I suspect that your “effectiveness rate” would be far, far lower with towers / personnel located several miles or more apart. Even with cameras, if your towers were 10 miles apart, that means that, probably at best, your guards would need at least five minutes to respond to a group attempting to cross the wall. I suspect that, by the time the guards arrived, many groups would be able to be long gone.
Looking at the details of the “Inner German border” on Wikipedia, it mentions that there were 700 watchtowers along the length of that fortified border (which was 866 miles long), as well as roughly 1000 fortified bunkers, which also contained guards. My understanding is that there were few, if any, locations along that border that were not in line of sight to at least one watchtower.
So, again, yes, a fortified, heavily manned border wall would be effective. East Germany proved that. I don’t think, however, that even Trump’s vague descriptions of what he wants as his wall really include that, and building a wall like that would be exorbitantly expensive.
So now we’re not just talking a hundred billion dollar wall, we’re talking regular guard towers and guards and patrols and patrol vehicles and billions more annually to watch empty desert to protect us against a population that commits fewer crimes and works harder than citizens?
Do you actually wonder why everyone keeps pointing out how ridiculous this entire concept appears?
Random patrols in vehicles plus monitoring approaches means they’d more likely than not already be closer than that.
But let’s say from detection to the time they crossed is 3 minutes because the group is all Olympian special forces and worst case scenario all personnel are at least 5 miles away. They are halfway there before a crossing is made and maybe the first two have made it half a mile past there at a dead sprint before they arrive with quads already having made a decision to detain the closest few.
Maybe 4 of these people are able to evade them. The rest are caught crossing or very close by.
This is just a scenario of being reasonably sure you could catch or deter most people.
Issues: anything having to do with a reason for building or not building a wall. Which I have little opinion of and favor the not building side.
Pure mechanics: walls work, been proven through thousands of years , across cultures , in thousands of scenarios and continues to be proven every single day.
It seems like you’re saying the wall will slow down crossers by 3 minutes. I’m not sure I’m willing to pay 150 billion of my taxes (plus probably 20-30 billion a year in maintenance) to slow down a handful of people from crossing a border by 3 minutes.
Plus, 3 minutes seems like a really really really long time to climb a ladder. I usually don’t expect to take more than a couple of seconds to climb my ladder. How high do you think they’re climbing?
The point that I think we (or, at least me) have been trying to make is not that “walls don’t work,” it’s that “walls can work, but in this case, in this situation, the vague proposal that Trump has made almost undoubtedly would not work as he and his supporters believe it would.”
A fortified, militarized border, with heavy patrols and numerous features beyond “a wall” probably would work. First, that’s not what Trump has seemed to propose. Second, the issues of exerting eminent domain over many thousands of acres of privately owned land, as well as the fact that the entire Texas / Mexico border is a river, are huge issues. And, third, building something that would actually work (i.e., a militarized border zone) would be ridiculously expensive, orders of magnitude beyond the $5.7 billion, or whatever number Trump has pulled out of thin air.
CBP spends tons on personnel already. Any physical barrier just makes them more effective.
Again, a wall simply lowers the required personnel to secure an area by an order of magnitude.
Do we need it…doubtful
If I had to decide where to put several billion dollars this would be like number 9,999 on my maybe.list.
You’re suggesting random patrols, plus guard towers, plus electronic monitoring. What does the wall add to that? How does it reduce the need for personnel? Seems like with the random patrols and guard towers you’ll need more personnel?
I can see how walls would help in heavily-trafficked areas (where we already have fencing). But in the middle of nowhere? I don’t see how it would help at all.
How fast are these ATVs that they are covering 5 miles in 3 minutes?
Also, how long do you think it takes for a motivated person to climb a wall?
When they show up on their quads, and a dozen people run in a dozen different directions, how do they catch them all? Do they just start shooting?
With this scenario, you’ve caught one or two of a group of a dozen. The effectiveness of your wall is about 10%.
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Walls work for what? You can’t just say “walls work” without defining what function they are supposed to be for.
The walls in my house work to keep out the weather and various critters. They are very porous to any human being that wants to get in.
The border wall would do well at damming up creeks, interfering with migration, disrupting trade, and stealing people’s land, but would not do much to prevent a human being that wanted to get in.
The thing that would really lower the need for border patrol by an order of magnitude would be, drum roll please, giving a lot less of a shit about undocumented border crossings.
They’re not nearly as dangerous as people driving 10 miles above the speed limit, or driving while buzzed. They don’t do nearly the damage to our economy that teenage shoplifters do. They don’t put nearly as many workers out of business as do white-collar criminals.
How fast are these ATVs that they are covering 5 miles in 3 minutes?
Also, how long do you think it takes for a motivated person to climb a wall?
When they show up on their quads, and a dozen people run in a dozen different directions, how do they catch them all? Do they just start shooting?
With this scenario, you’ve caught one or two of a group of a dozen. The effectiveness of your wall is about 10%.
You detect a group on approach, not after breech.
If they are really good at hiding maybe , maybe they can get with a couple hundred yards assuming a lack of IR detection.
So, they need to run a couple hundred yards with a ladder, erect it , scale it … Probably twice.
In 3 minutes … Just so the first one over who happens to run a five minute mile in rough terrain can make it half a mile before CBP arrives. 2:30 later.
So if they all happen to be special forces, then best case scenario maybe 2-4 out if a group of a dozen highly fit individuals escape.
Oh I see exactly what you mean there but
apparently there really are people who have no idea how a wall could possibly function to help secure an area.
There’s a million valid reasons it’s a bad idea.
Walls have no effectiveness is just not one of them.
This is a nonsensical argument. You are comparing the effectiveness of the Berlin Wall system (wall + fence + guards every few hundred feet + dogs + land mines + everything else they had) with what is proposed as basically a standalone wall, with zero land mines and zero guard towers and zero shoot-to-kill orders and most if not all of the guards and dogs dozens of miles away. Those are not equivalent, and trying to pretend that they are makes no sense at all.
If you want to propose a Berlin-like system along the border, then feel free, but that’s not what Trump has proposed at any point, so the objections about effectiveness are made in response to what he really has proposed. Would you care to make arguments about the effectiveness of an essentially unmanned wall that doesn’t have land mines?
How about a group of a dozen running 300 yards with a ladder and some carpet ,climbing it one at a time, then recovering it, running 20 yards then doing it again.
Then running far enough not to be able to be caught after the fact.
In heavy traffic areas, you are presumably putting your border agents in the vicinity too, so when somebody goes over the wall, there’s somebody close at hand to catch them. Mr. Trump and his administration have made no comparable proposal for the vast empty stretches that comprise most of the border.