Quite a few of us here don't exactly see Europe as the shining city on the hill. So why are we mindlessly trying to imitate one of the European Union's biggest economic and social failures? I am talking about our gut-driven wall-building effort along the southern border of the United States.

Our elected officials in Congress pushing the 700-mile Wall of the Americas are not telling us that a wall is simply a small obstacle that can be climbed or circumvented. Spending billions of dollars to build a wall will end up being a boondoggle-unless it protects a fortress. And life and business inside a fortress-even if it is "virtual," as many wall proponents like to call it-are smaller and more restricted than they are in the open.

Europe is a showcase for the high economic and social cost this fortress logic entails. The European Union is widely admired for the freedom of movement and settlement it provides to all citizens of member nations. What is less known is the harsh treatment migrants from outside the bloc receive at the hands of immigration officials, judges, law enforcement officials and border guards in Britain, France and Germany.

Part of the reason Europe hasn't built a big wall is its geographical "luck," due to its southern border running through the Mediterranean Sea. Hundreds of undocumented migrants from Africa and Asia who paid ungodly sums to boat-owning smugglers simply vanish at sea every year without a trace.

But two very visible exceptions-the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North African-show the ugly face of European immigration policy and give us a taste of what may soon be cooking along our southern border.

If you want to see a high-tech, "virtual" dividing line between the wealthy and poor world, I recommend you go there. On any given day, hundreds of mostly black African migrants rove the Moroccan side of the border. They are banding together to literally storm the two rows of 10-foot, razor wire-topped, camera-watched fences. Between these parallel fences runs a road on which Spanish border police armed with gas grenades and stun guns patrol, while others watch from towers.

A few migrants get killed in the effort, but dozens actually make it to Ceuta and Melilla every day, often with a hospital as the first stop. Once they're there, Spanish officials are forced to respond to their pleas for political asylum. Practically all get rejected, but the process takes months, sometimes years. For the poorest of migrants it's the only semi-legal ticket to the Promised Land.

Since the 1970s, most EU member nations have had harsh, restrictive immigration laws and practices that are among the most economically counterproductive on this planet. Under the 1984 Schengen Treaty, European nations decided to dissolve "inner" borders but strengthen the community's outer border. This, combined with rising immigration from war-torn and increasingly poverty-stricken developing nations, has created an underclass of millions of people living in the shadows of the world's wealthiest continent.

Europe's "No Trespassing" attitude has promoted an underground industry of people smugglers who work hand-in-hand with drug mafias. It has burdened economies and welfare systems by prohibiting hundreds of thousands of "asylum seekers" to work and forcing them into an underground economy, holding back economic energies and unnecessarily creating additional costs to taxpayers. It has fostered a culture of disrespect for laws and regulations. It is messing up demographic and market research. And it has led to rising social and political tensions, as frequently witnessed in the suburbs of Paris and Manchester.

Living in an anti-immigrant fortress such as Europe means wearing a straightjacket that takes away civil liberties and slows economic activity. In Europe's largest economy, Germany, you must register with police when you move to a new residence. For something as simple as getting electricity or garbage service for your home, you must show your police registration and/or your computer-readable national ID card. Unless she finds someone willing to cut corners, a non-EU professor who does research at a German university can't open a bank account there. Armed border guards checking dark-skinned passengers' papers on trains inside Germany are an increasingly common sight. And teaching German to undocumented immigrants is against the law.

Some of these controls and prohibitions are rather obscure and date back to way before massive immigration from Africa and Asia began. But they are gaining new life, thanks to Europe's current immigration practices.

To be sure, the European Union is beginning to open the gates of the fortress a bit. The EU member nations convened two years ago in The Hague to design a common immigration policy that creates legal channels for more migrants. But we in the United States are moving in the opposite direction, without much thought.