I’ll be short and sweet about ‘The Wall’; the wall being the product of the five billion in borrowed funds put into bricks and mortar. To the Dems, it’s a colossal waste of money or more accurately, a leverage point in the next rounds of war in Washington. To the Trump base, it’s a no brainer (literally) matter of national security. Here’s what I think:
- Some manner of physical barrier should and largely already exists at the border. It may be appropriate to fortify or improve it at sections, but the Trump wall is more an exercise in bombast and symbolism.
- Ever heard of the Maginot Line? Read the link to find out. That public works project was much better than the Trump wall and it failed spectacularly.
- The wall is a failure of foreign policy and international expertise. There is a reason why we’re not bombarded by breaches on our northern border and coasts and from places not contiguous to our southern border. It’s a combination of incentives that keep people on their home soil, multiple layers of enforcement, and disincentives to entering here. With our southern neighbors, we selectively ignored our own laws far too often and created incentives for illegal entrants to come. At the same time, we were too hard-assed toward those that sought to come in legally. By the way, last time I checked, there was no concertina wire spread across the beaches at Ocean City MD.
- A wall is worthless without manpower. You need more, not less to enforce it.
- If you can’t catch illegal entrants now with high tech electronic monitoring, what makes you think a wall will improve on that?
The right wants red-red meat and the wall is one big steak right now. If it ever gets built, someday, we’ll hold tours, or our Chinese overlords will send tourists there just like we do for their great wall. Maybe the Mexicans will break it into pieces and put a chuck on their fireplace mantel just like a few did with the Berlin wall. The wall is a toy we should be smarter than to afford it.