“President Trump, I have news for you: your wall won’t work.”
– Gavin Newsom, Governor of California
“We believe CNN declined a report from KUSI because we informed them that most Border Patrol Agents we have spoken to told us the barrier does in fact work.”
– San Diego TV station KUSI
Last week we started our look at Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border and addressed a couple of objections to it. This week’s post will further examine the arguments for and against the idea.
Do Walls Actually Work?
On Sunday, November 25, 2018, Fox News reported that “Hundreds of migrants try rushing toward California port of entry, as Trump threatens to close entire border.” The article went on to quote Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen saying that some of the migrants “attempted to breadh legacy fence infrastructure along the border and sought to harm CBP (Customs and Border Protection) personnel by throwing projectiles at them.”
Here’s some footage of the event:
In pretty dramatic fashion, the “legacy fence infrastructure” along the border between San Ysidro, CA and Tijuana put a stop to the migrant border rush.
Contrary to the naysayers, walls do work.
This wasn’t the only time the migrants – the same people whose virtues the MSM can’t lecture Americans enough about – attempted to force their way into the US.
On January 2, 2019, Breitbart ran a headline that read “Border Patrol: ‘Violent Mob’ Attacked Agents, Attempted to Push Minors Over Barbed-Wire.” According to Breitbart, “The migrants gathered at the San Diego sector of the United States border with Mexico on New Year’s Eve tried to force their way over the barrier. When turned back by Customs and Border Patrol agents, some in the group started throwing rocks and attempted to push children over the barbed wire atop the barrier.”
Lovely. Just the sort of folks we all want as neighbors.
But the big takeaway, apart from exposing the criminal mob mentality of many of the so-called migrants – invaders is a better term – is that one again, the walls held.
I think I’m starting to see a pattern.
Could it be that Gavin Newsom’s real fear is not that Trump’s wall wouldn’t work, but that it would, and all too well?
But Didn’t a Bunch of Migrants Just Dig Under a Wall?
Yes, they did. According to this article, 376 of them to be exact.
But doesn’t that disprove what I just got done saying about the effectiveness of walls? No, it does not. Here’s why.
As the article notes, “The area [where the migrants tunneled under the wall] became a major corridor for illegal crossings in the mid-2000s, prompting t he federal government to weld stell plates to a barrier made of steel bollards that had been designed to stop people in vehicles, not on foot, Border Patrol spokesman Jose Garibay said. In those spots, there is no concrete footing to prevent digging.”
Note well that last sentence, “In those spots, there is no concrete footing to prevent digging.” According to a statement by the CBP about a similar breach back in November, the “old portion of the wall lacks the improved concrete footer that new wall prototypes have which prevents easy digging underneath.”
Trump’s proposed wall will have a footer, making digging under it much harder than the current wall.
Won’t the Wall Cost Much More Than $5.7 Billion?
According to this article from Fox, Trump’s $5.7 billion funding request from Congress, the one that Nancy and Chuck refuse to so much as even negotiate on, will fund “215 miles of ‘wall system” of which “well over a hundred miles would be brand new wall in places where there is no barrier now.” The new wall would cover the most critical locations. The total cost of the full wall “could be upwards of $25 billion.”
Now, given the tendency of government projects to run over budget, I suspect the cost of the full wall, if built, would come in much higher than $25 billion.
The Pettiness and Hypocrisy of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi
The pettiness of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on the matter of the wall is remarkable.
The whole government shutdown is over a dispute of $4.4 billion, the different between what the Democrats have approved for border security and the $5.7 billion the Trump administration is requesting.
We’re talking here about politicians who will gladly vote to spend far more than $4.4 billion on projects that do little or nothing to help the American people, but who are going to dig in their heels and fight to the death over (by federal government standards) what amounts to chump change.
To give you a sense of how small $4.4 billion is relative to the federal budget, the Trump administration’s proposed 2019 budget is $4,407 trillion. This means the $4.4 billion difference between the Dems and Trump works out to 0.0998% of the total federal government outlays for fiscal 2019.
Schumer and Peolsi have decided to play budget brinksmanship over nickels and dimes.
On top of that, both Pelosi and Schumer have supported – in Pelosi’s case, as late as 2013 – funding for border fencing, as this Washington Post article points out.
