So, some say the first priority of United States immigration policy should be “securing the border.” Southern border, that is. Physically preventing anyone from crossing the border without passing through a continuously regulated secure checkpoint. Presumably this means multiple fencing, guard stations and patrols across the whole length, some air and satellite surveillance, whatever.
Leaving aside, if possible, the matter of whether this is desirable–is it even possible? Is it actually practical to contemplate spending the resources to maintain that level of genuine security across the entire length of the border with Mexico? Would this need to be a permanent condition, or how would that work?
As a guestimate based on the Israeli-West Bank barrier, it would cost $7 billion to fortify the border. How expensive you feel this is depends on how fast you want to get it up, and what you’re comparing it to.
I would think there is enough advanced technology available to monitor the border without even building a fence. You’d need a way to react quick enough with enough manpower to catch, catalogue, and then deport the people you catch. Kind of a tag and release program actually.
With 370,000 troops deployed worldwide each taking up ~3’ we could cover 1,110,000’ of the border. Since the US/Mexico border is about 10.4 million feet long we could put 10’ between each man and completely cover the border. Of course people need to sleep and take vacations so call it three shifts and put 30’ between each solder and it would be doable without spending any additional money.
Physically patrolling the border is impossible, but both the camera solution and just serious enforcement of immigration law (finding illegals not necessarily at the border itself) can make a big difference in illegal immigration at the margin.
Land mines. Cheap and easy. Carpet a strip a hundred meters wide along the entire border. No one gets past them, and there will be no repeat offenders. Nothing short of that will be 100% effective.
If the OP would settle for less than 100%, how much less?
Sure. And there’s gazillions of police officers all over the country doing their jobs in their local communities. We can’t reassign them to the borders - that’s ruinously expensive - but a small nudge for them to be more vigilant about illegal immigration, and thoroughly prosecute apprehended illegals, would have a big effect.
Migrants used to come in through cities & on roads. The USA thought we could close those & secure the border. Now they come in through the desert, which was previously considered a natural barrier.
If you build a fence, they can tunnel under it.
Build a wall with a foundation 100’ deep, they can go back to crashing checkpoints.
Close all roads in & out of Mexico, they’ll swim the Gulf of Mexico.
Mine our territorial waters? They’ll find ways to forge papers, maybe go through third-party countries.
So we can, in theory, completely close all of our borders to all traffic, all trade, all tourism, both ways–abolish exit visas for Americans so no one is able to falsely “re-enter.”
We can mine the waters, forbid fishing beyond a given limit–because swimmers could latch onto them out on the open sea.
We can force Americans to carry papers everywhere, then upgrade to radioactive tattoos administered by the DHS, with long prison terms for anyone who copies the technique.
At some point our own people will be chafing under the limitations, long before it stops a single illegal.
And this is why, again? Because somebody might lose a job to an immigrant?:rolleyes:
But, my point being, if you can afford ALL those officers (and all the other expensive shit), why can’t you afford a small fraction of those(that stuff) to control the border?
In my mind, the only real question (beside the principle of maintaining/enforcing law in the first place) is does the cost to control the border cost more than it “costs” us to allow totally uncontrolled “migration”?
If you’re putting up a fence it would make sense to put sensors on it so that you can tell if someone is tunneling under it or cutting through it, or even getting near it for that matter.
Crashing checkpoints? I’d think that would be a small subset of the total people who would cross a border.
Same here. Only so many people are going to risk swimming through the Gulf, or even boating. Plus, it is easier to spot such people.
Locks are designed to stop the lawful and the lazy. Not having a lock invites anyone to enter.
You’re missing that people are now crossing through a natural barrier that the government doesn’t find it worth it to secure. It’s a desert, friend.
They can get forged papers, or come in in container ships. In the 1980’s, they were coming in in trucks. I said you won’t stop a single migrant, & I mean it.
It’s funny, the person in this thread who seems to have the worst opinion of illegal immigrants is the one that’s defending them.
Illegal immigrants are not lemmings, and they’re not coming here just to spite us. Once the percieved difficulty of getting here outweighs the percieved reward for even one person who was considering the trip, your claim will be wrong.
That is the question of the thread. Can you secure it? Yes, you can. But it depends on IF you want to do it and HOW MUCH you want to spend. I wasn’t making a comment on whether it should be done.
Although, it makes sense that there is some sort of vetting process on who you allow to emigrate to your country. If you had no controls on your borders you’d not only have everyone south of your border showing up in your country, you’d have tens of millions from all over the world. The difference is that it costs many thousands of dollars more and extra logistics for them to smuggle themselves from overseas than across a desert. But, hey, if that is what you want then lobby for an open door policy and see what happens.
The Berlin wall stopped people. Not everyone, but many of them. A Mexican wall could do similarly, if we threw enough people and technology at it. We wouldn’t stop everyone, but I personally guarantee some would be stopped - all the ones shot by the machine gun towers, for example.
OK, let’s pretend you’re right. Is that what we want? Should the penalty for entering the country without getting on a twenty-year waiting list be summary death? I submit that that is exactly what it would take to lower the number of entrants, & I don’t think the punishment fits the crime there.
To put it another way. Yes, we can secure the border, by having policies roughly as protectionist & isolationist as Albania prior to 1990. But the methods would violate principles of proportionality in sentencing, & the economic price would be higher than any putative gain from having fewer persons in the economy.
(Granted, I don’t believe any such gain exists. I don’t understand how having fewer workers & consumers is going to create three times as many jobs as the number of resident aliens removed, but clearly there’s some “commonsensical” economic analysis my college-l’arning has blinded me to.)