It’d be more effective to simply reverse the flow of “undesirables.” Keep a steady stream of convicts, homeless people, the mentally ill, white supremacists, etc. over the border Mexico’s way and eventually they’ll build their own wall. Problem solved!
And some, I assume, will be good people…
Alzarian, I’ll ask one more time, pointedly: do you believe your proposal would violate the eighth amendment?
As an addendum, given your additional proposal to punish family members for escapes–do you believe that would violate the sixth amendment?
He either isn’t aware or doesn’t care that even illegal immigrants have (some) constitutional protections.
I’m a completely amoral monster, so I’m willing to totally accept grabbing illegal immigrants and forcing them to work on the wall. I’ll even handwave the expense of guarding them, housing and feeding them - we can force some of them to grow food for the others, some of them to build houses for the others, and the bullies among them to guard the others. I have no concern whatsoever for human rights or legality; this all sounds like a great plan!
But how does it pay for the wall again? It covers the labor, but there’s also going the materials to account for. Are we going to force illegals to mine the earth and produce the concrete and barbed wire? Are we going to make them manufacture the barbed wire and ask-questions-later automated guns to mount on top? This sounds complicated; can we force them to also manage and administrate it all?
I’m also a little worried that while trying to make this happen we’re going to encounter an immigrant shortage. It seems we’re going to need a lot of them, after all.
You can invade your neighbors so you can have Living Room and have the undermen as the slave labor to continue.
What do you take us for, Europeans? 
[QUOTE=begbert2]
I’m a completely amoral monster, so I’m willing to totally accept grabbing illegal immigrants and forcing them to work on the wall. I’ll even handwave the expense of guarding them, housing and feeding them - we can force some of them to grow food for the others, some of them to build houses for the others, and the bullies among them to guard the others. I have no concern whatsoever for human rights or legality; this all sounds like a great plan!
But how does it pay for the wall again? It covers the labor, but there’s also going the materials to account for. Are we going to force illegals to mine the earth and produce the concrete and barbed wire? Are we going to make them manufacture the barbed wire and ask-questions-later automated guns to mount on top? This sounds complicated; can we force them to also manage and administrate it all?
I’m also a little worried that while trying to make this happen we’re going to encounter an immigrant shortage. It seems we’re going to need a lot of them, after all.
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Instead of costing us, say, 2 dozen billion dollars it sounds like it will only be, $24 billion or so. That’s a great savings! And I’m sure the quality will be top notch. Forced labor always seems to bring out the best in those forced at gun point to work, after all…
Leaving the morality and legality of this aside, if they’re going to be in the USA for the entirety of the time spent building the wall, and then they become Americans, and the USA is paying for the materials, would you mind explaining to me again how MEXICO is paying for anything?
Oh, Trump uses members captured from a friendly nation, enslaves them to build a useless wall to his glory. Sounds like something out of the Bible.
According to my FaceBook feed today, there is a GoFundMe page for the wall…
I think the only way to get Mexico to actually pay for the wall or at least a majority of the cost would be to conquer them. If the US invaded we would probably only lose about 5 thousand troops and we could take over the whole country. Even at $5 million value per solder, the cost borne by the US would be about $25 billion or about a third or current estimates from there we’d build the wall on Mexico’s southern border which would drop the remaining cost of the wall to ~$20B. It would be trivial to loot $50 billion from Mexico by taking a 10% tariff for five years.
From there if we didn’t want to turn them into another Guam or Peurto Rico we could stay for a full decade and build a US/Mexico wall prior to freeing them. Outside of that, I don’t see any way to get Mexico to pay for even a Majority of the wall.
There is also the cost in paying for all the land that will be seized via eminent domain, which would involve paying the fair market value of the land taken plus severance damages to hundreds if not thousands of property owners on the U.S. side of the border. It is unclear whether the $20+ billion estimates for building the wall include those costs.
It is certainly becoming clear that the cost of the wall could not be covered solely through the labor of illegal immigrants arrested and pressed into service. Even the admittedly brilliant idea of harvesting organs to save American lives would only be a drop in the bucket.
It does indeed seem as if some sort of forced financial obligation being levied on the Mexican government may be necessary to achieve this goal. I wonder if we could possibly set up some sort of financial transaction with the Mexican government, providing them an opportunity to pay for the relocation of their citizens back into their territory with a surcharge added on to each illegal immigrant to go into the wall building fund. It does seem rather ludicrous not to exact some sort of tax from those who break the laws, and if the actual criminal is unable or unwilling to pay - perhaps the government of Mexico can foot the bill. Thus, the wall gets funding, and as an extra bonus, it puts a huge incentive on Mexico to stop border crossing as well.
Why would Mexico ever agree to do so? No Mexican politician could ever survive re-election if they agreed to such a deal.
During Trump’s campaign I had figured the Trump plan was to demand that Mexico write a check for the anticipated cost of the wall (i.e., $50 billion) and suspend all trade, visas, etc. until the check was written.
Mexico would never agree to that, since it would be political suicide for their leaders, and thus both countries would suffer economically from the loss of trade. We would look like incredible bullies trying to prey on a much poorer country.
Mexico writing a check could accomplish the goal set forth, but if it is not politically viable for those in charge of Mexico to do so, then pressure would have to be placed on the government to essentially make it more costly to refuse to pay for the wall. Once paying for the wall becomes the lesser of two evils for the Mexican government - then it could happen.
Otherwise, we entertain creative ideas to extract payment from Mexican citizens themselves, and as those here illegally are easiest to collect from, so it stands to reason that they bear the brunt of obligation, until their government writes the check. If the illegal immigrants can’t pay in money… They can pay with their labor. This is a kind thing too, as most in the US are seeking work… wall building is work.
Given your belief that enslaving people to build a wall is a good idea, and given your belief that enslaving people who want a job is wise, what would you think about the wisdom of outlawing such proposals (in obvious contravention of the first amendment, but you don’t seem to care about the Bill of Rights), and enslaving folks who advocate them? We could forcibly change their citizenship to Mexican before putting them on the wall, if that’d help.
I would like to step up and second the claim that enslaving people and pressing them into unpaid labor is a kind thing to do. This is such a clearly true thing that it deserves to be said twice.
However, despite the brilliance and moral fortitude of this plan, I’m still thinking that labor isn’t going to be the full cost of the wall, and so far all that you’re planning to squeeze out of our slaves will be labor. I mean, yes, we can raid their savings and clean them out financially too, but I don’t anticipate that many of the illegal immigrants will be independently wealthy. So I think we’ll still come up short.
You mention that there are a lot of harder-to-collect-from Mexicans out there who annoyingly evade our clutches by not illegally crossing the border - and that’s a well of capital and resources with a lot of potential. Particularly if we capture, rob, and enslave the people who are in control of the Mexican government treasury. So I think our course is clear - conquer Mexico, and clean it out. That should give us the resources we need to build the wall - paid for by Mexico.
Well, yes of course. I’m just saying I think that was how the plan supposedly went at the time.