Genuinely curious: what is your actual, concrete security concern with not having a border wall? What do you perveive that to actually protect you, personally, from?
If you enter your bank password over unsecured public wifi, someone there could steal it. But my advice to someone who does banking in a wifi cafe would not be "don't use a password at all, it does nothing for you".
Or am I missing something?
Border walls can only prevent access if there are actual guards and sensors monitoring the wall and responding when people attempt to go over, under, or through. That would be extremely expensive. Is it a good use of public funds?
I don't understand the seeming position by some on the left that there's no need for border security.
In some places there already exist walls and they do help.
undocumented immigrants used to just walk across, and have now switched to the mountains/deserts and to a lesser extent the ocean
The humanitarian crisis (concern for the migrants themselves) and logistical crisis (where do we put the migrants) would, to a global perspective, be a concern whether or not those migrants got stopped by a wall at the US's southern border.
You're right that proper border security doesn't solve the humanitarian and logistical crises. But I don't think that's a good argument for doing away with border controls all together. Your position seems to be that uncontrolled migration causes no harm, which seems a pretty extreme position to take.
Most of these countries have excellent social safety nets and public services which are now available to any migrants who achieve legal status. While contributing little in taxes back. If they don't get status they also don't pay any taxes.
I would argue the burden of proof is on you to establish that those migrants do no harm to the society rather than assuming they don't until proven otherwise.
I'm not arguing it causes no harm; I'm asking whether anybody has established any damage in the data. This is an opportunity to do a natural experiment; different places had different policies for integrating a large number of migrants, ranging from "don't let any in" to "find ways to integrate them viably into our society". Now that it's been ~5 years, what data do we have for which of those policies was beneficial for whom?
I'd add that I'm neither an economist nor a sociologist, nor do I speak any of the languages of Central Europe, so I'm not in a very good position to be able to surface good data.
>Most of these countries have excellent social safety nets and public services which are now available to any migrants who achieve legal status. While contributing little in taxes back. If they don't get status they also don't pay any taxes.
If they have can establish legal status to draw on the social safety net, they pay taxes, and presumably have the opportunity to stabilize their lives and contribute more taxes. Has that happened in the places where they were given legal status?