While I refuse to waste my time responding to each latest edition of Trump’s Trite Tweets, I will leverage one recent missive as a starting point to address a topic that has been front and center since the 2016 campaign: The Border Wall.
First, the tweet:
I would be willing to “shut down” government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall! Must get rid of Lottery, Catch & Release etc. and finally go to system of Immigration based on MERIT! We need great people coming into our Country!
— Donald Trump, July 2018
I have neither the time nor inclination to attempt to parse the apparently random set of words therein. The larger, serious issues related to immigration are deserving of an in-depth post — which I will try to eventually address. For now, though, I want to focus solely on “the Wall”.
Trump’s proposal was summarized in his initial campaign speech:
“I will build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me — and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
— Donald Trump, June 2015
The U.S.-Mexico border stretches for about 2,000 miles. Only about 350 miles of that are currently fenced with a design intended to stop people (as opposed to vehicles). Some prototype “walls” have been built in California but they aren’t in extensive use. The bottom line is that this isn’t an easy project. And the estimated cost is a moving target.
In 2016, Trump originally estimated the cost at about $12B. A Department of Homeland Security report in early 2017 increased that estimate to about $22B. A funding request from the Trump administration in early 2018 set the estimate at $33B. That’s already real money and the trend isn’t promising. Even more interesting is that fact that all of these estimates consider only the actual construction costs of the wall.
None of these estimates include on-going maintenance of the wall. None of these estimates include the cost of peripheral construction (e.g. the cost of building and maintaining a road alongside the border). None of these estimates include the costs for additional border agents to patrol the wall (without whom the wall is simply an expensive speed bump). And, my favorite part, none of these estimates consider the cost of land acquisition. Seriously. A border wall would impact approximately 5,000 parcels of property and no related costs have been included in the cost estimates.
My home state of Texas accounts for over half of the US side of the border with Mexico. As one might expect, this isn’t our first rodeo with respect to border issues.
Since our border with Mexico runs through the middle of the Rio Grande, any Texas wall needs to be built north of the border itself. The 2006 Secure Fence Act enabled the federal government to pursue private land in Texas for double-layer border fences through outright purchase, easements, or condemnation. More than 300 condemnation cases were brought against Texas landowners – who didn’t take kindly to the government taking their land. As of 2017 – eleven years later – over a quarter of those cases were still in court. There is little reason to believe that a more intrusive wall would go over any better with landowners. In any case, it certainly won’t be cheap. Some more inclusive estimates have placed the total cost of the wall at between $70B and $400B.
Which brings us to a core tenant of the original Trump plan: Mexico will pay for the wall. Trump wasn’t clear about many things, but he was quite clear about this. In fact, this was arguably the cornerstone of his campaign. He even said, “Mark my words.” So I am.
Frankly, while I personally believe that the environmental and social impacts of building an impractical and largely useless wall make it a fool’s errand, my primary objection to the wall is that I DON’T WANT TO PAY FOR IT. Make some other fool pay for it and I might move on to something else. Well, okay, maybe not. But this blog post would have certainly been a lot shorter.
Multiple iterations of the Mexican government have made it abundantly clear that they simply aren’t going to pay for the wall. Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, recently stated: “Not now, not ever.” Mexico’s president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took it one step further: “We won’t allow this wall to be built.” Mexico’s former president, Vicente Fox, was perhaps the most clear: “We’ll never pay for that fucking wall.”
So, if Mexico isn’t likely to write us a big check, how exactly does Trump intend to get them to pay? While there simply aren’t many options, the most discussed approach is via tariffs. Unfortunately, no reasonable tariffs would generate anywhere near the funds required to pay for the wall. And that assumes that tariffs actually work in the first place.
For example, Mexico currently supplies about 75% of the fresh vegetables sold in the U.S. to the tune of about $6B annually. Cool. However, any tariffs imposed by the U.S. government on Mexican farmers will simply be passed on to consumers in the U.S. Thus, the border wall would still be funded by Americans – we’d just be paying more for tomatoes instead of paying more in taxes. Nice try, but you don’t get credit for just shifting my expense to another line item in Quicken. Add the economic impact of any retaliatory tariffs that will likely be imposed by Mexico and the tariff methodology wouldn’t pay for a bathroom wall.
If reasonable people were actually prevalent in Washington, perhaps an alternative solution could be found. A bipartisan plan last year to substitute a “smart wall” concept went nowhere. In essence, the plan would leverage state-of-the-art technology – including drones, motion-sensitive cameras with night vision, real-time image analysis, seismic sensors, etc. — linked to a central control room with access to several rapid-response teams deployed along the border. This virtual wall would be considerably more flexible, arguably more effective, easier to maintain, substantially less intrusive, and a whole lot cheaper.
But that’s not the “physical, tall, powerful, beautiful” wall that Trump promised. So, no.
By all means, Mr. President, please force a government shutdown over funding of an unpopular border wall just prior to the mid-term elections. Even the Democrats can’t screw up that gift.