So I just learned that not all borders are fenced, very few of them are actually. So how are countries able to monitor thousands of kilometers of unfenced borders to fight off smuggling and illegal immigration ? Especially when it comes to long borders in arid/undeveloped areas, one example that comes to mind are the borders in Siberia.
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Borders are unfenced when the cost of smuggling and migration is lower than the cost of stopping it.
Things which make the cost of smuggling and migration low can be simply that the border is naturally hard to cross, or is so far away from financial and population centres that smugglers and irregular migrants mostly don’t go that way, or because the legal and financial system on either side of the border is so similar that there’s little or no benefit to trying to cross it.
Things that make the cost of stopping it high are things like it being a very long border which is a long way away from the logistics network.
So unfenced borders tend to be in places like Europe where free trade and free movement treaties make borders pointless, or places like India-China where the borders run across high mountain ranges hundreds of miles away from the nearest villages, or places like USA-Canada which aren’t 100% either but are close to 90% both.
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