Border Wall: Separating Fact From Fiction

People Magazine

Maybe it'd be a good idea to begin this discussion with some words from Robert Frost, from his poem "Mending Wall":

"...He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 
'Why do they make good neighbors? 
Isn't it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know, What was I walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
That wants it down..."


With the current president's declaration of a "national emergency" along the Mexican border, now seems a good time to remind ourselves of some essential facts.

According to the latest Pew Research poll (taken in January), seventy-six percent of all immigrants currently living in the US are here legally. But only forty-five percent of Americans realize this is the case. Politicians and others who claim there has been a massive uptick in illegal immigrants are simply wrong.

The same Pew Research poll found that fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose substantially expanding the wall along the US-Mexican border. Only forty percent of Americans support this.

The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US actually peaked in 2007 (at 12.2 million); a thirteen percent (10.7 million) decrease since 2016. Two of the four states that have registered the highest decreases of unauthorized immigrants are border states (California and Arizona).

The Immigration Project, citing the Washington Post and the Marshall Project, noted that while the number of immigrants in the US had increased 118% from 1980 to 2016, the number of crimes in the US had decreased during the same time period by thirty-six percent. Simply put: A border wall won't do anything to curb crime because statistics prove it's not necessary.

The same Washington Post story went on to report that the Anti-Defamation League documented a fifty-seven percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents during 2017, as hate crimes increased by seventeen percent that same year.  When national leaders stoke fear they give consent to hate.

Given all this statistical information, the Washington Post and the Immigration Project correctly make the point that the danger of violent crimes in the US isn't coming from outside our borders, but from within.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

One can only wonder as to the true motivation behind the current president who ran on a promise to build a "big, beautiful wall," which Mexico would pay for. If this is so, then why is the current president so adamant in demanding $5.7 billion of US taxpayer money to build it? To the point of shutting down the government and laying off over 800,000 workers?

In essence, the current president and his administration are backing a wall that most Americans don't want and isn't necessary. 

A recent report from the New York Times included an interview with Jon Barela, a life-long Republican and CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, an organization dedicated to economic development in the cross-cultural hub of El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, and Las Cruces, where there are some 2.7 million people.

Drovers

"The president is just wrong about the wall and about El Paso," he says. "As a fiscally conservative Republican, I just don't understand how spending $25 billion [the estimated total price tag] on a wall with limited effectiveness is a good idea."

The current president and White House administration chose to shut down the federal government for 35 days recently, creating the longest shutdown in US history. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the shutdown cost the US $11 billion. With nearly twenty-five percent of that money permanently lost.

Of course, the most relevant question to ask is: Was it worth it if nothing was accomplished? 

And yet, the current president declared a state of "national emergency" along the Mexican border, insisting on $8 billion to help build sections of his wall to hold off "an invasion" of criminals crossing into the US. 

Immediately there were many in Washington who were alarmed at the president's action, even questioning whether he had done something unconstitutional. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House Chief of Staff noted: "It actually creates zero precedent [for going beyond executive power]. This is authority given to the president by law already. It's not as if he didn't get what he wanted and waved a magic wand to get some money."    

Actually, that's exactly what the president did.

Rather than dealing with reality, the current president and his administration are merely stoking fear. And fear is a very expensive emotion.

In an op-ed piece published in the Baltimore Sun, Meg Hobbins, a senior attorney in her law firm, and experienced with immigration law, recounted her experience interviewing asylum-seeking families (mostly mothers and their children) at the Mexican border recently. 

"None of these mothers had a choice [whether to flee their countries or not]," she writes. "And that is why policies of deterrence [like a wall, separating families or detaining asylum seekers] will fail every time... These families will continue to flee until the violence and lawlessness forcing their journey abates."

The problem, says Hobbins, isn't the border, it's the extreme poverty and violence in Central America that is causing families to flee. Hobbins points out that a better, more effective way of addressing the core problem facing residents of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala is not to warehouse asylum seekers, but to allocate funds for a Marshall Plan-type of systemic support in these countries. This would include economic development, anti-corruption efforts to bolster government protections against violence and organized crime.

At the end of the day, wouldn't allocating $8 billion towards such humanitarian efforts be a lot more effective than building a wall?
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FOOTNOTE: On February 11 the president held a rally in El Paso to drum up support for his border wall. The New York Times covered the event, noting: "Among lawmakers who represent border districts, there is remarkably little support for a wall...

He [the president] repeated grisly stories of violent crimes committed by immigrants - never mind that the crime rate among immigrants is no higher than among native-born residents. He said a wall would stem the flow of deadly opioids and other illicit drugs into the United States - another dubious assertion, given that most drugs arrive at legal ports of entry."