What exactly is Trump going to spend the money on? No blank check.
Oh, Hell, I saw that one coming a mile away! 
(running coach’s reply)
That is ridiculous. If island A had a population of 100 and an average of 1 murder per year, and island B had a population of 100,000 and had an average of 5 murders per year, which is safer? Obviously island B, because the rate is what matters, not the absolute number.
Just as a thought experiment, if there’s one violent crime committed by an illegal alien for every ten committed by legal residents, do you propose that we should focus our law enforcement efforts on the one crime first, and leave the ten for later?
RC already quoted it, and has done so again. If you differ from your president on this, that is fine but the claim that that is not what the GOP is asking for specifically is entirely debunked at this point, and repeating your false claim does not help your position.
No, that is not what you see. You see people who were for a 700 mile fence, not for a 2000 mile wall.
The stimulus was needed to prevent our economy from entirely cratering after it had been destroyed while in the hands of republicans. It could have been better, but it ended up being largely tax cuts for those not harmed by the recession, and there were not followups to it as were planned. There are many things I can criticize about the stimulus, but on the whole, I do believe it did far more good than harm.
The wall, not so much. Even if your breathless fears about immigrants were in any way true, the wall, as your president is proposing, will not make any effect on illegal immigration, and so not assuage your fears in the slightest.
So you would charge a $2500 border-crossing fee? How much do you think that would raise.
Beck in the 70s France decided to charge a visa fee for all non-EU visitors. They claimed it was to allow them to vet every visitor to made sure they weren’t terrorists. Then they authorized travel agents to give them out to anyone who paid the fee. Their tourist industry tanked and they abandoned it.
I too like Odelay.
Then how about charging a toll to climb over the fence? 
A ladder tax.
The problem being is they keep going up.
This won’t fly. Trump wants the wall because he’s a racist, not because he’s looking to make money off of immigrants.
If there was a $7 cross-the-wall tax, Trump might support it because he’s an idiot and would let him fleece Latinos, but after a few months he’d notice a large number of Latinos will have collected $7 US each and crossed the border. The tax wouldn’t “work” toward his aim at keeping the number of Latinos low.
Furthermore it wouldn’t stop immigrants from going to American government offices in Latin America and signing up for refugee status there. Whether there’s a wall tax or not, there would still be Latinos entering the United States, so Trump would have another racist temper tantrum.
The OP’s assumption (and some of the others in this thread) seems to be that if the federal government charged entry/exit fees on vehicles crossing the border, that would raise the money for border security without needing Congress to act, and that would break the current impasse.
I’m not a US lawyer, but just from noodling around a bit, there seem to me to be two problems with that:
1 A fee for a government service needs to be authorised by law, and the general law already passed by Congress says that the amount of the fee has to be linked to the service provided to the person paying the fee; and,
2 Even if a fee can be charged, the revenue it generates can only be spent according to the appropriation act passed by Congress. (I.e. The President doesn’t get to spend government revenue from fees as he wishes, but only as permitted by Congress.)
On the first point, the general power to charge fees for services provided by the federal government is set out in 31 US Code s. 9701. It provides for fees for services or things of value provided by a federal agency to a person, based on four factors. The two most pertinent seem to be the costs to the government, and “the value of the service or thing to the individual.”
That sounds to me, as suggested by *iiandyii upthread, that a fee charged under this section can only be based on the cost of the thing or service, and the benefit of the thing or service for the individual. Fees for things or services aren’t meant to be a general revenue source.
If I’m right in that interpretation, hard to see how entry fees could be used to improve border security hundreds of miles away from the service received by the individual crossing the border. How does a fence/wall, drones and security cameras, and increased numbers or border guards 500 miles away benefit the individual and authorise the fee?
So, unless there is some more specific fee-charging legislation, it looks like Congress would need to pass new legislation to authorise the fees proposed by the OP. And that can’t happen during the current [del]Mexican stand-off[/del] Congressional impasse.
The second reason is the appropriations clause of Article I of the Constitution. This is the power of the purse, assigned to Congress. Regardless how money has entered the Treasury (fees, income tax, customs duties), it can only be spent according to an appropriations act passed by Congress.
