Illegal Immigration

[Yonadav]

I went searching for a very good article that I read a few months ago which detailed one of the changes that Jeff Sessions was attempting to make to the definition of 'credible fear'. He wanted to change it so that the fear specifically had to be fear of the government in a prospective immigrants home country. I have not been able to locate that article. I apologize for that, and hope to come up with it in the near future.

The wall really will be a very, very small obstacle.  We are talking about people who are willing to risk their lives following 'coyotes' on life threatening treks through the desert. Quite a few of them die doing this. Compared to that, the wall is just a little hill that they have to get over, under, through, or around. They are going to do it.  Seriously, the cost to benefit analysis of the wall is really horrible. The benefit is close to zero. The cost isn't really known aside from being many billions to build and billions more to maintain. We have bridges that are falling down. I would rather spend the money on bridges. The cost to benefit analysis on most of them is fantastic.

If you can find the article I'd definitely be interested in reading it, but everything I've seen from this administration doesn't show that they are trying to actually hamper the amount of actual asylum seekers into the country.  If you are truly seeking asylum, you can do so at points of entry or embassies.  Most of the people trying to illegally cross are not doing so to actually seek asylum, they are economic immigrants.  And there's nothing wrong with that, but there is a line that they need to get in to enter the country.

As far as the wall being a small obstacle, not necessarily.  I know that there hasn't been a clear design for the wall, but I've heard that Trump wants it to be 30 ft tall.  Which is very large, think about a 3 story building in your city and trying to climb it without equipment.  Crossing a desert is definitely difficult, but a lot of them cross without enough water or food.  Crossing a desert also does not give people an inhuman ability to climb walls.  Not everyone is young and in shape, there are older people, full families with young kids, etc.  They are not all going to be able to scale up a 30 ft wall.  Even if they brought climbing equipment with them (which I would doubt because walking through a desert with heavy climbing equipment is impractical), the prototypes of the [url=Height of Trump's Mexico border wall make it near-impossible to scale ... https://metro.co.uk/.../height-trumps-me...-...]walls that have already been built and tested[/url] could likely still prevent them from scaling.  I haven't seen any numbers on what it would cost to maintain, but depending on the material used it might not be terribly expensive.  It might even provide a net benefit if you taken into account all the other various costs of hosting illegal immigrants in a country.

I became a bit lazy about searching for the article. I'll try to keep trying.

I think that you are stuck in a false belief that the wall will be an effective obstacle, and the reason that I think that is that you keep comparing it to something unrealistic.  If there is a three story building that I want to get into in my city, the obstacles that will stop me don't have much to to with the height of the building. Three stories just isn't very high.  Put the building in a remote area where no one will see me. Have the building me unoccupied with no guards and no motion detectors, no cameras, and no thermal imaging drone surveillance. Then I have very, very little to stop me from breaking into the third story of that building. My chances of success are pretty much one hundred percent.

Now add guards, motion detectors, cameras, and drones. My chances of success drop enormously. Is it the third story climb that stopped me? No, absolutely not. I get detected for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the building. Remove the building entirely, and I can't even enter the area where the building was without being detected. I can't walk across the area where the building would have been without being detected. The building was never an obstacle.

If we would have built a wall 50 years ago, it would not have been very successful without a lot of manpower doing surveillance on it. Rudimentary counter surveillance would have pretty easily located weak spots with insufficient manpower to watch the wall, where people would have a high chance of crossing successfully. The wall is a small obstacle. The surveillance is the big obstacle. So even then, I wall would have been an expensive proposition with little benefit.

Today we can do really good surveillance with far less manpower. We can seal up our border as tightly as we want to. We can make it almost impossible to cross without being detected.  Tunnels are a little bit of a problem but the technology to detect them is coming along nicely, and a wall doesn't stop tunnels anyway. The wall is one hundred percent a political symbol. It is a distraction from reality.