Assuming we house them in the States. If house them in overseas exile prisons, the costs would be much lower.
A lot of people use “ethnicity” as code for “race,” which confuses the issue. People who share an ethnicity tend to share genes, but they don’t have to. American ethnicity is that set of cultural beliefs, behaviors, and values that Americans, by and large, tend to share. For any given ethnic trait, there are exceptions, but the aggregate holds for the generic American. Americans speak English, and slightly louder and more direct in conversation than, for example, English people, hold the Constitution as an important defining document, etc.
And it would be much harder to monitor them for civil rights abuses, right?
Maybe not, Guantanamo Bay costs $2.7 million per detainee.
Seriously. I totally don’t get why people would want to spend all that money on a damn wall. Surely we have more effective technology than that.
I’m on the fence (ha!) on the immigration issue, but a wall is just dumb. If we’re serious, drones armed with tranquilizer darts + backup cops makes much more sense. 
Not necessarily. First of all, they are criminals already twice over. They committed crimes in their home countries and then they got deported and came back which is (or certainly should be) a crime here. So it’s not like we’re generated criminals here, we’re just dealing with them.
Secondly, why wait for them to commit another crime before we lock them up? They almost certainly will.
Third, as I’ve already pointed out, there’s no reason for a criminal to not come to the US now. We’ve got more stuff to steal, and we if catch you we probably won’t do anything other than hold you temporarily and release you or maybe deport you and you just come back. Giving a reason to not have criminals come here will reduce the number of them once word gets out.
This would save money.
I agree we need more than just a dumb wall. We need more border patrol. More ICE. More technology.
But the wall isn’t that expensive. One of the cites upthread said it would cost $40 billion. That’s nothing. Up in Boston we spent $30 billion (of mostly federal tax dollars) to dig a hole in the ground for a single highway that doesn’t even let more cars in than the old one.
Good point.
And the wall isn’t just about its immediate practical effects. It’s also a statement of purpose. It shows determined commitment to border security and the rule of law.
Lock them up for how long? If their countries won’t take them back, what you’ve basically got are new prisons full of lifers, right?
That’s what the Stasi said.
And it will remind people of the last heavily guarded physical wall between countries.
There’s a couple ways to handle this.
How serious was their crime in their home country? If someone is a murderer in their country and we deport them and they come back I think it’s reasonable to give them a long sentence.
But for most people you just need to deter them from coming back in repeatedly after being deported. Here’s the scenario:
Person commits a crime in their home country. For whatever reason, they are not in prison. But they have a criminal record.
Person comes illegally to the US and is caught.
We deport them to their home country to deal with them.
Then, later we catch them again.
At this point we can just deport them again, but that already didn’t work. I’d say give them a year in federal prison and that would be a powerful deterrent. If they do time and are deported yet again and get caught a third time in the US then we hit them with a longer term. Make sure that they know this.
For every criminal you actually put in prison for ten years for coming back in for the third time there would be many more that learn their lesson and stay away.
It’s completely different to be so terrible that you need a wall to keep your people in and so great that you need a wall to keep other people out.
Heh.
Your analogy is exactly backwards.
In both cases, economic and political elites enforce policies that are completely against the will of the people, exclusively for the benefit of the elites.
That sounds indistinguishable from American culture, though. By the above definition, can’t it be said that every nation is an ethno-state?
It is a crime
Is two years not long enough?
A life sentence for all criminals, eh? A bold plan.
Sure there is - competent, generally honest law enforcement. Why do you suppose the huge drug cartels operate outside the US?
Seems like he’s trying to treat the symptoms, instead of the cause. Why do the illegal immigrants want to come to the US?
To build classy hotels and golf courses, of course.
If there is an American culture, then the people who bear it are ethnically Americans.
Once a nation-state is formed, one of the things that happens is an ethnicity is created. The process is a long one, and takes centuries. Even in Europe, most of the nation-states started out as multi-ethnic, and only gradually has the dominant group become the ethnicity of the nation-state’s citizens.
I would say that Americans are an ethnic group, but not a fully-formed one, because most Americans’ primary ethnic identity is something else. Census data shows that a small but not insignificant portion claim American as their primary ethnic identity, and that these are (by and large) white folk of mainly British heritage.
I’ve read it and I find it lacking. In the section “Make Mexico Pay For The Wall”, he spends three quarters of it lambasting them and only throws in the actual policy proposals in the last paragraph. I can give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s mostly trying to woo voters and not list policy details yet, but what I cannot give him the benefit is how he expects those policies to be done. Here’s his one paragraph on the wall situation:
Where is the detail on HOW he will get that done? If know which payments are from illegal wages already, then we know exactly who’s illegal. But people are illegal because they have no papers, it sounds like a fantasy to me that he’ll just happen to figure out who’s illegal, he’ll happen to figure out when and how much they’re sending, and he’ll just happen to be able to get law enforcement to seize those monies. And how much fees do a bunch of CEOs and diplomats really generate? I bet its probably not that much. And what if the CEO wants to build a factory here in the US, or buy something from us? Is he going to say “Sorry we’re not going to take your money until you get your government to pay us money”? And what’s the point in increasing fees for border crossing cards when he’s trying to stop illegal immigration? He’s just putting the onus on legal travel, that’s not going to deter illegal immigration at all! And attacking NAFTA? He knows that makes money for business right? If Obama did that he’d be lambasted with calls on why he’s bad for business and yada yada yada wealth redistribution, but if Trump does it its ok? What happens if the business say goodbye to the high cost and just relocate to Mexico?
All of this really just attacks legal migration. He thinks that will stop the flow of illegal immigration? Hell, he might increase it. What is his estimate on how much the wall will cost and how much doing all of this will bring in? I saw a lot of numbers on immigration, but not a lot of actual dollar values on cost and estimated revenue. That’s only one of the things I see wrong with this list of proposals. I know that the election’s pretty early, but a paragraph on what you’re going to do but not how much it will cost is not a detailed proposal, its a stump speech
That’s not really fair - some of the proposals treat symptoms, but mandatory e-verify is most definitely aimed at the cause.