Good grief... If you truly believe that a SOVEREIGN nation is going to pay for a wall to reinforce OUR southern border, you will be sorely disappointed. What a pompous position to take and how blatantly arrogant one must be to actually believe that there would not only be a "huge" and "beautiful" wall to adorn our southern border, but that somehow Mexico is going to pay for it? Listen up and listen good. This wall will never happen and even if it does, rural America is going to fit the bill.
Not only is the southern border some 2000 miles long, but it encompasses so much protected and privately owned land. Good luck forcing those people to move their ranches and farms and homes... Not even the government wants to cede that sovereign American land to build an impractical wall. Building the wall through the Rio Grande? Across the topographical nightmare that is the U.S.-Mexico border? With estimated costs ranging anywhere from $10 billion to $30 billion, Trump's proposal will absolutely be pulling money out of the American peoples' pockets. And then what? We erect a wall and all of a sudden illegal immigration stops? Now you must hire a few hundred or thousand border patrol workers to monitor the wall, especially under its construction. Then once it's finished, illegal immigration magically stops? Trump must not realize that planes exist. Surely he must also be forgetting the dozens of underground tunnels that drug smugglers navigate in order to cross the border. Roughly 30% of the border is already adorned with some sort of barrier and officials that monitor those patches say it does almost nothing to stop illegal immigration. This isn't even a partisan issue at this point. Many republicans representatives have come out in opposition to the wall. Republican Rep. of Texas Will Hurd, whose district spans about a third of the southern border, has said that "building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border," in a statement earlier this month.
Trump claims that Mexico will reimburse the United States after it begins construction with TAXPAYER MONEY. That's right folks. Mexico is going to pay us back after we build the wall, even though Mexican officials, and President Peña Nieto, himself have adamantly stated that they will under no circumstances pay for the wall. Not only will this wall negatively impact American households economically, but it will come with negative environmental impacts as it would cut right through Big Bend National Park.
And what about the 20% tariff on imports from Mexico to pay for the wall? You know, our third-largest trading partner and close ally? First things first, if the United States hits Mexico with a trade war, Mexico can retaliate right back. Take cars for example. We make some of the car parts, export them to Mexico, they build the cars, and export them back to us. If we put a 20% tariff on all of those cars coming in, what is to stop them from putting a 20% tariff on the car parts we send to them to actually build the cars? Or think about this: What happens during the winter when Florida and California have low tomato yields and we have to rely on Mexico for tomatoes? What about avocados? Or beer? Or computer monitors, insulated electrical wires, telephones, refrigerators, air conditioners? Are you really willing to pay more for your everyday items to fund a wall that will almost certainly be ineffective? My educated guess is that the same people who voted for Trump, in large part for more secure borders, are people that are not in the financial position to pay more their everyday items. Otherwise they would not have voted for Trump in the first place.
The President's insistence on a border wall is not only embarrassing on the global stage, but has the potential to be financially and politically crippling while yielding little to no positive outcomes. We would be alienating one of our closest allies and trading partners. There is staunch opposition to the border wall on both sides of the party line and the cost of building and maintaining the border wall far outweighs the benefits of its construction. I truly hope the President reels in his outlandish plans and goes back on his word, just as he has done time and time again throughout the election cycle.
