Those who hate the Israeli Wall and the proposed Mexican Wall also hate the idea of the Calais Wall. People should be free to live where they choose. Actually, those who say this don't have that freedom themselves. True, they are free to live in Britain, but where in Britain they can live is constrained by where they can find employment and, if they are home owners, by the kind of property they can afford.
Following Rousseau (whether consciously or otherwise), they see walls as something unnatural. But all those with whom I have argued find nothing strange about sleeping within walls at night, or about creating a protective wall for their possessions by closing and locking the front door when they go out. They have a mental wall, to protect themselves from unwelcome ideas, and consider it evidence of intellectual virtue.
Through history, people have found it an entirely natural impulse to live behind protective walls. Castles, fortified farms and manor houses, walled cities (at one time, all cities were walled), Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China...
I suppose those troubled by the Calais Wall are social evolutionists. Protective walls belonged to the bad medieval past. We should have evolved beyond the need for them. But mass invasion is not merely a phenomenon of the past. It is happening now: by land and by sea. If the barbarians (metaphorically speaking) are at the gates, you do not remove the problem of the barbarians by removing the gates.
