The infrastructure and accompanying facilities would be placed in between and around existing sections of border fences and walls. Their paper suggests placing wind turbines along high-potential wind-energy sites on the Texas Gulf Coast and in Baja, California. That energy could then be used to desalinate water in the region, which frequently faces droughts and shortages. Solar panels would dot the border in West Texas and New Mexico—an area with the best solar-energy potential in the United States, but little installed capacity.

Given its size and scale, the infrastructure in this plan effectively is the barrier between the two countries. And the paper proposes that it all be accompanied by high-level security, such as drones and sensors, warning of any suspicious activity or threat to the sensitive energy and electric infrastructure—whether that’s humans attempting to cross through it, or the wildlife that inhabits both sides of the border.

Luciano Castillo, a professor at Purdue and the lead author of the paper, doesn’t see the border energy park as a way to stop immigration, which would require a much more holistic set of policies. It could, however, provide jobs and opportunities to people fleeing their home countries. “This isn’t us versus them—we want people to be able to come and work [on this] innovation,” he says. On paper, the idea might seem equal parts fantastical and unfeasible; Castillo sees the proposal as inherently optimistic. To an engineer, it looks like a chance to change the more and more polarized rhetoric around the border, and spur cooperative economic development on both sides.

Read: A border is not a wall

The proposal, co-written with more than two dozen engineers from large research universities including Texas Tech, Arizona State, and Stanford University, is mostly focused on the technical and economic challenges at hand. It doesn’t address the complexities that drive migration in the region, or the fate of the people who will still ultimately be stopped at a border wall—even if that wall functions as a hub of economic activity. “We’re not arguing that this is going to make everything nice for everyone,” he says.

But it’s not the first time that people have reimagined what the border can or should look like, Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern University who focuses on the borderlands, tells me.

In 2006, The New York Times asked 13 architects to reconsider what a border fence could look like, as Congress was debating adding thousands of miles of border fence to the southern border. Some architects declined to participate, because of the politicized nature of the question, but those who were up to the challenge came up with ideas that at least attempted to defy the stark reality of a barrier between nations. Most of the submissions weren’t traditional fences or barriers: one was entirely conceptual, created by heaps of crushed rock that, once heated from below, would cause a mirage-like divider of hot air. Another architect proposed “a strolling, landscaped arcade of lighted glass columns,” marking the border and encouraging social gatherings in the space.