Building walls, building barriers
Five days after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order that directed federal funds toward the highlight of his campaign: the anti-immigration wall along America’s southern border.
Trump’s goal is to build a wall spanning from southeast Texas to southern California. According to President Trump himself, the wall will be “35 to 40 feet tall” and cost $8 billion dollars, something he has vehemently declared Mexico responsible for. Truly, Trump’s wall would join the Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens as a great wonder — a 40-foot tall leviathan that slithers through the almost 1500 miles between Texas and California.
And that is exactly what the wall will be unless Trump manages to convince Mexico to foot the bill for the wall.
To be blunt, Trump’s wall is destined for failure. Mexico has already voiced its refusal to pay for the wall, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto himself has said that Mexico will not be funding Trump’s fever dream. Who will be paying for this $8 billion dollar monstrosity? The American people, of course.
Trump has already fast tracked federal money toward the wall’s construction. Unless Trump can pull off some major blackmail against President Nieto, the bulk of the payment will come from taxes drawn from America’s own citizen.
Trump supporters will tell you that he also plans on taxing legal travel across the border, similar to toll roads, and while this is going to help, do people really think that there is going to be enough travel across the Mexican-American border to make any significant tribute to the ultimate bill? Both Trump and his supporters need to realize that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall.
Trump’s intended opus has drawn comparison to the China’s own Great Wall — the 13,171 mile behemoth that stretches from the Yellow Seat through the Gobi Desert. Built over several centuries by numerous Chinese emperors, the wall was a noble effort to protect the Chinese, and it remains an important part in Chinese history and legend.
However, like many things that have been consigned to legend, the failures and horrors of the Great Wall are often forgotten.
The Great Wall was built using slave labor. Is that would Trump would propose to do? Given that he wants to publish lists of crimes committed by illegal aliens, Trump would probably see it as “good business” to use indentured servitude to build the wall. China’s wall is literally built of bodies — between the mortar and brick are the bodies of workers that died during construction. The Wall bankrupted multiple Chinese governments and it is said that roughly 400,000 people died during the wall’s construction, and that is just under Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s reign. The overall death toll is thought to surpass one-million.
One may argue that modern technology will change things, but how much? Trump’s wall will have to tear through literal mountains, something it would take a veritable John Henry to do. “Technology” is just a blanket term that wall proponents are using as an invalidating excuse. The same hazards that the Chinese faced when building over mountains still exist, and no amount of excavators and industrial equipment will change that. At the end of the day, it will still be people laying down Trump’s American-funded bricks, and nothing short of a blockade or a war will force Mexico to pay for Trump’s pipedream.
Walls are built to keep things out, but do they really succeed? Think of all the animals that find ways into houses by exploiting weaknesses in walls, and then apply that to Trump’s plan. If a rat can squirm its way into your house, what will stop a person from doing the same thing?
Another concern Trump should be worrying about is that once a wall is built, people are going to want it taken down. The Berlin Wall stood tall for 28 years, but German citizens spent that time trying to cross it and destroy it. It took the almost-total downfall of the Soviet Union for that wall to collapse, and President Trump should take that as a grim warning.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a nation building a wall to defend itself. China’s Great Wall did start with good intentions. However, there is a problem with the leader of a nation inventing and inflating a problem, and then spearheading his campaign with this monstrously expensive solution that may take longer than his presidency to build.
There are families and men and women entering this nation seasonally so they can get work and provide for the families, just like every other person in the world. Don’t make illegal immigration harder and dissuade those who intend on entering this nation. Focus on making legal immigration and the process for applying for a work visa easier for the individual.
Do not equate illegal immigrants to horrid monsters, because that is not what they are. Humans cannot be and will never be “illegal,” because they are not contraband. They are not drugs or guns or money-laundering schemes. “Illegal” is a scary buzzword used to refer to undocumented-citizens. The act of calling someone illegal because they are trying to make a decent living and provide for their family is perhaps the strongest proof toward the dissolution of the American Dream.
Trump’s all-too systemic discrimination against these trying families is honestly terrifying. His wall is absolutely outrageous and will come straight out of American pockets.