Border Walls and Smuggling Spillovers

Abstract

A growing number of states are erecting physical barriers along their borders to stem the illicit flow of goods and people. Though border fortification policies are both controversial and politically salient, their distributional consequences remain largely unexplored. We study the impact of a border wall project on smuggling in Israel. We use the initial phase of the wall construction to causally estimate spillover effects on cross-border smuggling, especially vehicle theft. We find a large decrease in smuggling of stolen vehicles in protected towns and a similar substantial increase in not-yet-protected towns. For some protected towns, fortification also arbitrarily increased the length of smuggling routes. These township-level shocks further deterred smuggling (6% per kilometer). Our findings suggest that border fortification may have uneven distributional consequences, creating unintended winners and losers.

Social Isolation and Repertoires of Resistance

“…Second, I center the role of built structures in conflict zones. Although scholars acknowledge that geography can impact conflict process (e.g., “mountainous terrain”; Fearon and Laitin 2003) and an emerging literature focuses on the role of built structures in various political phenomena (Amir 2013; Carter and Poast 2017; Getmansky et al 2019; Longo, Canetti, and Hite-Rubin 2014; Tawil-Souri 2011), political science studies of conflict give short shrift to the impact of built structures on conflict processes. Built structures are an important ideological and symbolic (as well as physical and strategic) implement in conflict ecosystems—and also have significant variation.…”

Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict: Evidence from Palestinian Villages in the 1948 War

“…Because of its unique characteristics, scholars have largely avoided testing general social science theories in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the conflict does share a variety of features with other cases, and a burgeoning empirical literature has recently begun to investigate generalizable theories of conflict processes in the contemporary context (Arnon 2020;Getmanski, Grossman, and Wright 2019;Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014;McAlexander 2020;Panza and Swee 2020;Weiss 2019). Social scientists have yet to renew attention to the 1948 war, but several of its characteristics provide empirical leverage useful to testing a general theory of local-level population displacement.…”

Walls and Strategic Innovation in Violent Conflict

“…Laughlin (2019) finds that sections of barriers built along the US-Mexico border in 2007 disrupted existing smuggling routes, causing cartels to violently compete for access to un-walled stretches of border. Vehicle thefts in Israel (Getmansky et al 2019), drug violence in Venezuela (Kronick 2019), and property crime in Colombia (Blattman et al 2017) shift noticeably from one location to another following changes in physical security. Thus, a full analysis of walls' impacts must evaluate not just whether they prevent particular access to a specific location, but also their broader effects on surrounding areas and the ways in which illicit actors' tactical responses shape the nature of conflict.…”

“…Slipping through a checkpoint through which some movement is allowed is easier than crossing a complex physical barrier across which all movement is illicit. Terrorists and criminals frequently use ambulances 10 or Israelilicensed vehicles 11 to transport people and weapons through checkpoints (Getmansky et al 2019). Closing checkpoints makes these illegal crossings much more difficult.…”