That means that regardless how the money has been raised, the President can only use it according to the terms of the appropriations acts passed by Congress. So even if there’s authority to charge the fees proposed by the OP, it doesn’t mean Trump can freely decide to use that revenue to build the wall. He can only do it if Congress has granted him that authority.
These aren’t mere technicalities. The history of taxation and appropriations, starting in England and then in the US, emphasise that control over the public revenue and spending are vested in the legislative branch, not the executive branch. That is a crucially important restriction on executive power.
The benefit to the payer is that they are permitted to cross the border, which they presumably want to do. Trump could simply close all borders. So it is a fee for keeping them open.
Could justify any fee that way.
At the extreme, you could pull someone over, and then charge them a fee for letting them continue on their way. You could imprison someone, and charge them a fee for letting them go.
Well, there’s your problem right there.
A toll to use the checkpoint doesn’t “defray” the cost of a border wall. At best, it serves as a fee to defray the use of the checkpoint.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
Trump cannot “simply” close all borders. He can’t shut down the border to legal travelers without convincing the courts. He can’t shut down the border to American citizens. He can’t shut down the border to asylum seekers. He can’t shut down the border to trade without violating the NAFTA treaty, and he definitely can’t do so without damaging the US economy.
This is what you people don’t seem to understand. This entire conservative temper tantrum is being caused by their exasperation with the reality that Trump can’t simply wish the border closed.
And the idea of charging a fee for entry is simply juvenile. The expense of maintaining border entry is not the problem. The problem is that the border cannot be legally, morally, or practically closed and the proposed “wall” is draconian. This entire thread is arguing a solution to a problem that does not exist, instead of addressing the inherent stupidity of the wall itself. Many, many, many posts above have already explained this to you, so I fail to comprehend why you bother.
First, what percentage of these people snuck across the southern border via a route that would be blocked by the wall? If a large percentage entered legally and simply overstayed, then the wall may not make much difference, and other measures might be more useful (such as more efforts to locate overstayers).
Two: DPS says these illegal aliens committed more than 461,000 criminal offenses, but the actual numbers given don’t add up to even half that number (seriously, 1,018 homicide charges; 52,199 assault charges; 14,859 burglary charges; 59,627 drug charges; 690 kidnapping charges; 28,727 theft charges; 40,922 obstructing police charges; 3,491 robbery charges; 5,564 sexual assault charges; 3,396 sexual offense charges; and 6,706 weapon charges = 216,847 charges), so what were the remaining 244,000 or so charges that weren’t even worth mentioning?
Three: what is the actual nature of these charges? For example, there’s an awfully high number of “obstructing police” charges; is that actual interference, or merely failing to tell the cops they were illegal? How many of the drug charges were trafficking, versus mere possession of personal-use quantities? How many were charged (much less convicted) of felonies?
To my eye, it looks like we are actually talking something more like 20 to 30K felonies over an eight-year span, or maybe 3000 felonies per year. How many actual people does that represent? 461K charges / 186K aliens = 2.48 charges per person; does that ratio hold when we limit to felonies, or are we really talking about a couple of hundred people per year charged with a dozen felonies apiece?
If we are talking about making a downpayment of $5 billion (against a total cost perhaps ten times that) to block a couple of hundred felons, is that the most effective use of law enforcement dollars?
What makes you think this would cost the USA (meaning both the US government and the US taxpayers) very little or nothing? What percentage of the people and vehicles crossing the border every day, who would presumably have to pay this toll, are Americans? I would guess that at least half are, but I have not seen any actual statistics?
Also, how much are you budgeting for the cost of collecting and administering this toll? Even handling cash has costs; setting up the infrastructure for electronic collecting (EZ Pass-style) isn’t free. Will the current staff be adequate, or are you going to have to hire more people and build more toll booths?
If you think elected officials from Texas would support massive fees for border crossings, you’re delusional.
This could never get past Congress. Maybe people in Wyoming would be in favor of a gigantic tax on cross border traffic, but not people who actually live in border states.