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.
For the Finnish-Russian border even the seemingly unguarded bits are still under remote surveillance and some border police will appear if you are hiking in the forest towards the border.
Uhm. Guard borders? How do you mean?
In addition to the other answers here, you cannot deny that an actual physical wall is effective.
Even biased PolitiFact is forced to begrudgingly concede (with cope) that Israel’s wall made illegal immigration go from 16k people a year to less than 20.
Source: [link](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/feb/13/ron-johnson/border-fence-israel-cut-illegal-immigration-99-per/)
Germany doesnt have guarded borders anymore. The border in lake Constanz isnt even properly defined. I travelled to Italy 4 times by train and the train goes from Munich to Venice through Austria. When you cross the border some police officers enter the train before crossing and leaving at the next station, looking at some IDs in the meantime. Thats basically all we have left as border control outside of airports.
Wait until you cross the border from France into Germany or between any european countries. You just drive. No nothing. No checkpoint, no guards, no fuss.
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