I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Trump’s prime-time border diatribe last night, but I did read the transcript. Wow. Numerous media outlets have done a decent job fact-checking the cornucopia of outright lies, so there’s little reason to do that. However, I will add a few thoughts to my previous take on the subject.
First, could a southern wall stop a random terrorist from entering the country? Yeah, sure. But at an initial cost of $5.7B, Trump would need to prove that it’s a cost-effective solution to a pervasive problem. He didn’t. He can’t. The facts are:
- Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security recently estimated that successful illegal entries into the U.S. fell 91% between 2000 and 2016. Seems we’re already on the right track without a wall.
- Over 2/3 of the immigrants that are currently in the U.S. illegally entered the country legally and then overstayed their visas. If we want to fix an illegal immigration problem, perhaps visa enforcement might be the place to start.
- While Trump keeps telling us that 4,000 terrorists were caught trying to enter the U.S. in 2017, he conveniently ignores the fact that only 12 non-U.S. citizens on the terror watchlist were stopped at the Mexican border last year. The vast majority of the rest were stopped at airports. Even assuming for the moment that a wall would work, is $5.7B a good price to pay to address .03% of the problem?
- The border patrol did stop another 41 non-U.S. citizens on the watchlist at the Canadian border. Are we going to build a northern wall as well?
While $5.7B is real money, does anyone really think that would be the end of it? I’m pretty sure that’s not the way extortion works. If Trump gets his down payment, we’ll have a new shutdown well before the end of the year to pay for the next installment.
So how about this? We give Trump the $5.7B so he can say he “won” – BUT he can only use the money for one of several non-wall options. Here’s just a few possibilities:
- If we really want to make America safer, we could buy the military some very impressive hardware. $5.7B will buy 2 Zumwalt-class Guided Missile Destroyers, 47 F-35A Stealth Fighters, or 161 M1A2 Abrams Tanks.
- If we want something that might actually be useful on the border, $5.7B will buy 1414 RQ-4 Global Hawk Surveillance Drones. Or we could just pay to double the number of border patrol agents for the next five years.
- $5.7B would go a very long way towards a cure for Alzheimer’s. Find me anyone that thinks that’d be a waste of money.
- Thinking outside the box a bit, we could buy both an iPhone X and an iPad Pro for every man, woman, and child living in the Greater Austin area … ’cause, well, that’s where I live.
- We could buy a 2019 F-150 for every military service member currently deployed outside of the United States.
- We could write a $1700 check to every public school teacher in America.
- The Dallas Cowboys are currently worth a bit over $5B. We could literally make them America’s Team and we’d even have some money left over to buy a decent offensive line.
Of course, we could also just not spend money we don’t have. Why doesn’t that ever occur to anyone in Washington?