But somewhere between 2013 and 2019, Nancy Pelosi had an epiphany and now calls the wall “immorality.”
Doubtless, a good deal of that epiphany has a lot to do with the man who wants to build the wall, Donald Trump. The Democrats have shown they are willing to follow a scorched earth policy to when it comes to Trump. Simply put, there is nothing they consider off the table when it comes to destroying him.
But there is perhaps another angle that is not mentioned in the press: Nancy Pelosi is Roman Catholic. In fact she is often described in the press as a “devout Catholic.”
For example, it was Pelosi along with then House Speaker John Boehner (also a Roman Catholic) who in 2014 invited Pope Francis to come and address Congress, which he did in September 2015.
As this author has noted time and again in this space, there is no bigger advocate of mass, taxpayer funded immigration, migration and refugee resettlement than the Antichrist papacy and his henchmen in the Roman Church-State, since this is one of the means by which the Papacy hopes to weaken independent nations and fold them into its planned system of world government.
As I discuss below, Pope Francis has been very outspoken in his opposition to the wall. Could some of Pelosi’s obstinate refusal to deal with Trump be driven by her connection to please her masters in the Roman Church-State?
But Didn’t Trump Say That Mexico Would Pay for the Wall?
Yes, he did. For my part, I always thought that was campaign rhetoric and never took it seriously.
One way of at least offsetting some of the wall cost would be to tax remittances Mexicans working in the US send back to Mexico.
According to CNN, Mexicans sent home $26.1 billion from January to November 2017 [apparently this means Mexican working in the US], which represents one of Mexico’s top sources of foreign income.
I’m not a big one for imposing new taxes, but a good argument can be made for this one. Not only due to the cost of the wall, but due to other costs imposed on taxpayers of the US by illegal Mexican immigrants.
The Cost of Illegal Immigration
It’s beyond the scope of this article to discuss the full economic impact of illegal immigration, but the one example below should serve to give the reader some sense of hidden costs imposed on Americans by our current shambles of an immigration system.
Tony is a friend of mine who a few years ago worked as a prison guard in the state of Virginia. The facility where he worked housed 1,300 inmates at a cost of $20,000 per year per inmate.
One time when we were talking about his experience at the prison, he mentioned that probably a quarter of the guys in there couldn’t even speak English. These non-English speakers did, however, speak Spanish.
Tony’s claim is supported by a recent report released by the Department of Justice (DOJ), indicating that 26% of federal prisoners are aliens.
With these facts in mind, let’s do a little quick math. If Tony’s prison held 1,300 inmates of which 26% were aliens, that means about 338 prisoners were aliens. Multiply that times $20,000 per year and you get find that Virginia taxpayers are stuck with a bill $6.76 Million annually to house the foreigners in that prison.
And that ‘s just the cost of housing illegal aliens in one prison facility. In one state.
This doesn’t include aliens housed at other prisons in Virginia, other prisoners housed in other state and local jails throughout the US, or the cost of prisoners held at the federal level.
It also says nothing about the cost of this illegal alien crime spree to the police, to the court system and, most especially, to the crime victims themselves.
If strengthening the existing wall system along our southern border and building new sections of wall where currently there is no barrier can help cut down on the flow of criminal aliens, building the wall not only seems like a prudent thing to do, one could argue that it’s an imperative.
But the Wall Won’t Solve All Our Immigration Problems
Some people seem to argue that, because the wall isn’t a silver bullet to solve all America’s immigration woes, therefore it has no value at all.
To the extent that they argue the wall is not a cure-all, I agree. The wall by itself will not solve all our immigration problems. But they are wrong to suggest that it is of no value.
Let’s apply a little economic logic to this problem. All things being equal, the more something costs, the fewer people take of it. That’s why you see more Fords and Toyotas on the road than BMW’s and Benzes.
Building new sections of wall and upgrading current, ineffective sections of the wall will make it harder – not impossible – but harder to illegally enter the United States from Mexico. Making it harder to illegally enter the US is another way of saying the wall raises the cost of illegal immigration to those who would attempt it. And if it costs of illegal immigration go up, economic logic suggests that fewer people will make the attempt.
