Donald Trump wants to build a border wall. A beautiful wall. The best wall ever. It will rival the Great Wall of China.
Picture the Berlin Wall with border guards dressed like Trump Tower doormen and your first question is, “What will this amazing wall cost?” I’m glad you asked, because Donald’s cost estimates have crept up faster than Bernie Sanders’ delegate count.
At first the wall would cost maybe $5 billion, tops. Fifteen billion is the latest number I heard come out of Trump’s incontinent mouth. He was surprised when Anderson Cooper pointed out the Legos would have to be huge. Donald Trump’s detailed plans for his wall, which sound as though they were sketched on a bar napkin, include a big beautiful door. And a peephole, just in case Jehovah’s Witnesses are on the other side. Or Ted Cruz’s wife with a baseball bat. Or worse, fact checkers.
The facts surrounding this baffling boondoggle don’t matter to his supporters. Just build the damned wall. If Mexico doesn’t pay for it he’ll increase trade tariffs, which will hurt American companies in Mexico far more than it will hurt the Mexican government. And if that doesn’t extort the cash he wants he’ll increase visa fees. If that happens Arizonans can say “adios” to the $2 billion Mexicans spend here every year. And here’s the punchline: Illegal immigration will not be slowed one bit.
The Wallies desperately want a big beautiful wall because they think millions of Mexican rapists hoping to pass into El Norte will see the wall and turn around.
Here is a small, pesky detail the world’s greatest businessman overlooked. Build a 50-foot wall and your industrious border crosser will find, build, scavenge or buy a 51-foot ladder, bound up that ladder, toss a rope down the other side and voila! Your “Phenomenal” $15 billion investment is as worthless as a bankrupt casino, Mr. Trump. I wholly expect to see thousands of Mexican entrepreneurs on the Mexico side hawking ladders, rope, shovels, pogo sticks, trampolines, cranes, catapults and jet packs to border crossers. Let’s just burn $15 billion in the desert and save ourselves the pointless sweat and labor.
A truly secure border will only come with immigration reform, which should include a high-hurdle path to citizenship, a serious guest-worker program and a sincere effort to enforce E-verify.
Trump’s supporters lack the attention span to think this one through. Maybe that’s why his supporters worry about uneducated, non-English-speaking peasants in rags taking jobs from them.
As many comedians have observed, if you have the kind of job that could be taken from you by an uneducated, non-English-speaking peasant in rags, odds are high you may be what Mr. Trump calls a “loser.”
I prefer the official Labor Department term “goober.”
Heads up, goobers and xenophobes, our farms need the labor and despite Trump’s fear peddling there are no greater percentages of criminals among the overall population of undocumented immigrants than there are American criminals in American society as a whole. Well, actually, there are more criminals in American society, if you include Wall Street’s white collar criminals, the constitutional criminals working as “commentators” on Fox News, the prevaricators pushing the microscopic voter fraud piffle and Trump’s campaign aides, who appear to be a mix of extras from the movie “Casino.”
If you’re a Wallie, it’s safe to assume you want to deport every last “illegal” in America because if you want a wall we can safely assume, as I suggested earlier, you do not think things through. So I’ll walk you through it, slowly.
Deporting 11 million human beings is estimated to cost somewhere between $100 billion to $600 billion and take up to 20 years. And that cost estimate is a conservative take from a right-wing cabal called the American Action Forum!
I’d repeat that putting undocumented immigrants on a pathway to citizenship would be a positive step, adding more than a trillion dollars to our Gross Domestic Product but then I’d have to explain what the GDP is, and let’s be honest, “GDP” may as well be as foreign a concept to the Wallies as “PBS.” Or as baffling as the enigmatic acronym “KKK” is to Mr. Trump.
So there you have it, a border policy that misdiagnoses the problem, offers a solution that will cost billions, and solves nothing because the complexities of our border problems make some heads hurt.
But a wall? The biggest, best wall ever? That’s easy to understand.
