From the Sacred Wall to the Rights-Permeated Border: Reading Heaven Has a Wall from Mediterranean Europe
Alessandro Ferrari
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, visited the migrant hotspot in Lampedusam, Italy © European Union, 2026 (CC BY 4.0).
I would like to read Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall from the perspective of Mediterranean Europe, and more specifically from Italy. My aim is to ask what happens when the wall is doubled: a European wall, shaped by Schengen and European Union asylum law, and a national wall, reactivated by states in the name of sovereignty, security, and identity.
One of the central insights of the book is that the border is not only an administrative line or a physical barrier. It is also a symbolic and political site. The border does not merely regulate movement. It helps define who belongs, who threatens, who can be saved, who may be rejected, and what image a political community wishes to preserve of itself. In the American case, the wall is embedded in a powerful national narrative. It is not only a physical barrier, but part of a broader border regime in which religious freedom, asylum, and national security are intertwined. Through this regime, America appears at once as a land of freedom and as a vulnerable community that must protect itself. In the book, the protection of the persecuted and the defense of the nation belong to the same political religion of the border.
Mediterranean Europe presents a different configuration. Here, too, the border is made of procedures, interviews, files, delays, and decisions. Here, too, procedure is never merely technical. Yet its symbolic force is not gathered around a single national narrative. It is distributed across international law, EU law, member states, agreements with third countries, and the possible reactivation of internal borders. This is an important structural difference. In the United States, the tension between openness and closure can still be narrated as an internal conflict within the national story. In Europe, the same tension is fragmented across different legal and political levels. International and European law make the border permeable to claims for protection. National governments seek to recover margins of control, selection, and distance. The European border does not express one political community. It is the place where a legal order of rights meets a plurality of national sovereignties.
For this reason, the European border struggles to become a pure border of exclusion. It remains anchored in supranational rights regimes that give priority to the protection of individuals and place limits on state-centred claims of sovereignty, security, and territorial control. The refugee may enter not because a state wishes to welcome him or her, but because the law gives vulnerability a claim against exclusion. The European border controls, identifies, and filters, but it must also remain open to those who are entitled to protection. A refugee does not enter only because a political community chooses to welcome him or her. A refugee may enter because international law prevents removal, requires an examination of the claim, recognizes risk, suspends return, and opens the possibility of judicial review.
Schengen makes this ambivalence visible. Under normal conditions, the border should coincide with the common external frontier. When that frontier appears insufficient, states can bring internal borders back into view: at the Brenner Pass, at Ventimiglia, at the Italian-Slovenian border, or elsewhere in the Schengen area. The external border selects access to Europe; the internal border reassures the state that free movement has not fully erased national sovereignty. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum marks a further step in this tension. It shows what happens when Europe tries to become more political in the field of migration. Instead of simply deepening a rights-based order, European policy increasingly absorbs state-centred concerns: control, responsibility, screening, border procedures, and return. The more Europe acts politically as a manager of migration, the more its border tends to harden.
Italy is a particularly revealing case because it stands at the point where European law and European politics collide. As an external frontier of the Union and a Schengen state, Italy must apply a rights-protective European legal order. At the same time, it bears the immediate impact of arrivals that other European states may be reluctant to share. The Italian border is therefore not simply a national border. It is the place where European guarantees, national responsibility, and the limits of European solidarity become visible. With Albania, Italy attempts to move part of the asylum procedure outside its own territory. The Italy-Albania Protocol does not represent the whole European model, but it makes one tendency especially clear: the disaggregation of the border. Albanian territory, Italian procedure, and the European grammar of asylum are brought together. The person is outside Italian territory, but inside an Italian procedure; outside the European Union, but inside a European legal language; physically handled, but socially and politically kept at a distance.
The question of the religious refugee sharpens the comparison. In asylum law, both in the United States and in Europe, the religion of the applicant must become legally intelligible as risk. Faith, conversion, apostasy, minority belonging, and non-belief must be translated into persecution, vulnerability, and credibility. At this basic level, the legal grammar is not radically different. Nevertheless, in the United States, as Hurd’s book shows, the religious asylum seeker enters a national narrative of religious freedom. The recognized victim of persecution can confirm the image of America as a land of liberty. The rejected or suspected migrant can confirm the other side of the same border religion: security, defense, and protection of a vulnerable national community. Openness and closure are held together within a powerful national story.
