Illegal Immigration

[LadyForCamus]

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.

I'm sorry man but I think you're the one with the false belief about a wall being an easy obstacle.  I meant to link this in my previous post but it looks like I screwed it up somehow.  I fixed the link in the previous post too.  They've had prototypes built and they have all been very effective at preventing people from scaling, or even using tools to cut into the wall.  Also, most border partitions already in use are installed 6 feet deep as it is.  Yes, people can still tunnel under them but few and far between are going to do so.  Climbing is not easy and it's risky.  Think of just one of those rock climbing walls with the rubber grips and imagine it 30 ft high.  Would you climb that with no scaling equipment or safety equipment with little to no climbing experience?  Then imagine that it is just smooth concrete instead, nothing to grip onto.  You likely didn't bring a grappling hook and safety harness with you because a) most of these people are coming from poor countries with barely enough money to eat let alone buy recreational climbing equipment and b) climbing equipment is heavy so you decided not to trek through the desert with it.  Speaking of trekking through a desert, you're tired, thirsty, and overheated.  And if you have your family with you, you run the risk of being separated if some people can't make it over the wall.  It not a matter of someone having enough time to make the climb, it will literally be almost impossible to scale a wall of that height.

With the wall keeping most people out, you can then use surveillance more wisely in the areas without a wall and points of entry.  You are correct that surveillance can be done with less manpower, but the problem is surveillance doesn't actively prevent someone from entering the country illegally.  Manpower is required to detain illegal immigrants, we can't just use the video of someone illegally crossing and write them a ticket.  That's why having a wall that is near impossible to scale (which prototypes have shown is very possible), can be used in conjunction with surveillance at segments of the border without a wall to more effectively utilize the manpower we have.  This would make border security a lot tighter.