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Comment by jschwartzi | Hacker News Reader

I would urge you to do your own research rather than dismissing everything they say out of hand. Not because what they're saying is true but rather because skepticism is not the same thing as wilful ignorance.

I once thought the same thing about building a wall but a friend of mine who worked extensively with CBP had talked to agents who are out of the political eye, and they had some convincing arguments for building one. For them it wasn't about keeping Mexicans out or whatever racist BS our president is agitating over. But it was more that there are small groups such as cartels in Mexico and Canada who want to come here for the express purpose of committing crimes, and they exploit the response times of CBP in remote areas to cross the border at will.

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How some CBP agents feel about the wall has no bearing on the actual realities of building a wall. People don’t dismiss the idea out of hand because of the people who hold the idea, but because _it’s an objectively bad idea_. And that’s after “doing my own research”. Did your friend ask those agents how we would pay for the wall? Or how we would maintain 2,000+ miles of wall? Or how we would handle the massive ecological damage caused to migratory species?

And do keep in mind that it’s possible to be a racist without explicitly saying it. This can of worms never opens well on HN, because 99.9% of the people here have always had pleasant interactions with the police (i.e. they’re white), but American law enforcement, especially CBP, tends to hold certain views about people who aren’t white, and that’s how you wind up with immigrants being denied basic things like water and medicine.

> HN, because 99.9% of the people here have always had pleasant interactions with the police (i.e. they’re white)

I'm white and as a teen growing up in Idaho I had many unpleasant interactions with police. Once two friends of mine and I were stopped at gun point just for walking home at 2am. The excuse was that there had been some thefts in the area. I guess we looked the part.

Granted, there are not a lot of black people in Idaho. I was actually quite surprised when I moved to NYC and realized that the cops weren't looking at me any more just because I was white.

i mean, if you'd been black, you'd have been stopped at bullet point instead of gun point...

Walls throughout history have overwhelmingly been fools errands. It's hard to maintain an exhaustive wall. They can work in the short term (the battle of sadr city) but they never hold out in the long term.

Walls are an effective strategy to control where the battle happens rather than an attempt to keep the battle from happening at all.

The point of the wall isn't to stop people from crossing the border. It's to slow them down enough to make the CBP response time smaller than the crossing time. Beyond the political aspects of this there are actually some thoughtful reasonable arguments for it. The people in CBP who want to build this thing know that people will break sections of it, but they can't break the entire thing down. So it concentrates the border crossings into smaller areas. The intent wasn't to build it and then not defend it.

OK. I'm 100% with you on this reasoning. I'd like to ask if the cost is worth it. I've seen speculation with 'build the wall' that it would be enormously expensive to build and then even more expensive to man and maintain. I've also seen speculation that migrants are actually good for USA (benefits the reduced birth rate, bigger tax base, migrant work willing to do labor americans wont do, the potential for children born to benefit the economy)...

A wall is less expensive to maintain than putting more people there.

Increasing the pool of unskilled labor is good for some parts of the economy. It's great for me because I'm wealthy. It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.

> A wall is less expensive to maintain than putting more people there.

Is this actually true, given that walls must also be manned, regularly maintained, repaired, etc?

> It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.

Is this actually true? I'm really not educated myself on the matter. Do you have sources, studies, etc?

Physical barriers tend to funnel migrants to areas without barriers. This means you need fewer people where the barriers are.

Illegal immigration hurts the poor while generally helping the broader economy. Specifically, minorities and people without a high school education get their wages suppressed. Here's an article by a Harvard PhD economist.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...

Hadrian's Wall protected the Roman frontier in Britain for centuries.

Without the Walls of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire would have fallen in the 700's instead of lasting until the 1400's.

The Great Wall of China helped protect northern Chinese frontiers for centuries.

Are walls 100% effective. Of course not. Nothing is. But walls can be a useful part of a strategy for regulating/protecting your borders.

That is not to say that a wall along the Mexican border is advised. It is a very long border, and individuals and groups of smugglers are able to get around an unguarded wall. However, to absolutely dismiss the utility of walls on principle is incorrect.

