Mexico wall: long, high and expensive

tijuana - The US president Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Along the US-Mexico border are already meter high fences and other obstructions over a distance of approximately 1,000 kilometers. That's almost a third of the border that runs from Brownsville to the Pacific Ocean in San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico.

The barricades are there since the nineties built, first to prevent illegal border crossings, and then there are a lot of fences set up after the terrorist attacks in the US are large parts of the border in 2001 in an inhospitable desert that is hard to traverse is.

It is not clear yet where the new wall should be exactly and how long it is. The construction of the wall may lead to conflicts with private owners of land in the border area, protectors of nature and the Indians of the autonomous Tohono O'odham Nation to manage their own tribal area along approximately 100 kilometers of border.

The plan would be that a certain 15-meter high wall is made of steel and concrete. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would definitely 9.7 million cubic meters of concrete and 2.3 million tons of steel are needed. The experts of this prestigious technical university put the cost at least $ 40 billion.