Danke.
Lordy, God Almighty. This is General Questions, not Great Debates. Are these factual answers?
There are both legal and practical implications for where and how a border wall can be built. The main issue is posed by the Great River, which acts as the border between Texas and México. For obvious reasons, building a wall down the middle of the river is not practical. As the articles discussing the problems regarding border properties make clear (usually), the wall will often have to be inland from the river a bit (often built on the solid ground just north of the river’s floodplain). Then there are the places where the river is damned, er, that is, dammed, creating reservoirs. And, of course, in some places, the border is either south or north of the river, making things marginally easier.
Google Maps shows the border varies from the river. It was surveyed at some point, and the Rio Grande moved, leaving some parts if the USA in Mexico, and some parts of Mexico in the USA.
I’m comfortable that there’s a Factual Answer here for the OP’s General Question …
… and I think there’s more to be said in the matter …
As week or so ago, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke raised some eyebrows by suggesting that the wall might be built on Mexican territory. Kinda sorta maybe, depending on what you make of it.
What he said was, we can’t reasonably build it down the middle of the river, and we’re not going to build it on our side, effectively ceding the river to Mexico.
Put the border wall on Mexico’s side? Trump’s interior secretary raises eyebrows
I rather suspect he was edging towards saying no wall of any kind along the part of the border delineated by the Rio Grande, but put resources into some other method of detecting, deterring or repelling incursions.
Legalities aside, the problem with putting the wall on Mexican territory is obvious. The Mexicans could just demolish it.
Is that actually true? Google maps is not known for its accurate cartography when it comes to borders, and I thought the general rules for “river” borders is that natural changes in the river’s course are reflected in the border, but artificial changes are not.
Does the actual wording of the border treaty say “The Rio Grande”, or “The Course of the Rio Grande as it exists now”, or something else entirely?
Here’s an article on a bit of land, the Horcón Tract, that was cut off from the US by an (illegal) artificial change in the course of the river, that by right should have stayed US territory, but over the years the tract kind of became Mexican by osmosis.
It was surveyed in the land grab after the war with Mexico.
“The Treaty negotiators understood all too well that their line was to a certain extent arbitrary. So, they added a requirement to investigate its entire 2000-mile length, commissioning a bi-national survey to record, measure and draw the new boundary’s position on the ground. A decidedly 19th-century project, this quantitative and qualitative measuring assumed it could cement the relationship between the words on the page and the line in the sand, as if declaring it both legally and physically would make it practically so.”
Sorry I can’t find a shorter cite. I will post a better one if I find it again.
Yeah. I hate when ED is used legitimately, just makes it easier for them to steal someone’s land to build a shopping mall. But the feigned ignorance is annoying in this case. Who wouldn’t realize the potential problems with owning border property?
I’ve always read that in an eminent domain proceeding, the former owner is entitled to just compensation, usually meaning fair market value plus reasonable damages for disruption, relocation, etc. I don’t think that’s quite the same as just renting from the government.
Watch the video I linked earlier, in the case of border properties for the walls the land owners got less than just compensation.
Sure. Whatever you want to call paying thousands of dollars per year for property you don’t control and have no choice in whether it gets sold or to whom.
Also, econ 101 was a long time ago for me, but I’m pretty sure a “market price” requires both the seller and buyer to voluntarily agree on it. Not just the party with the most guns and lawyers on their side saying “you’ll accept this price or go to jail”.
You might want to brush up on your old textbooks, then. Fair market value (slightly different than market price) is what an item would trade for at a fair auction. A recalcitrant seller can’t raise the market value of his land, even if he might demand a higher than market value if he was selling voluntarily.
Under rulings on the 5th Amendment:
While the federal government has a constitutional right to “take” private property for public use, the Fifth Amendment’s Just Compensation Clause requires the government to pay just compensation, interpreted as market value, to the owner of the property. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined fair market value as the most probable price that a willing but unpressured buyer, fully knowledgeable of both the property’s good and bad attributes, would pay.
I don’t know, they’ve apparently owned it since 1921, and no one had suggested putting up a wall in the first 80 years or so they owned it.
See the great international atrocities visited upon the citizens of Estcourt Station, Maine.
Or a much more interesting article here