In Europe, the translation of religion into risk moves through a less unified political field. First, the common law of protection operates: the 1951 Refugee Convention, EU law, the principle of non-refoulement, procedural guarantees, and judicial review. Then national societies intervene, with their fears, reception systems, legal cultures, and models of religious pluralism. At the border, European law forces states to reason in terms of fundamental rights centred on the individual person. Religion is not treated primarily as a collective identity or as a sign of cultural belonging, but as one possible element of individual vulnerability. Inside national political space, by contrast, the same religion may be recoded as a problem of integration, security, separatism, cultural compatibility, assimilation, or public order, and may have to overcome many other walls.
Islam makes this tension visible. Many people coming from Muslim-majority countries and thus perceived as Muslim move because of war, state collapse, poverty, ecological pressure, or general insecurity. Yet national politics may transform that religious background into suspicion toward Muslims as a group. The migrant is no longer seen mainly as a rights-bearing individual, but as part of a religious and cultural presence considered difficult to integrate. This is where radical-right politics intervenes in Europe. It does not invent the European wall, but it tries to transform a “constitutional wall” into an identity-based wall. The term “remigration” is significant because it goes beyond the return of those who have no right to stay. It makes the presence of certain groups appear revocable, especially when they are associated with religious or cultural otherness. The problem is no longer only irregular entry. It becomes the permanence of a pluralism perceived as excessive.
This brings the discussion beyond migration alone. Every democracy needs some form of boundary. A political community must know who participates in collective decisions, who shares obligations, who contributes resources, and who benefits from protection. A border is not, in itself, the opposite of democracy. It can be one of the ways through which a political community recognizes itself and acts. The way religion is handled tells us a great deal about the democratic quality of a border. The border reveals what kind of religious subject a democracy is prepared to recognize. In this sense, the border does not only decide who enters. It also shows whether a democracy is still able to live with religious pluralism, or whether it has begun to protect only those forms of belonging that do not disturb its image of itself.
The contemporary border is therefore a democratic test. It may protect a community founded on rights and capable of including those recognized as vulnerable. Or it may defend an identity afraid of transformation. The United States shows how a universalistic promise can be blocked by, or turned into, a wall. Europe shows how a system of rights can remain incomplete without a political community able to accept its consequences. Between these two poles lies the democratic future of the border: not only as a barrier against the outside, but as a measure of a democracy’s capacity to recognize itself without becoming impermeable.
At this point, the French Constitutional Council’s 2018 decision on humanitarian assistance to migrants, concerning the so-called crime of solidarity, adds a final dimension. Therein, the French Constitutional Council recognised fraternity as a constitutional principle and derived from it the freedom to provide disinterested humanitarian assistance to migrants irrespective of their residence status. Nevertheless, this protection extends to assistance with their stay and related movement, but not to assistance with irregular entry into France. By giving constitutional force to fraternity — understood here as solidarity among human beings across borders — the constitutional judges, paradoxically French constitutional judges, showed that even a nation-state democracy is not entirely exhausted by state sovereignty, citizenship, and control. It can also take the form of a constitutional openness to the vulnerable other, made operative through the concrete action of human beings toward one another, precisely where exclusion appears most tempting. ♦
Alessandro Ferrari is Professor of Law and Religion and Comparative Law of Religions at the University of Insubria, Italy. He directs REDESM – Religions, Rights and Economies in the Mediterranean Space, and his research focuses on religious freedom, Islam in Europe, and law and religion in the Mediterranean region (www.redesm.org).
Recommended Citation
Ferrari, Alessandro. “From the Sacred Wall to the Rights-Permeated Border: Reading Heaven Has a Wall from Mediterranean Europe.” Canopy Forum, August 4, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/07/31/from-the-sacred-wall-to-the-rights-permeated-border-reading-heaven-has-a-wall-from-mediterranean-europe/.
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