I was actually thinking about Hadrian's wall when I wrote the above! The building of the wall was a super expensive task for the time, and it usurped a ton of manpower (they also had the advantage of using slaves for a lot of it, and it still was expensive). Plus once Hadrian's wall was no longer well manned (once Hadrian died), it became a haven for the picts to launch their raids from and a border through which they couldn't be chased.

is it still the 1400s? how frequent did planes land in Britannia from the picts?

more recently, how'd the Maginot line go? what makes defence against warring enemies similar to preventing immigrants?

In regard to planes, planes in general are a lot more expensive, fewer, and thus easier to track than are people on foot.

Regarding the Maginot line, it actually forced the Germans to use the Ardennes. This was a high risk move for the Germans and if the French had been doing what they were supposed to be doing, they could have destroyed the German Army in the Ardennes.

So, the Maginot line actually was useful, but the French failed to exploit what it was doing for them.

a wall would do the opposite though, wouldn't it?

break through the wall, and you have even more time before CBP can respond.

comparing against alternative means, like having more drone coverage, and better CBP placement based on ML analysis of the drone input would be a far more cost effective mechanism for the same thing

"Build the wall" should've been "control the border". More intellectually honest, more reasonable.

Democrats aren’t in favor of open borders, but evidence-based border security. The president’s platform is attacking anyone who doesn’t want his proposed “solution” as dismissing border control and immigration reforms.

It’s dishonest and in bad faith, but it works on lazy or decided individuals.

For example: https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/immigration

> Democrats aren’t in favor of open borders

Citation needed. Cutting the enforcement budget for border patrol to zero (as Julian Castro proposes) is open borders in all but name.

> It’s dishonest and in bad faith

... To pretend that some Democrats aren't for open borders.

No democrat with standing in the party is for open borders.

Julian Castro isn’t even an elected official.

Does Keith Ellison not count? He famously wore a shirt that said "I don't believe in borders." He was a congressman from 2007 to 2019. What about Cortez who's slogan is "abolish ICE"? If there's a difference between open borders and completely defunding border enforcement, it's not a distinction that means anything to me.

Also, Castro is a 2020 primary contender. To count him out because he doesn't currently hold office is a bit silly. I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn't have counted in 2014 either?

Organizations are historically composed of people, some of whom are more radical and some of whom are less radical than the overall organization. Claiming that Keith Ellison or Julian Castro are representative of the Democratic party or the left as a whole strikes me as very reductive. I'd like to live in a world where borders don't exist, but to claim that it's possible if we just stop enforcing our borders is pretty ludicrous.

> Claiming that Keith Ellison or Julian Castro are representative of the Democratic party

Don't slide the goalposts. This is not a claim I've made. The exhaustive claim ("no Democrat with standing") came from the person I responded to.

is that to say that Ron Paul speaks for the Republican party?

I didn't know they hated wars and spying.

There are a lot of different views on the left, but the view of the Democratic leadership is unambiguously for border security.

Abolishing ICE is different from wanting open borders. You can disagree with the methods and still believe in the mission - much of the current administration’s stance is an attempt to conflate the methods they have chosen with the concept of border security, as painfully evidenced by the 2018 shutdown meeting between Pelosi, Schumer and Trump.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/11/trump-meets-with-pelosi-and-...

ICE is a relatively new organization, that many believe does not have a great track record of either effectiveness or respect for human rights. There are many ideas of how we would accomplish border security more humanely. https://pelosi.house.gov/issues/immigration

> I guess Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have counted in 2014 either?

No, the clear forerunner and a senator would count. Herman Cain wouldn’t have spoken for the Republican Party though.

Some republicans are too; why does it matter, when the democrats and republicans with power are not?

Aha - but the goal of the "Build the wall" slogan was to get elected. It wasn't a carefully crafted policy for border control. That slogan achieved it's primary goal

Good point, and somewhat similar to President Obama's "Hope and Change" slogan.

it was successful: there was hope, then there was change to stop Congress from doing any work.

TIL borders are racist BS.

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