Trump advised the Spanish government to build a wall across the Sahara

An archival photo of camels in the Sahara Desert.

(Image credit: Hulton Archives/Getty Images)

published 20 September 2018

President Trump seems to have one go-to solution for any problem: Build a wall.

Josep Borrell, Spain's foreign minister, revealed this week that Trump told his government that in order to keep migrants from entering Spain, they needed to build a wall across the Sahara. Borrell said they told Trump the wall would have to stretch for 3,000 miles to cover the desert, but Trump was undaunted. "The Sahara border can't be bigger than our border with Mexico," he said. The U.S.-Mexico border is approximately 1,954 miles.

Spain does have two autonomous cities on the north coast of Africa, but the wall would have to be built almost entirely on foreign land. So far this year, more than 33,600 migrants have arrived in Spain by sea, three times as many as in 2017, and 1,723 have died on the journey. More migrants are coming to Spain than Italy and Greece, and while it is straining resources in some areas of southern Spain, Borrell said in July the government does not consider this a crisis. "We're talking about 20,000 migrants so far this year for a country of more than 40 million inhabitants," he said. "That's not mass migration. We're trivializing the word 'mass.'"

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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