Haitians fleeing hunger and violence will soon be met with a 13-foot-tall border wall meant to keep them out of the neighboring Dominican Republic.

The concrete and steel structure will stretch some 102 miles (164 kilometers) along the border of the Dominican Republic.

In the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo, government officials diplomatically describe it as a painful necessity to insulate one of the region’s most successful economies from one of the hemisphere’s most intractable problems. 

The wall is also, at some level, a reproach to an international community that has spent billions in Haiti but has been unable or unwilling to alleviate the growing humanitarian crisis.