According to the Rasmussen Reports 51 percent of the American populace believes illegal immigrants are stealing jobs and 11 percent are not sure. 28 percent do not think illegal immigrants are stealing jobs at all. This belief has led many Americans to the conclusion that we need stronger border security and enforcement or that illegal immigrants need to be deported and promptly. Because of this, President Donald Trump’s proposal of a wall across the Mexican border was met with mixed emotions. Many Americans felt it was overdue, and many also felt it was the very embodiment of their worst nightmare.
Whatever you may feel about President Trump’s wall, it has no hope of coming to fruition for a variety of reasons. First, let’s discuss the cost: initially it will cost us between $15-25 billion, and then we would have the annual cost of maintaining and staffing the wall. According to CNN, it will cost approximately $3.9 million per mile for the taller stretches of fence - but that’s not even a wall.
President Trump has said “I will build a great wall...and I will make Mexico pay for it. Mark my words.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said, “I regret and condemn the decision of the United States to build the wall...I have said time and again; Mexico won’t pay for any wall.”
Besides the fact that the cost is obviously astronomical and would be ongoing, the wall would also have to pass through the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range, as well as the Rio Grande. This is before ever splitting villages, properties, and even houses along the border. Can you imagine the great wall of Mexico in your bathroom? Imagine sitting down to go potty and having to ask the guard in America for toilet paper.
President Trump has said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you...They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
However, according to the New York Times, “several studies [conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research], over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.”
In actuality, building a wall would actually increase illegal immigration. According to Jorge Ramos, a journalist, and politifact 40 percent of illegal immigrants come here by plane legally and overstay their visa so a wall wouldn’t prevent them from coming here anyways.
Besides forgetting to take into account other modes of transportation to make it into the United States, we have also failed to consider circular flow. Think about the Mexican-American border as a circling door, Mexican immigrants come to America to fill agricultural jobs which Americans don’t want and then go back to Mexico. When that flow is stopped rather than stopping illegal immigrants from coming in it stops temporary immigrants from going back and they simply stay in America.
Building a wall would not only cost Americans billions of dollars in the long and short of it all, but is also impractical. Rather than stopping illegal immigrants from entering the United States it would stop them from going back.