The wall is not a cure-all. As noted in the example above, 376 people dug under or climbed over the existing wall, and then claimed asylum once the police came. This is an outrage. Quite obviously, our asylum laws need an overhaul. But a well-constructed border wall, by raising the cost of illegal entry, will almost certainly help cut down on illegal entries.
The Wall Represents a Blow to Socialist Democrats
Many pundits have sarcastically referred to illegal immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.” This is not without good reason.
Economist Walter Williams highlighted the Democrats push for amnesty for illegal immigrants – N.B. whenever you hear some politician, Democrat or Republican it doesn’t matter, talk about “comprehensive immigration reform,” what they mean by this is amnesty, that is to say, the term “comprehensive immigration reform” is code for giving citizenship to illegal immigrants – in a recent column and I strongly recommend you read it in full.
In effect, the rising socialist wing of the Democratic party knows they can’t get enough Americans to vote for their nonsense to actually bring about full-scale socialism in the US. But if they can import enough voters friendly to socialism, perhaps they can create a permanent electoral majority in support of their harebrained, big-government schemes.
Quoting Tucker Carlson, Williams writes,
One: According to a recent study from Yale, there are at least 22 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. Two: Democrats plan to give all of them citizenship. Read the Democrats’ 2016 party platform. Three: Studies show the overwhelming majority of first-time immigrant voters vote Democrat. Four: The biggest landslide in American presidential history was only 17 million votes. Do the math. The payoff for Democrats: permanent electoral majority for the foreseeable future. In a word: power.
Putting up a wall makes it harder for the Democrats to push their agenda of permanent electoral majority through immigration.
Could this be one reason Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are so shrill in their refusal to fund the modest border wall funding request of the Trump administration?
Sanctuary Cities and More – Elite Pandering to Illegals
If, after reading Williams’ article anyone still harbors doubts the Democrats’ lust for illegal votes, just consider the pandering that goes on to illegals in heavily Democratic districts.
Sanctuary cities are municipalities that refuse to cooperate with federal officials on matters of immigration. As the Center for Immigration Studies puts it, “[S]anctuary jurisdictions are…cities, counties, and states [that] have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)- either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal officers.”
Now the US has a federal system of government, and one of the strengths of a federal system is that there are overlapping, independent jurisdictions. This has the salutary effect of limiting abuse of power by a central authority by allowing the lesser magistrate to push back on unlawful orders from above.
That said, it is the opinion of this author that those magistrates that adopt sanctuary rules, and the voters that support them, are behaving in a highly irresponsible manner.
To give you a sense of what I mean, consider the case of Luis Rodrigo Perez, who, being released from the Middlesex County, New Jersey jail despite having an ICE detainer placed on him, now stands accused of triple murder in Missouri, facing eight felony counts.
Worth noting too is that there seems to be a negative correlation between a jurisdiction’s willingness to embrace sanctuary policies and it fiscal health. The state of Illinois, for example, is rapidly sinking into bankruptcy while taxes are skyrocketing and residents, quite sensibly, are fleeing left and right, but by golly, it’s a model of righteousness in that the entire state refuses to cooperate with ICE.
What’s going to be interesting is when the state’s finances finally do implode and the politicians come begging for a bailout, will anyone have the guts to remind them that their treasonous behavior is part of the reason for they’re in the fix in the first place?
Non-citizen Voting, a Dangerous Precedent
In October 2018, the LA Times ran an article announcing that San Francisco would become the largest city in the nation to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. As the article notes, this includes those without legal status.
The spin in this article is actually kinda funny, at least if you have a dark sense of humor. The piece notes that this move would turn San Francisco into a punching bag for conservatives who would be upset at the city’s attempt “to protect people in this country illegally from President Trump’s immigration crackdown.”
Oh, those silly conservatives! They’re such a bunch of losers who just aren’t hip to the idea that the governments they’re taxed to support should put the interests of actual Americans over protecting the “right” of illegal immigrants to remain in their country and vote in their elections.
It’s hard to view the non-citizen voting push as anything other than a next-level attempt by progressives to subvert the American republic by diluting the votes of the American people with ballots cast by individuals who have no business even being in the country.
(To be continued…)
Lux Lucet 
Sounds like tourists will be voting in San Francisco soon.
Could be!