Trump wants five billion dollars to pay for the wall. Why isn’t anyone saying, “Hey, Mr. President, you promised that Mexico would pay for the wall.”?
We know Trump does not have the authority to spend Mexico’s money, but why doesn’t anyone call him on his promise.
I have some basic questions:
There must be some kind of fence or wall in place now. How effective is it?
If it is not 100% effective, then how bad is the problem, and is it worth spending billions on fixing it?
(Trump wants 5B, but that’s just the start)
He already has his set of excuses in place. “Oh, they will pay for it eventually”. “Oh, they will pay for it indirectly.” More empty shyster salesman BS that explains it just fine for his followers.
Trump already said that his new NAFTA deal would make so much extra money for the US that Mexico is paying for the wall.
There. Problem solved.
Answer: Not very.
The big issue with fencing or a wall is the border is just massive, in some areas it cannot be effectively constructed (we actually have some parts of the border that are bodies of water, some are mountainous), and in areas where it is constructed the border is so huge that it’s not like we have Border Patrol agents watching every mile of the border. What this means is you often times have upwards of 20 minutes or more before Border Patrol shows up to get through the existing fencing. There’s a lot of ways to do this pretty quickly.
Additionally, in several spots people have actually dug underground tunnels that authorities don’t detect for a long time and that smuggle lots of people in.
It’s not impossible to make a border almost impossible to get through (look at the DMZ in Korea), but the costs/effort/negative side effects of such a thing would be enormous.
I’ve heard that not only is the current wall and fencing not effective, they are actually negatively effective. The roads they had to construct to get in to erect the barrier have made progress once inside the barriers much easier. So the immigrants can further into the U.S. more readily.
$5 billion sounds like a drastically low estimate. That’s around two thousand miles of border, a project that will take well over a decade, thousands of workers who must be housed, fed, protected, paid, etc., private property along the wall that must be acquired, and so forth. I’d be surprised if it were finished for anything less than $30 billion.
I say it to anyone who brings it up. Granted it’s usually me shaking my fist at the tv. But, hey, I do my bit.
Serious question…do we provide foreign aid to Mexico? (I assume we do). If we were supposed to give them, say $5b over the next 15 years, why can’t the U.S. just say “Nah, we need that money to build a wall.”
I’m not saying I *agree *to such an approach (I don’t), but it would seem to solve a number of problems. It “finds” $5b without raising taxes or shifting money from U.S. funding recipients. Plus Trump could point to how Mexico was indeed paying for the wall.
It seems so simple, I must be missing something obvious.
A lot of people are asking him that. The problem is, his base isn’t asking him that, and he only listens to his base.
It’s moderately effective, it is mostly there to keep drugs out.
Trumps wall would cost $21B and $150M a year for maintenance.
Of course it could cost more, maybe $70B.
This is grandstanding. Trump could get the GOP to slip that $5B in for drug interdiction, and it would sail thru.
It would seem you give the Mexico USD 290 mln a year and it is for the anti drug trafficking… (there are some useful graphics for comparisons).
It seems a bit silly.
What you’re chiefly missing AFAICT [ETA: as Ramira just pointed out] is that US aid to Mexico is given overwhelmingly for purposes that the US supports for its own benefit, chiefly involving law enforcement and the narcotics trade. (And with the new proposed multi-billion-dollar aid initiative, those purposes also embrace the tightening of Mexico’s southern border, which is partly aimed at reducing illegal immigration into the US.)
The amount of money that the US gives to Mexico for purposes that might in the most generous interpretation be deemed purely “altruistic” is comparatively minuscule, maybe a couple million dollars a year. You’re not saving up for a border wall out of that kind of couch-cushion change.
Seems like it would be more cost effective to just buy the drugs outright and then destroy them before they get to the US. Fights the war on drugs and no need for the wall. Anyone know the $$ value of the drugs coming across the border now? Is it anywhere in the neighborhood of $5B (not to mention the yearly maintenance costs thereafter)? Or is this whole wall/drugs thing a smokescreen for just keeping poor brown people out of the US?
I think you all are being just a bit literal here. If a guy shoots out my window and I declare that “He will pay for that window!” and the next day I am at Home Depot buying a new window to replace it, should my wife ask why I am buying the window when I promised that the criminal would pay?
The OP admits that we have no power, short of invasion, sacking, and pillaging to make Mexico directly pay up front for the wall. So the idea that there will be a payment or an offset down the road doesn’t seem like an excuse, but something implicit in the statement.
Now, if we will or ever do that, who knows? But it is not like we should have taken that statement literally as everyone knows that it could not happen.
The “idea that there will be a payment or an offset down the road”, when we have no more power to compel any “payment or an offset down the road” than we do to compel payment up-front, is not “implicit” in the statement at all.
It’s an empty promise, and it doesn’t become less empty just because you’re trying to apply it to some unspecified future time rather than to the present.
Typical Trump defense. His supporters praise him for being “straightforward” and “telling it like it is” until the falsity of his statements is fully exposed, at which point they switch to chiding his critics for having taken his statements “too literally”.
