To begin with, I will offer a disclaimer to liberals who mainline in knee-jerk inclusion, rabid Southwest State nativists and homeland security cheerleaders, first- or second-generation Hispanic immigrants, or generally anyone who has in one way or another become a part of the renewed immigration debate of the past two years: this article is not about immigration. It’s about a fence.

What’s the difference between a wall and a fence? Most would point to the idea that a fence is thinner than a wall and porous. Whether it’s white wooden slats, chain link, or chicken wire forming the fence, there are gaps to let things through, even if it’s just air or pet dander. Generally, fences are employed to keep things in and other things out, but still allow some visibility on either side. A wall, on the other hand has no such pores. It’s an opaque barrier, shutting off both sides from the other not only physically, but visually as well. Not even light can penetrate a proper wall.

Thus, a wall is a more powerful symbol in terms of defense and fortification. A wall is not something you have to go through or get past, it’s something you have to go over or around. The word also has a rather ugly connotation in the past century. The Berlin Wall became a symbol of the Iron Curtain, a physical and psychological barrier between freedom of association and the willful repression of it. And it was the United States that has clinched posterity with Reagan’s anthemic line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Thus, in many ways, a wall is as much a psychological construct as it is one of mortar and steel and carries with it more negative connotations than a fence.

This brings us to the ethical conundrum of the border barrier that is being financed by the United States. As a result of Congressman Duncan Hunter’s 2005 activism to build a secured barrier on the U.S./Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security has been overseeing the construction of hundreds miles of “fence.” The continual use of the word in popular discourse has a number of telling effects and reflections.

I don’t believe that building a border fence or referring to it as such is merely contingent on cost-effectiveness of a fence over a proper wall. It’s a cop-out, a soothing balm over the ugly prospect of its perception as shutting off the U.S. from the outside. If you look at the border fence being built and disregard its thinness or vague transparency, it’s hardly a fence. It’s not designed to keep the neighbor’s kids from drowning in your pool or his dog from leaving a brown biscuit on your lawn. It’s designed to keep everyone on the other side out and to tell them that without speaking. Semantics aside, the barrier on the U.S./Mexico border is a wall, not a fence, for all intents and purposes, psychological and physical. The pores are small and the fence itself is smooth metal, preventing the kind of grasping and scaling possible with a chain link fence. Cameras and checkpoints are set at strategic intervals and the lip of the widening fence sits at an imposing 15 feet. In many regions, there is not one barrier, but three. It’s a fence to do the work of a wall.

The barrier itself has become a battle of words and the catchphrase in policy circles has been that the fence was borne of a need to “secure our borders.” At least publicly, most proponents of the fence reason its necessity not on the basis of preventing illegal immigration, but its ability to stave drug traffickers, violent criminals, and potential terrorists slinking into the U.S. via Mexico. Even if that was true, it merely closes one front. So long as Americans continue to puff cheeba, present profitable black markets, or anger the Muslim world, then the barrier will simply divert the flowing illicit tributary through the boreal of Saskatchewan or the scores of vulnerable ports on the Atlantic and Pacific. This is not a reason to topple the pines on our northern boundary for miles of cyclone fence or line sandbars with iron spires. It’s reason to recognize that walls are only lines on a map. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and unless a wall follows Magellan’s route ’round the globe, those willing will find a way around it.

Where does the barrier leave the U.S. then if not in a situation of assured safety? It leaves us with a barrier on one of two of our boundaries. It weakens our ability to invoke the fall of the Berlin Wall as a freedom footnote or to criticize the construction of a border wall in Gaza or between ethnic communities in Iraq. More importantly, it degrades the very core of a tenet of our national consciousness.

Historically, a grand dimension of American nationalism has been about breaking down barriers, both physical and metaphorical. Commodore Perry broke Japan’s isolation with the “opening” of the island nation. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. The D-Day invasion tore through the German line on Omaha Beach. The Berlin Airlift flew over the Soviet blockade of Allied zones in Germany. In the past half century, our legislature has slowly, (and sometimes surely) broken down the barriers of segregation and discrimination, beginning with opening public institutions which then spurred shifts in the national consciousness. In a time when our revolutionary fervor has calmed into suburban placidity, the will to overcome obstacles and barriers has in many ways replaced the American motto “live free or die.” Thus, it has long been America’s business to tear down barriers.

And now we’re building one. A big one. And when it comes time that some other world leader beseeches our own president to tear something down, it doesn’t seem likely that he or she will name a fence. It will be a wall.