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#10 - Walls end up being used to keep people IN not OUT. When an empire reaches end of life, historically, they overextend their ability to manage their territory and run up excessive debt. This always leads to the collapse of the empire.
As overextended empires collapse, they increasingly rely on their most productive (richest) citizens to finance their debt. This is done by increasing the taxes on these productive citizens, and taxes don't get collected if the rich citizens can freely leave the empire.
As taxes go up, the incentive to leave goes up. As I recall (cite needed), every major empire in history ultimately forbade and prevented its citizenry from fleeing - even as the empire imposed increasingly totalitarian laws upon those citizens. Walls were frequently erected to further the goal of forcing productive citizens to stay and service the debt of the empire.
At a time when Mexican immigration into the US is at all time lows, the purpose of this wall seems suspect to me. The fact that US debt is already far beyond the country's ability ever to repay, I would be wary of a wall that could easily be converted from its stated purpose of stopping immigration, to it's fairly obvious objective - stopping emigration.
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