Why any border fence will fail.
The Denver Post just ran an article on the Border Fence and given the last post on the H-Blog, I thought I'd comment.
The article shows the flaws in the border fence, either as the GOP favored physical wall or the Dem favored high-tech wall. Basically for the GOP wall, you can ask any prison warden how effective walls are without people manning them. For the Dems, this ain't a movie, technology just isn't there yet, and yet may be a looooong time coming.
But what's staggering is the cost, $7.6 billion (initial cost, I've seen nothing on recurring expenses, improvements, maintenance, etc), and no one in their right mind thinks that that cost is anywhere close to the real cost (if it's ever built, I'm thinking at least $20 bln).
The solution to the illegal immigrant debate isn't a wall of any kind. It may make people think that somethings being done, but in reality its the ultimate red herring. As the wall fails to "fix" the illegal immigrant problem, the solution will inevitably become to keep "fixing" the wall. The solution is political, economic. and legal. Allow more legal immigrants, focus on the big ticket offenders, work to get Mexico more economically viable (pie in the sky I know), and figure out what kind of crime illegal immigration really is and enforce it accordingly. Is someone coming to America and working as a dishwasher the equivalent of murder? Kidnapping? Grand Larceny? Petty Theft? Jaywalking? Seriously. We keep hearing that illegal immigration is bad, and we're clearly ready to spend billions, but what kind of crime is it? How does should it rank on our enforcement priority given the damage it causes? This is one topic I've heard nothing about, and to me, its kind of key.
Bottom line, of all the really stupid ideas I've heard recently, the wall is, by far, the most stupiderist. Really expensive and totally worthless.
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1 comment:
At first I was a half-hearted supporter of the wall for the simple fact that I couldn't think of anything better. But I have come around to the notion that it will turn into an enormous waste of money since 1) it will cost much more than the government tells us it will cost (everything always does) and 2) it will only have a marginal impact on solving the problem. So what is the problem?
To me the main problem is the expense in services consumed by illegals. This problem is leveraged to nanny state policies. If libertarians controlled federal programs the cost of illegals would be irrelevent. The next significant problem is one of tribalism. If groups don't assimilate society fractures. The argument that we didn't have this problem in the past is naive. In the past there wasn't a multi-culturalist political faction that stood against assimilation. We keep creating forces that slow or stop that natural and healthy assimilation process. This results in immigration being a larger problem than it should be.
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