The wall isn’t about immigration, it’s about politics
Is this shutdown and wall fight President Donald Trump’s Reichstag fire?
The Reichstag fire was the arson of the German Parliament by communist plotters in 1933, a month after Adolph Hitler was elected chancellor.
Stoking fears of a communist revolution in Germany, Hitler used the fire as an excuse to pass a law in Parliament to suspend civil liberties, which were not restored until Germany’s defeat in World War II. Historians consider the Reichstag fire the beginning of the Nazi Party.
Trump can’t go that far, but it’s good to keep similar historical parallels in the back of our minds.
He is using – creating – a fake crisis on the southern border to gin up his base for the
2020 election, distract from Bob Mueller’s investigation and test just how far he can extend presidential power.
He has worsened the fake crisis by presiding over the longest government shutdown in American history – making 800,000 workers and their families suffer without paychecks going on three weeks now.
Both houses of Congress have already passed the bills that would reopen those departments.
One of the politicians who met with him Wednesday asked him why he didn’t just sign those.
“Because then you won’t give me what I want,” he reportedly responded.
The southern border is
2,000 miles long, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
From the 1990s through the
2000s, the U.S. – with strong Democratic support – built 653 miles of barriers along the border to block pedestrians or vehicles.
These walls and fences do work in and around urban areas.
Traffic has decreased by 92 percent in the San Diego area since 1992, 95 percent in El Paso since 1993, and 90 percent in Tucson since 1993, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Most of the 1,317 miles of border without fencing are not in urban areas and the Rio Grande River extends for 1,254 miles of that border.
Beyond the river on each side are hundreds of thousands of square miles of human-punishing but environmentally fragile deserts and canyonlands.
The desert is home to wildlife species that will decline and possibly become extinct if they are walled off from the river’s water. It will become a vast dead zone.
What are we going to do, install doggie doors? Then what would be the point of the wall?
And if a wall is built all along the river, we will cede the river entirely to Mexico. If Mexico won’t pay for the wall, it sure won’t allow it to be built on the Mexican side.
Since Trump came into office, the federal government has started to build an additional 40 miles of previously approved “steel bollard wall” in California and Texas at a cost of $292 million ($7.3 million a mile).
Those walls, expected to be finished in May, are made of thick steel posts filled with concrete and topped with spikes or a 5-foot anti-climbing plate at the top.
People with chainsaws are already sawing person-sized holes in them.
Nearly 4,000 people on terrorist watch lists were stopped from entering the United States last year.
Only 41 of those were stopped at ports of entry on the southern border and five were apprehended between those ports, according to Homeland Security.
Not a single person who has carried out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil arrived in this country from the southern border.
Our 19,800 Customs and Border Patrol agents are already doing an awesome job in that regard.
Moreover, telling people in their own countries that they won’t get in has had a strong deterrent effect.
The number of undocumented immigrants apprehended by CBP has fallen steadily from more than 1.6 million a year in 2000 to
303,916 in 2017, a decline of
80 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 60 percent of undocumented immigrants who do get in enter through airports and “overstay” their work or student or tourist visas.
So where is the crisis? What has changed along the southern border is the demographics and the optics.
Now it is unaccompanied children and families who are seeking asylum, mostly from Central American countries rather than Mexico.
Most of these Central Americans have traveled 2,000 miles north in groups – caravans – for the safety that numbers afford and to avoid having to pay “coyotes” to smuggle them.
That’s the optics that Trump has used to claim we are being invaded.
But these people do not try to evade the CBP and escape into the interior of the country. They immediately surrender to agents.
The CBP is not set up to deal with families and so it is bottling them up at ports of entry, mistreating them in detention facilities and suddenly releasing them, hundreds at a time, into Texas city parks and bus stations.
This is a crisis of Trump’s own making, made far worse by keeping the government departments shut down that employ CBP and ICE agents, TSA agents, immigration judges, and now the entire Justice Department.
If he declares a national security emergency, how is building a wall that is going to take years to complete going to protect us?
He will immediately be challenged in court. Has anyone noticed that he has lost virtually every court battle over immigration so far in his presidency – the Muslim ban (twice), family separation, the deportation of asylum seekers?
He made a moronic campaign promise – simply as a memory device at rallies, according to campaign aides – to “build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it.”
Everyone, including every single Trump voter, knew from the get-go that couldn’t happen.
But we all know, this it isn’t about the wall, it’s just about showing his base and certain Fox News pundits that he’s “fighting for them,” all the way up to election day 2020.