Anyone who follows politics, watches the news, or has any human interaction whatsoever knows about Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along Mexico in order to decrease the number of illegal immigrants. Luckily, I haven’t met anyone who actually thinks that this is a good idea. However, I am sure that there are people who do think that this is a good idea, for some unforeseen reason. Of all the publicity I have seen this hypothetical wall get, I have seen very few people talk about the logistics that this “project” involves and how it is not feasible. So, I would like to talk about these logistics and point out why this is not a good idea.
First, we will look at the most obvious and arguably important logistic, the cost of this insane project. A lot of numbers have been thrown around, making this project more ambiguous than it already is. During Trump’s candidacy, he stated that the wall would cost around 10 billion dollars to build. Recently, he has raised that to around 12 billion. However, experts with the Washington Post estimate that it would actually cost about 25 billion. The initial question that arises is, “who would pay for this wall?” Trump has come out and said time and time again that he will have Mexico pay for the wall. I don’t know how he believes or how some of his supporters can actually believe that Mexico will willingly drop 25 billion dollars for something that they don’t even want. It makes no sense and anyone can see that. Hilariously, the Mexican President has been pretty active on Twitter lately saying that Mexico absolutely will not pay for the wall. Recently, Trump has taken back his original sentiments and said that Mexico actually won’t pay for the wall, meaning that the burden of 25 billion dollars will fall upon the taxpayers of the U.S. I don’t know about you but I don’t want my taxes substantially raised for this insane cause. I am fine paying taxes for Social Security, law enforcement, and infrastructure, however, I am not okay with paying taxes that go towards Mr.Trump’s hate barrier.
Throughout Mr.Trump’s campaign, he has stressed that he wants to bring jobs back to America. He also thinks that this wall project will bring a lot of jobs to the U.S. for people that are building this wall. Well let’s take a look at this. This is a wall that spans thousands of miles at the bottom of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and some of California. These areas are not necessarily close to civilization making relocation very implausible. And most people will not want to fly down to southern New Mexico to most likely make minimum wage working a low level carpentry job. So who is going to build this wall? Due to proximity and wages, the workers that would end up building this hypothetical wall would be mostly immigrants (legal and illegal). This seems very different than Mr. Trump’s intentions which is quite ironic.
All in all, not only does this seem like a bad idea in general, but it seems completely implausible. If this isn’t apparent to most people already, I’m sure it will be once Mr. Trump is inaugurated and tries to put some of his plans into action.
