“...people are always looking for a way to get over — out of necessity, not because we want to.”
TIJUANA: Eladio Sanchez is unimpressed by the eight border wall prototypes looming over his house here, almost within spitting distance of where United States President Donald Trump visited yesterday.
At age 30, he has already snuck across the border several times, and doesn’t expect Trump’s wall will have much effect on undocumented migrants like him.
Pointing to the only prototype with an angular barrier at the top — a concrete structure built by Texas Sterling Construction Company — Sanchez said that one might slow him down a little more than the others.
But, he said, “you can get over it anyway”.
“It’s just a little more complicated. But people are always looking for a way to get over — out of necessity, not because we want to.”
In Tijuana, Trump’s visit to the prototypes looks like just the latest slap in the face from a man who launched his presidential campaign calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists” and has since driven US-Mexican relations to their lowest point in recent memory.
It’s as if “he wants to come just to tell us he’s here, that he’s going to do what he promised with the wall,” said Sanchez, who lived in a small grey house in a poor neighbourhood that jutted up against the border, across from Otay Mesa, on the outskirts of San Diego. Sanchez has watched the barrier between the US and Mexico grow over the years, blocking his view of the mountains more every time.
It started with a fence built during the Bill Clinton administration, then was beefed up with barbed wire.
“They just keep adding more, making it taller,” he said from his rooftop. From there, he has an unimpeded view of the hulking prototypes, which stand about 9m tall and cost US$300,000 (RM1.17 million) to US$500,000 each.
If Trump gets his way, whichever prototype or prototypes win will snake across much of the nearly 3,200km border.
The cost is estimated at US$20 billion. Trump’s insistence that Mexico will foot the bill is a source of national outrage.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto reportedly cancelled plans for a visit to Washington recently over the issue — the second time he has done so.
“He firmly repeated what all Mexicans have always said: We will never pay for a wall on the border,” said Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray.