The big, beautiful border wall is always on President Donald Trump’s mind. “Build the wall” is chanted at rallies. The wall was used as an excuse when Trump University lost in court. Now, to force its construction, the Trump administration is using deplorable treatment of illegal immigrants as a bargaining chip. We have been told time and again how Mexico is paying for said wall despite attempts to wrangle it into an immigration bill and to have Congress allocate taxpayer money to fund it. All of this for a $25 billion price tag.
But that pales to the actual waste.
The upfront price tag might be $25 billion, but how much will it cost to maintain this wall? Let’s use a car as an example: you buy a $25,000 car and spend 1% of its value on maintenance; about $250 a year. Some years will be more, some will be less. So a guesstimate would be $250 million a year for upkeep – every year until when exactly?
The Constitution makes no mention of the border, but it does have the 5th and 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process of law before seizure of property. That’s important because the United States doesn’t actually own the border with Mexico. Most of the border is owned by private citizens; some of whom will willingly sell their land to the government, but some will not. So the government will confiscate it by force with eminent domain. Those cases will be adjudicated in court, consuming more time, money and resources. In the end, the government will likely get what it wants through theft from people through tyrannical force.
The ecological impact of the wall is incalculable. Animals migrate across the border. The semi-arid and arid regions of the southern border are delicate ecosystems and, when altered, many species struggle to adapt. How many animals’ extinctions is a wall worth?
Would a wall even work? There is a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, going back thousands of years.
Let’s begin with the most famous wall: the Great Wall of China. It took hundreds of years to construct. Sections were built upon the bones of the dead workers, and it never kept anyone out. Mongul invaders routinely raided China. Increasingly, more resources were needed to maintain and expand it, with little effect upon raids.
How about more modern examples? After World War I, France built the Maginot Line; defense structures along the German border to protect against a future German invasion. Manned by the most experienced French soldiers, bunkers, concrete fortifications, anti-tank obstructions, and machine gun nests were simply bypassed through the Low Countries. After the success of the Maginot Line, the Germans in turn built the impenetrable Atlantic Wall. Then came the Berlin Wall, a symbol of everything wrong with communism, that still could not stop 5,000 people from wanting to be free and risking everything to attain that freedom.
The most modern example is the Israeli West Bank barrier. Israel controls the West Bank where many Palestinians and Israelis live. They built a security wall to control and restrict travel of the people that live there. Yet there are still terror attacks. Mortars and rockets fly perfectly fine over the wall, terrorists still tunnel beneath it, and there are even attacks using incendiary balloons and kites.
The purpose of the great southern wall is to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs. How successful would it be? Not very. According to Pew Research, 26% of illegal immigrants come from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Caribbean, most of whom simply overstay their visas. Unless we are building a wall 30,000 feet high to keep out airplanes, ¼ of illegal immigration will be unaffected.
Then there is the drug angle. The War on Drugs has failed. After 40 years, $1 trillion, countless lives lost and ruined, a wall will do nothing more than be a speed bump. 40% of illegal drugs do not cross the southern border. The current scourge fentanyl is manufactured in China, and because of its potency, minute amounts can be trafficked through any open door into the country. A single person can carry a few ounces that would be enough fentanyl to kill dozens. In addition, drug and human traffickers are extremely innovative. They use submarines, tractor trailers, drones, the postal service, cannons, tunnels, speed boats, planes, hidden car compartments, balloons, or they just walk right through one of the open doors. As long as there are doorways of legal immigration, of free travel and exchange of goods, there will be illegal crossings and drugs trafficked.
It wouldn’t be the government without some fearmongering, so what about those terrorists sneaking across the border? Some suspected terrorists have been apprehended, but no one has ever entered this country through the Canadian or Mexican borders and plotted or carried out a terrorist attack. This scare tactic invented by the Bush administration after 9/11 still persists.
Most people can agree that we need border security, but not at a $25 billion dollar price tag for something that is obsolete even before it is built. Republican congressman William Hurd, who represents 820 miles of the Texas-Mexico border, introduced a bill for a “SMART wall” of radar, lidar, drones, cameras, and sensors. All are far cheaper than a physical barrier, cheaply replaceable and cheaply upgradeable. That bill was introduced on 27 January 2017; it has not even gone to committee for consideration or debate. Hurd’s fellow Republicans’ vision has been obscured by the wall.
The border boils down to some basic economics of supply and demand. Illegal immigrants are looking for a supply of jobs, safety, and freedom. Because of quotas and a terrible system of legal immigration there will always be illegal immigrants in America. The harder it is to become a legal citizen, the more illegal immigrants there will be. The demand is unaffected. If the wall was built tomorrow, it would simply shift where illegal immigration comes from. Same with drugs, except we have actually tried to affect both sides of supply and demand with no change in outcome. A hard truth is that people in America demand drugs, and they will get their drugs somehow. Prohibition, or a wall, will not change this, but simply change where it comes from.
We can live in an utterly safe and secure society depending how many freedoms you want to give up. We can cede more money and power to the government, or we can work on real world solutions. Walls, either physical or mental, are an impediment to the free exchange of ideas and to the very idea of free people. By erecting walls, we are not keeping people out – we are forcing ourselves in.
Sources:
www.thelocal.de/20141105/the-great-escape-across-the-berlin-wall
www.medium.com/center-for-biological-diversity/5-animals-threatened-by-the-border-wall-3160a6bbfd85
www.pewhispanic.org/2014/11/18/chapter-2-birthplaces-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants/
www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/oct/26/will-border-wall-stop-drugs-coming-united-statesf/
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/19/15326286/trump-wall-opioid-epidemic
www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-trillion-war-drugs-failed-meet-goals.html
www.businessinsider.com/16-maps-of-drug-flow-into-the-united-states-2012-7
www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/25/fentanyl-is-lethal-and-almost-impossible-to-keep-out-of-the-country
www.statnews.com/2018/01/24/china-fentanyl-usps/
hurd.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/hurd-introduces-21st-century-smart-wall-legislation
* Michael Telesca is a seasoned salesmen and amateur/hobbyist writer who hates seeing money wasted whether it be personal or tax dollars and people’s freedoms being trampled upon.
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