COMMENTARY Border wall not a practical solution to illegal immigration issue
An important part of immigration policy is border control. But realistically, no border control can ever be perfect, so how much of our resources that is to be devoted to border control should be determined by the bang we get for our buck. Even if you are pro-immigration, you don’t want a porous border; you just want to authorize more people to enter legally. And even if you want to keep everyone out, you must recognize that no border is impenetrable, and investments in border security will have diminishing returns, as more resources are required to prevent the most determined immigrants from entering.
The budget Congress just passed to fund the rest of the year included $1.6 billion for border security. While President Trump claims this budget shows he is fulfilling his oft-repeated campaign promise of building a wall, this is not the case. First, Trump claimed (against all rational thinking) that Mexico would pay for the wall. Did his supporters believe him? Certainly nobody else did (including, most significantly, the Mexicans). Second, the legislation specifically excluded building any of the prototype walls that Trump recently viewed in California.
Like much of Trump’s rhetoric, the border wall revved up the base at his rallies, but made no sense. There already is a very formidable fence on 700 miles of the border where construction was feasible (mostly flat areas across the desert) and most necessary (populated areas). But much of the border is the Rio Grande River, and it is quite difficult to build an impenetrable wall along a river (there are bluffs 1,500 feet high along the river in Big Bend National Park). In places where the fence was built along the river, it was often back from the border (to avoid following every bend), which puts some U.S. territory on the wrong side of the wall (including a golf course in Brownsville, Texas).
The wall was supposed to stop drugs, terrorists and unauthorized immigrants, but even a perfect wall could not do that, since they generally were not crossing the border where the wall would have stopped them anyway. As long as there is demand for illegal drugs, they will find a way to get to market. Drugs are more likely to be brought across the border in a truck at a crossing (there are 52 legal ports of entry on our southern border), rather than in the middle of the desert. Conservatives should understand the power of the market, where supply grows to meet demand; if you interrupt the drug supply, the price goes up and the higher price attracts more suppliers. More than 200 drug tunnels, some quite elaborate, have been found going under the border since the first one was discovered in 1990.
As for stopping terrorism, even if there were a perfect wall between the United States and Mexico, a terrorist could simply cross the Canadian border (which is generally a 20-foot-wide treeless strip that doesn’t even have a fence).
Most unauthorized immigrants come to the United States legally on a visa, and overstay their visa, so a wall would not help with that, either. As the United States built a more secure barrier across the areas where immigrants were crossing illegally, they didn’t stop coming. They were just forced to cross in even more remote areas, which dramatically increased the number of people who died in the attempt (from 1998 to 2006, 2,650 people died trying to cross the southern border). As long as there is a desire to come to the United States, motivated people will find a way.
Historically, most immigrants that came to the United States did not stay. They came, worked for a few years, then returned to their country of origin. Mexican migrant workers historically went back to Mexico every year when the seasonal work was done. But when the Clinton Administration tightened border security in the 1990s, ironically many of these unauthorized workers brought their families to the United States and stayed because border crossings had become too risky. And since the Great Recession, more than a million Mexicans living in the United States illegally have gone back to Mexico than have immigrated, so if a new wall makes it more difficult to cross the border, the population of unauthorized Mexicans in the United States could actually grow.
Many immigrants send some of their wages home, which drains some cash from our economy, but it often has a dramatic impact on the impoverished areas the immigrants left, since many things are less expensive there. Also, these remittances improve the immigrants’ home country, reducing the pressures to migrate to the United States. People who are happy where they are generally don’t immigrate.
Environmentally, the wall would be a disaster. If it extended along the entire border, it would use massive amounts of materials with high embodied energy (metal, concrete), and the construction process would be very disruptive. Once completed, an impenetrable wall would disrupt the local environment, blocking the movements of wildlife, and changing the course of flooding.
Instead of spending $20 billion to $70 billion on a border wall, less draconian immigration restrictions would reduce the need for immigrants to sneak in, and the legalization of marijuana and enhanced treatment of addiction would reduce drug traffic while avoiding the environmental costs of a wall.
Kent James is an East Washington resident and has degrees in history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University.