Border wall would be a boondoggle
The first stage of President Donald Trump’s controversial borderwall project ended Nov. 16, while the prospects for any more wall construction — and even what type of wall — remain uncertain.
A border patrol agent was killed and his partner seriously wounded in the line of duty Sunday in West Texas. Few of the details of the incident have been released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez, 36, and his partner were said to have come under attack while on patrol, and some Texas lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz, immediately called for enhanced border security.
Not to be outdone, President Donald Trump got into the act Sunday night tweeting not just condolences but — rather predictably — vowing to build a wall along the southern border.
Make no mistake, whoever shot Agent Martinez deserves to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But even Congress seems to understand that a border wall is a boondoogle. There’s little chance that funding for the project — conservatively estimated at $10 billion but more likely to cost at least two or three times that — will win approval in the U.S. Senate. Far more likely is that Congress will eventually approve an expanded border patrol force.
Why is a wall the wrong fix? There are legal issues, given that much of the land involved isn’t controlled by the federal government. When attempted in the past, it’s often proved ineffective — tunnels are a popular counter strategy, but there’s also a more basic counter-measure of simply entering the country legally and then overstaying your visa (which is how the majority of undocumented enter the country now).
On the other hand, if the attacker or attackers who killed Agent Martinez are involved in the drug trade, then there’s all the more reason to doubt the effectiveness of a wall. If the United States has learned anything, it’s the fallacy of conducting a “war on drugs.” Until the U.S. treats illegal drugs as a health scourge and not simply a crime, trafficking will continue, as the current opioid crisis with its accidental overdoses has demonstrated.
That makes the wall mostly a costly distraction, and one that stirs xenophobia and harms relations with one of this country’s most important trading partners. Illegal immigration isn’t the cause of this nation’s crime problem. Indeed, studies have shown over and over that, as a group, the undocumented are less likely to commit violent crimes than people who were born and raised in the U.S.
We aren’t at war with Latin America. We don’t need to turn Texas or Arizona into police states. And we don’t need a wall. What we need most is sensible policy, to pay attention to the circumstances that caused this tragedy, and to not mindlessly recite the usual scaremongering talking points to stir the electorate into fearing anyone who has a darker skin color or speaks Spanish.