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Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 123-mile border it shares with Russia, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/1WMyN
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I don’t think a fence will stop anyone… :) But sure, go ahead.
Finnish border officials say fences equipped with top-notch surveillance equipment — to be located mostly around crossing points — are needed to better monitor and control any migrants attempting to cross over from Russia and give officials time to react.
A fence won’t stop anyone, but it can detect people, which sounds like the point.
Detect, deter and slow down.
It’s a bit more than a line in the sand, though, which I suspect is the point.
It does help
As the traditional saying goes, show me a five meter high fence, and i’ll show you a six meter high ladder.
More seriously, if you want to catch people at the border, you do mainly just need to have cameras, sensors, and people monitoring it, and you then just need to send some guards out in a truck to go out and talk to the things that walk through it.
If their arn’t guards, then there is nothing to stop anyone with bolt cutters or a cutting tool coming along and getting through, or as the US found out, coming along and stealing parts of the unguarded fence in the middle of nowhere whenever the price for scrap metal got high enough to be worth the trip.
The only problems with this approach of just sending guards out is that it doesn’t look as imposing in stock footage, and that it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory and you have to talk to them and escort them back instead of pushing them away from a fence with your fingers in your ears saying I can’t hear you.
It’s a bit of a silly thought that because you can have a six meter tall ladder a five meter fence wouldn’t help in stopping people. Of course it helps and that’s the supposed function, help, not stop everyone.
I don’t know what you know about Norwegian-Russian border but the fence is supposed to be part of the other things you mentioned.
it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory
These are people who have traveled the whole of continent of Europe and big parts of Africa and Middle East to apply for such asylum and who Russians are trafficking in to use as part of influence operations. It’s pretty easy to tell them to go back.
How does any easily cut through or driven over fence help at all, much less justify the significant expense? It doesn’t help stop people, or even particularly slow them down. You’re still relying on guards actually responding and getting out to meet them, now just with higher maintenance costs because there is a hole dozens of kilometers from anything else.
All that a fence does is take resources away from the things that actually help intercept people crossing the border, because fences are primarily a social barrier rather than a way to practically slow people down.
Here’s something for you to think about when making these silly drive over the fence remarks:
The border area consists mostly of hard to traverse terrain with only half a dozen roads or so on Russias side iirc. It’s easy for us to see vehicles approaching, because the places where the could are far and few between.
The issue is just random people walking over. We have plenty of road networks to intercept on this side, as long as we know where border guards are needed.
Final note: there are only 9 border crossing stations altogether in a border spanning 1,343km.
Neglecting the silliness of assuming that we were talking about where the road crosses the border, or alternatively showing a map where the Russian road parallels the border for sections and where not a single part of the border is more than 10km from the Russian road while meaning it to show that no vehicle could even drive near to the border much reach it, surely what you said about the guards always knowing when someone is coming from kilometers away and being ready to meet them makes the case for a fence over the whole length worse, as it is evidently is and has not been needed for that purpose?
I guess it is nice though that the issue is just Norway considering spending a lot of money to help solve the issue of lost Russian tourists instead of trying to solve any security concerns.
The point of mentioning the road crossing points were that those places are reinforced, and yeah, it’s silliness to attempt it there, leaving no possible places to take a truck over the border due difficulty terrain - we’re talking about migrants here, not soldiers.
They aren’t using vehicles, the russians provided migrants bicycles to get to the crossing points when they had the “flood our border with immigrants” operation active some months ago.
That leaves us with one large issue to cover: people traversing the foresty areas by foot, attempting to slip in undetected. That’s where the fence comes in - they can obviously get over it if they bring a ladder, but as they struggle to even have proper shoes, a ladder becomes a luxury item they cannot afford. In any case, the fence is a slowing measure. The fence also contains alarm systems and surveillance, so that our border patrol can then pinpoint where they are needed ASAP.
The border patrol people themselves wanted this, and it’s been working well.
How would the fence be worse?
“How does making things harder help at all”. Gee, I wonder.
You’re still relying on guards actually responding and getting out to meet them,
Well obviously, but now you also have a barrier to slow them down so those guards have more time to get there and make sure less people manage to get through. Again, the fence isn’t supposed to work alone but to compliment the other ways of stopping them/slowing them. You’re talking as if they’ve scrapped the border guards in favour of this instead of using this to make their work easier.
Again, fences are like cheap locks, they are creating a social barrier to tell people not to pass, not a way of significantly reducing the speed at which someone who wants to will take in doing so.
How many seconds do you think it takes a truck to drive through one, or someone to hop out of a truck to prop a ladder up against one? What else could be built or funded with the cost of building these expensive signs?
If your going to spend massive amounts of money on securing a border, at least spend it on the things that actually have an impact, like more patrols and guard posts, not on more extensive signposting.
Norwegian, Finnish and Polish border forces seem to disagree with your estimate on border fences and seem to think as them as valuable tools in addition to others they have. Those are the ones who have had to deal with this migrant issue.
Thus achieving?
“Build The Wall!”
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Static defense worked for centuries in China!
And in France during WWII /s
