“Build the wall! Build the wall!” the chant (and commonly used phrase) among Trump supporters can still be heard post-election.
Whether some of you believed it would ever be built is debatable, but I personally never thought it would. I also knew Mexico would never agree to pay for it.
A study done by the Washington Times shows the wall could cost up to $25 billion. Now we are starting to hear who’s really going to pay for it – yep, you guessed it – US (or the U.S., either is fitting). This is preposterous in every sense of the word.
In a political climate where it seems like spending trillions of dollars doesn’t matter, apparently, spending billions doesn’t either, which is no surprise.
A report done in in 2013 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, showed that illegal immigration costs the U.S. about $113 billion annually.
Now, while I do not agree with taxation, I also don’t agree with illegal immigrants not having to pay taxes. Most illegal immigrants that end up paying taxes receive back, in the form of a tax refund, whatever little money they paid.
It’s highly unlikely that a wall would stop people from wanting to enter the country. Illegal immigrants would likely just come into the country on planes, boats or tunnels.
More government can only hurt our situation as seen in the Drug War, and government is never the answer to these problems.
While I don’t 100% agree with open borders, I do believe we should severely lessen the difficulty of coming to the United States.
If we can even turn half of the illegal immigrants into legal immigrants, we could tax them like the rest of us. This would, in turn, severely limit the amount of money they cost the taxpayers each year, and every little bit counts.
While every Republican (besides Rand Paul) is trying to put us on the hook for $9.7 trillion to get rid of parts of Obamacare, we cannot overlook the rest of what we are spending either.
Most Republicans have been adamant and boisterous in their demands for the wall, by saying they want it, and Mexico will pay for it; but when they saw it was not going to happen, their tune changed to saying the wall will pay for itself.
They have contorted the $113 billion I spoke about earlier and turned it into their battle cry for paying for a $25 billion wall, and this probably won’t change.
Republicans will probably not change the error of their ways, as we’ve seen with the Drug War that hasn’t worked – and never will work.
Instead, they think banning drugs and building a wall to prevent immigration will work.
Men have always proved to find solutions in situations when faced with a figurative obstacle, and this one just so happens to be a literal obstacle. The other side of this argument, from Democrats, is to just let them in; who cares that they aren’t paying taxes?
Murray Rothbard once said, “It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost,” which rings true on this subject.
While illegal immigrants flood in, we have been stuck with the bill. Why can’t we just let them in to an extent, and tax them like we do ourselves? Unless they are criminals, why should people care? It should be a simple answer, but it isn’t.
Half of the country wants to let them freeload off us, and the other half wants to deport them. The small percentage of us smart enough to see the right answers are overlooked and drowned out in the screams of the modern political mainstream here in the United States.
So we must keep on spreading the voice of liberty and fighting the irrational solutions our politicians have presented us.
Featured image: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
* Jacob Huntzinger is a recent graduate from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He currently works as a TTSM (Truck Tire Sales Manager) at Continental Tire, a world-wide manufacturer of tires, rubber products, and automotive parts.
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