Donald Trump’s border wall remains one of the most visible symbols of his presidency. Trump has said his goal is to build the barrier along the nearly 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border with the objective to prevent illegal immigration at the cost of billions of dollars.
But is that really the objective? Actually, there are better and cheaper ways to prevent illegal immigration than the creation of a physical blockade that can be climbed over.
For Anand Pandian, that wall is not only a border-enforcement tool. In “Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down,” the Johns Hopkins anthropologist argues it also reflects a broader American habit of “defense and retreat” woven into daily life. The book traces how division is reinforced not simply by left-right ideology or partisan media, but by the ordinary structures of “home and road, body and mind.”
Pandian’s argument is that Americans increasingly build lives organized around separation: fortified homes and gated neighborhoods, oversized Cybertruck vehicles that turn the road into a private fortress, bodily ideas of self-protection, and media habits that shut out contrary views. In the book, he links these patterns to the same fantasy behind the border wall, the belief that safety can be achieved by sealing ourselves off from one another.
In 2016, Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States and the appeal of Trump’s politics of anger, resentment and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country―from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York to seek out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others.
Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kinds―including salesmen, truck drivers, police officers, urban planners, and activists for women's rights and environmental justice―Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present.
Guest:
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (2019) and Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India (2014). He has served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective.
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This interview will be recorded live Thursday, March 26, 2026, at 12:00 p.m.
