Best wishes to an old friend, former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, who was hospitalized today with cancer, the second time around for her. Here’s to a speedy recovery!
Janet’s comment in the title about walls illustrates just one problem with spending billions of dollars to build Trump’s border blunder: No matter how high or wide the structure is, people will find a way over, under or around it. QED. But that’s only one drawback to this multi-billion-dollar boondoggle.
There’s a reason a majority of people living along the border do not want a wall; nor do most law officials in those communities. Many people live near the border precisely because it offers such a rich mix of cultural and natural landscapes, everything from Bisbee to Big Bend. It’s a truly remarkable region that walls will only screw up. Look at the line:
The Texas border may follow a natural boundary, the Rio Grande River, but the straight, surveyor-drawn lines across California, Arizona and New Mexico are mostly arbitrary.
The line doesn’t respect cultures, like the Tohono O’dham Nation, a sovereign people who’ve lived in what is now Arizona and Sonora long before those states existed. The tribe’s huge two-country reservation, nearly as large as Connecticut, would be sliced in two by a border wall, separating families and interfering with rituals and customs. Visit the region and you may see border guards stop O’odham people on backcountry desert roads, demanding ID from tribal members whose ancestors have been here since the 15th century. The tribe has pledged to stop (“Over my dead body”) a wall through their territory.
Don't even get me going on the damages walls inflict on ecological zones, and the Sonoran Desert is one of the most unique in the world: deserts, canyons and mountains whose plants and animals exist nowhere else. It’s also one of the most sensitive landscapes, the least able to adapt when humans tinker with nature. A wall will change watersheds, interrupt migrations, and simply cut off access for desert critters, leading, eventually, to the loss of species that groups are working hard to save, like the jaguar.
In case Mr. Trump hasn’t noticed, a good chunk of the border is already fenced, about a third of its nearly 2,000 miles, and a lot of it feels like a friggin’ war zone—checkpoints abound, towers dot the horizon, blimps float overhead and it seems like every other vehicle is a green and white US Border Patrol truck. More than 21,000 agents now patrol the region, up from 4,000 during Bush’s years, and the annual enforcement budget has ballooned to nearly $20 billion, from just $1.5 billion back then.
While money and resources have increased, the laws protecting citizens’ rights at and beyond the border eroded, creating a “constitution-free zone” where established protections against, say, unreasonable search and seizure, can be overridden. Increasingly, the people making these decisions are either part of or work with huge corporations, a subset of the MIC who hawk their border weapons, leadership skills, rent-a-cops and other tools at large conventions here in Phoenix and elsewhere. They’ve militarized the heck out of most of the U.S. border, not only the Southwest. You can bet they’d love the job building Trump’s wall.
Despite all the money, laws, militarization, personnel and technology watching over hundreds of miles of relative nothingness, most immigrants from the south do not enter the US by trekking across an empty, dangerous desert. Most undocumented immigrants in Arizona today originally entered through a checkpoint, where we already have the highest, thickest walls and a lot of guards. Or they flew in and overstayed their visas. Walls do nothing about that.
And there’s this: crossings are way, way down since the George Bush days—from 1.6 million people apprehended in 2000 to fewer than 230,000 in 2014. On top of that, more Latinos are leaving the U.S. than are entering. The economic collapse after the 2008 meltdown, combined with hateful legislation like Arizona’s “papers please” law, which other states copied, has encouraged more Latinos to return to Mexico and Central America. It’s no surprise that fewer Mexicans, who don’t consider themselves rapists or murderers, want to live in Donald Trump’s America.
Then there’s the $20-30 billion needed to build Trump’s monstrosity. Imagine what that money could do if it were invested in the communities along the border. Pitchman Trump should call Arizona Sen. Steve Smith, a Republican who started an organization to solicit donations for a border wall. Smith’s PT Barnum-worthy stunt initially drew a lot of attention, then it fizzled when donations from nativists nationwide dried up. Sen. Smith ended up asking Home Depot for fences and materials, so he could erect something, at least a symbolic few feet. His $50 million campaign raised less than $300,000 after three years, before he quietly shut the sucker down. But selling a piece of border wall is perfect for QVC star Donald J. Trump: “Send $50, get a free Trump Steak!”
Although it’ll be a costly dud, Trump pledged again last week that he’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it:
On Wednesday, Trump clarified that the United States would begin building the wall immediately and force its southern neighbor to “reimburse us.” But Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto insisted that’s not going to happen, calling the wall “against our dignity.”
Earlier, former Mexican President Vicente Fox said his country won’t provide a dime for Trump’s “f------ wall,” which he called a “racist monument.” So knock off the sales pitch, Mr. Trump. We get it that you promised your base a wall that Mexico would pay for, but that’s not happening.
Still, “Build the Wall!” has been an easy applause line for Trump, and he may just follow through with his racist promise, on America’s dime. The whole border scenario showcases Trump at his huckster, carnival barker best—hawking what he can’t deliver. And he’s doing it again, blaming the media for reporting the truth and lying his friggin’ butt off about the layaway program he designed for Mexico:
Donald Trump tweeteth it so. Always with authority. Always wrong. But Trump doesn’t care that his stupidity and lies ultimately hurt families and communities. That’s not what matters. Another Trump landmark does. If built, the wall will be his legacy and it will not end well. A wall will not work practically, it will harm society and the environment, it will waste tens of billions of dollars and cost the US more in lost commerce, and it’s a bigoted solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist.