Amid the ongoing illegal immigration crisis in the southern United States, the city of Tijuana, Mexico unveiled a new monument last month to serve as “a lesson” about the importance of open borders. The monument, a three-ton concrete slab pulled from the Berlin Wall, now stands mere feet from the latest construction on the US-Mexico border.
The massive concrete relic was installed on August 13 in a public ceremony hosted by Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and former Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. “May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges,” a plaque at the base of the monument reads, attributing the quote to Caballero.
The fragment of the Soviet-era barricade was donated by Los Angeles-based producer Marcos Cline-Marquez, who called out “parallels between the Berlin Wall, a wall that was built to divide not protect, and the wall on our southern border.”
The installation, entitled “A World Without Walls,” stands in Friendship Park, a bi-national park established on the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico in 1971 to celebrate US-Mexico relations. The park is now somewhat ironically the site of the latest border wall construction following approval from the Biden administration earlier this year.
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“Why in Tijuana? How many families have shed blood, labor, and their lives to get past the wall?” Caballero said at the unveiling. “The social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but it’s a wall at the end of the day. And a wall is always a sphinx that divides and bloodies nations.”
While Mayor Caballero conceded that the US does have a right to protect its borders, she continued by stating “We are against violence, we are against family separation, we are against division, and that’s what the wall represents.”
The unveiling of the monument—which many argue is a direct jab at American border security efforts—coincided with the record-setting arrests of 91,000 illegal immigrants in the month of August. Since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, border officials have reported more than 6.2 million migrant encounters, with an estimated 2 million escaping or being released into the United States.
Despite these staggering numbers, which have contributed to skyrocketing crime rates, human trafficking, and fentanyl overdoses across the country, American and Mexican officials have continued calling for open-border policies. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he signed a day-one executive order ending all border construction projects begun under his predecessor Donald Trump. In the years since then, projects already contracted out were allowed to resume. This included the Friendship Park construction, which replaced a chain-link-and-barbed-wire fence with an 18-foot steel barrier. However, no additional expansions have been approved—and the Biden administration has even taken steps to prevent states from erecting their own barriers.
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