Trump's Wall is Just Another Con: Because Boats

Donald Trump is still at war with Republicans who he should be treating as allies, attacking men like Arizona senator Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham. Trump is also trying to blackmail the Senate, threatening to shut down the government unless they fund his border wall.

Now, in the best Trumpian tradition, I am announcing that I have a secret plan to finance the border wall. But instead of promising to reveal it "next week," as Trump always does but never gets around to, I will reveal it later in this post.

Flake is opposed to the border wall for personal as well as economic and moral reasons. But there's a much better reason to oppose the wall: it's a senseless waste of money that won't accomplish its stated goal.

The main reason? Most illegal immigrants just overstay their visas: they don't sneak over the border.

In each year from 2007 to 2014, more people joined the ranks of the illegal by remaining in the United States after their temporary visitor permits expired than by creeping across the Mexican border, according to a report by researchers at the Center for Migration Studies.

To further illustrate how oblivious Trump is, consider this: last year Europe was inundated by illegal immigrants arriving from Syria by boat.

Doesn't Donnie know Mexicans have boats too? Here's a story from 2010 about how illegal immigrants use boats to enter California from Mexico.  Here's a story from last Saturday about people using a boat to enter the United States from Haiti. Here's a story from Breitbart in 2014 about pangas bringing illegal immigrants by sea to San Diego. And of course there was the Mariel boat lift in the 1980s...

Yet in Trump's first budget he cut Coast Guard funding by a billion dollars. Doesn't Trump understand that the Coast Guard stops boats entering the United States illegally? A later budget restored the cut, but because the Guard's budget is already drastically insufficient, they can't even do their job as it is:

The White House has dropped plans for a 14 percent cut to the Coast Guard, instead promising a budget that “sustains current funding levels.” The bad news is that “current funding levels” are already too low. The Coast Guard has to give almost 600 drug shipments a pass each year because they don’t have the ships or planes to catch them — and that’s their top-priority mission. Elsewhere, the Coast Guard has cut corners on everything from patrolling the Pacific, to maintaining its bases and to working with the Navy, the Coast Guard Commandant told reporters today.

From this you could deduce that Trump is just plain stupid. And you would be correct. But the real reason is Trump wants the wall is to con his supporters. The wall riles up the racists, haters and white separatists who call him the "god emperor." It plays well at his Nuremberg-style rallies. In his mind, it boosts his ratings, and ratings are everything.

If Trump's voters want the border wall, let them pay for it.

Now for my secret plan: instead of making Mexico or American taxpayers pay for Trump's vanity project: let the people who want the wall pay for it. If Trump wants to spend $20 billion on his "beautiful" wall, that's only $307 for each of the 65 million fools who voted for him. Why waste federal dollars on something most people don't want?

Trump could create a non-profit "Beautiful Wall" foundation. What could possibly go wrong?

The thing is, it doesn't matter to Trump that the wall will be an expensive failure. Many of his businesses have been expensive failures: the casinos, Trump University, Trump Shuttle, the United States Football League, and so on.

But all those things boosted his notoriety, and a splashy failure is good for business if your business is just selling the Trump name. Especially when he's always able to leave someone else holding the bag for his mistakes.

The Mexican border is 2,000 miles long. Trump has already admitted he's not really going to build a wall along its entirety, but just a short segment to feed raw meat to the animals.

Now, the coastline of the lower 48 states is 6,000 miles long, half of that on the states closest to Mexico, the Caribbean and South America -- Texas, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. There are tens of thousands of square miles of open sea around those coastlines, making it very difficult for a thinly spread Coast Guard to intercept all the smugglers.

If the wall was 100% effective -- and it won't be, because people will just tunnel under and climb over it -- drug smugglers and illegal immigrants will just switch to other means: cars, boats, planes, and overstaying visas.

To stop illegal immigration you need to remove the incentive to come to the United States illegally. But Trump's preferred method -- making life miserable for illegals -- doesn't work very well. Because life for many immigrants is even worse at home.

If it were more attractive to stay in Mexico and South and Central America -- if people had jobs that paid better, drug gangs were defanged, government corruption was rooted out -- the people living in those countries would stay home. And a lot of the immigrants that Trump wants to deport would voluntarily go home to their families.

If we fixed American drug policy to make illicit drugs unprofitable, drug gangs would stop smuggling drugs over the border.

The United States should pursue a set of "everbody wins" policies for trade, immigration, cross-border employment, illegal drugs, etc., with Mexico and Latin America. NAFTA should be renegotiated to make life better by raising the wages for the citizens of our trading partners, so they can afford to buy our products, and they're no longer the lowest cost producers, making our workers more competitive.

But that's impossible under Trump: the only thing he understands is him winning personally, and that means everybody else -- even his own allies in the Republican Party -- have to lose.