POINTLESS: Trump’s wall is a waste of money and will not be effective.
By Guadalupe Meza, Staff Writer
During his Oval Office address on January 8th, President Donald Trump explained to the American people why building a southern border should be necessary. He presented a number of arguments as to why the wall might be needed, but these arguments aim to invoke fear of immigrants and lack factual accuracy.
Trump argued that drugs are entering through the Mexico-United States border and that they are causing American citizens to die. While it is true that a large number of drugs are being brought from Mexico, Trump did get some information wrong. According to Time Magazine’s “Here Are the Facts Behind President Trump’s Border Claims,” most of the drugs being brought into the country come in via legal ports of entry. A wall, therefore, would be largely ineffective to stop the drugs from coming in. A problem that could be focused on instead might be America’s drug addiction epidemic, which is what drives these drug sales. Pew Research Center has found that drug-related deaths have doubled in the last decade, increasing from 34,425 to 63,000 in 2016. It’s the law of supply and demand; if America didn’t have such a high demand for drugs, then there would be a lower supply of drugs coming into the country. The federal government has the resources to directly address this issue rather than simply attribute it with border security.
Trump then named a few crimes that have happened at the hands of illegal immigrants, seeming to imply that most immigrants are criminals. In reality, native-born citizens are more likely to be convicted of violent crimes than immigrants. Cato Institute found that in Texas, a state with a large illegal immigrant population, native-born citizens had a higher homicide rate than illegal immigrants. In 2016, 746 native-born Texans were convicted of homicide while only 32 illegal immigrants and 28 legal immigrants were convicted of homicide. Trump often refuses to acknowledge the crimes committed by native-born citizens. He instead acknowledges crimes committed by people of color, as if to villainize them in order to make his point stronger. A majority of the immigrants who cross illegally come looking for a better future, and they would not jeopardize that by committing a gruesome crime.
Trump estimates that the wall, which he previously claimed Mexico would pay for, would cost the federal government around 5.7 billion dollars. Economists predict that it would cost more than that to actually build the wall. The Washington Post explains how economists Treb Allen from Dartmouth College, Cauê Dobbin and Melanie Morten from Stanford University modeled the possible effect of building a wall that covered two-thirds of the border. They concluded that a wall would actually hurt the economy and would not be effective in reducing migration. They found that the wall would only decrease the amount of Mexican workers by 144,000 which is around one percent. Without that one percent, the economy would lose $30,000 per immigrant in economic output. This would amount to a $4 billion loss for the U.S economy. Instead of building a wall with that money, the federal government could use that for more important issues such as providing health care or taking care of the environment. It is not yet clear what the wall would look like, but there have been eight prototypes of the wall made in San Diego. New York Daily News found that the prototypes did not meet certain requirements according to a U.S Customs and Border Protection report. The wall might seem impossible to get over, but eventually, people will find a way to do so and it will be back to square one.