the Secure Border Initiative, created by the Bush administration, contracted with Boeing BA +0.34%to create SBInet. SBInet was a high-tech surveillance program—a “virtual fence”—along the Arizona border that included electronic towers, radar, thermal imaging devices, subsoil sensors to detect foot or vehicle pressure, and border agents monitoring PC screens in command posts.

The original plan was to build 1,800 towers on the 1,969-mile border. Boeing built 28. The project encountered many operational problems, not least that the intense wind, heat and rain of the border environment disrupted the system’s electronics. Ants ate the buried sensor wires.

This technology and other efforts reduced but didn’t end illegal crossings. It didn’t secure the border to “90% effectiveness.” The SBInet project was terminated in 2011 and replaced with a new program that will use sophisticated detection technologies developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anticipating that the immigration bill will provide several billion dollars of funding for a virtual border fence, defense contractors such as Northrop, General Atomics, General Dynamics GD -0.04%and Lockheed Martin LMT +0.02%are hiring Beltway lobbyists to sell the government pilotless drones, advanced tracking technology, Apache helicopters and other post-Afghanistan inventory.

This is a mistake.

The border-security fence in the Senate bill would be America’s Berlin Wall—a historic embarrassment. Once built, it will never come down. Long after more feasible solutions have resolved the immigration problem, Congress will lose interest in funding so much complex technology. It will sit in the desert sun and rot, the way France’s Maginot Line rotted into the 1960s.

But once built, it is going to become part of the Republican Party’s permanent political legacy—a monument to negation. This hasn’t been a great year for the Democrats, but with this wall, they just might get lucky.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A19
A version of this article appeared June 20, 2013, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America’s Berlin Wall.

Henninger: America’s Berlin Wall – WSJ.com.