CALGARY, Alberta — New coils of razor wire top the fence around Melilla, one of two Spanish territories on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast. Along with Ceuta, the enclaves share the European Union’s only land borders with Africa and are targets for would-be migrants desperate to reach Europe. Spain has long maintained high-tech fencing systems around the enclaves in an attempt to keep the migrants out, but they had removed barbed wire from the top of Melilla’s fence in 2007 after it inflicted serious injuries on those who dared to climb over.

Last November, though, in response to an increase of migrant assaults on the fence, the Spanish authorities restored the wire. The move angered human rights activists and religious leaders across Europe. In a letter to the Spanish interior minister, Bishop Santiago Agrelo Martinez wrote: “Barbed wire with blades on fences in Ceuta and Melilla is an attack on the physical integrity of immigrants: those blades cut, injure, [and] maim ... ” The bishop appreciated the Spanish government’s responsibility to secure the nation’s borders, but he laid bare the fact that the “blades cause only pain and death.”

The reinforcement of the fence around Melilla echoes the current building boom of border walls. According to Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii geographer, nearly 30 new border barriers have risen worldwide since 1998. There are new fences on America’s border with Mexico and along Greece’s border with Turkey. India erected barriers on its frontiers with both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Israel built a wall around Palestine and recently completed a fence along its Egyptian border.

Through technology, barriers to trade, travel and communication keep falling, and yet our world has never been more physically divided by the geometries of bricks, barbed wire and steel.