FILE PHOTO: A child looks through the border wall during the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to Calexico, California, as seen in Mexicali, Mexico April 5, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Last updated on April 26th, 2021 at 09:40 pm
Trump spent $27 million in taxpayer money on one mile of the Texas border wall that is being defeated by migrants with wooden ladders.
He finds still another in Granjeno, where the newly built 1.3-mile Trump wall joins up with a 1.75-mile piece of wall authorized during the Bush administration and built during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the Trump wall in this area—an 11.4-mile stretch from just west of Granjeno downriver to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge—runs to about $27 million a mile.
In recent months, the number of apprehensions has soared. Border Patrol caught more than 171,000 migrants along the southern border in March, the highest one-month total in fifteen years. Nicol is finding more and more ladders—further evidence, he said, that the wall is not about stopping people or drugs. “Border walls are just backdrops for politicians who want to rile up their voters,” Nicol said. “They have political value, and that’s what counts.”
Border walls aren’t about stopping migration. They are political props that some border agents suggest help to buy them a little more time, but that bit of time is every expensive to taxpayers and it would be more effective to spend those tens of millions of dollars on technology to improve monitoring at the border instead of a wall that doesn’t do much to deter migrants.
The real fix to the problem that most Republicans don’t want to talk about is comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans would rather pretend that a complicated policy problem can be solved with a wall instead of fixing the immigration system and creating a pathway to citizenship for migrants.
Trump’s wall was a massive waste of money that just like the former president it is ineffective, standing around a lot, and doing nothing to solve problems.
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