About Trump’s border fence, let’s focus. It’s not about his ego.

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (2 minute read)  

Let’s talk about the Trumpian border wall, because nothing sparks a conversation better than talk of grandiose, useless public projects.

There’s no need to expound at length over this, the wall is a bad idea because:

• It’ll cost $14 billion, at least.
• The undocumented immigrants that are presently coming to the U.S. are from Central America’s northern triangle – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
• Half of them are women and children.
• They come to the U.S. to seek asylum, to get away from threats of violence in their home countries.
• Because they seek asylum they look to be detained by border agents, they’re not hiding or trying to breech a border.
• Once they declare their intention to seek asylum, and if a border agent feels they have a legitimate reason, they’re given an immigration court appearance date.
• There’s a 500,000 case backlog in the U.S. Immigration court system, so they might wait up to 5 years for a hearing.
• In the meantime international law forbids the U.S. from sending them back.
• U.S. law says they can’t be detained indefinitely while they await a hearing.
• So they’re set free, with a date to come back.
• A wall won’t stop this.
• But Mexico is helping by stopping immigrants at their southern border, with Guatemala.
• They’ve got the resources to do this because Mexico’s economy is growing, it’s the 11th largest in the world.
• This is also why Mexicans aren’t migrating to the U.S. anymore, they follow jobs and the jobs are in Mexico.
• But if we build a wall and renegotiate NAFTA it might hurt commerce infrastructure and supply chains between our countries.
• If this happens Mexico’s economy will be affected.
• There will be fewer jobs in Mexico.
• Mexicans will start coming to the U.S. again, because it’s where the jobs are.
• Mexico will strengthen its ties with China, because the Chinese treat them better.
• Border wall proponents will clamor for the wall to be taller.
• Billions more will be spent.

OK, the last five or six bullet points are speculative, a stretch of my imagination, but plausible. The point is that we waste a lot of time and energy criticizing the Trumpian wall as an extension of the Trumpian ego. It’s not about Trump, it’s about bad policy, bad international relations, and a bad allocation of resources. Let’s focus.

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