Trump's Big Border Wall Is Now a Pile of Rusting Steel | Hacker News Reader

Trump's Big Border Wall Is Now a Pile of Rusting Steel

theatlantic.com

17 pointssebastian_z24 comments

Who could have thought building a robust wall could be this hard? It was a silly project.

If the US govt. really wanted to tackle illegal immigration they would give massive fines for hiring illegal immigrants and offer rewards to individuals for submitting any information resulting in fines. A wall is a massive waste of resources and a really expensive project considering the length of it. Plus a maintenance nightmare. It also doesn't offer a potential revenue stream like fines do.

That's the dirty secret, isn't it? Many American industries are addicted to the cheap labor illegal immigration supplies. The media circus about the border wall was a distraction.

In "The Nine Nations of North America", Joel Garreau put it like this (from memory, not verbatim):

"This is all discombobulated in terms of traditional Democratic and Republican positions.

"The Democrats tend to be quality-of-life people. They also tend to be in favor of the little guy. Well, here those two conflict. If you look at the long-term implications of letting Mexico move up here unrestricted... goodbye Zero Population Growth.

"The Republicans tend to be law-and-order people. They also tend to be in favor of big business, who finds immigrants to be useful for low-wage labor.

"This creates a very difficult environment."

Its not hard to build a wall. It was attacked again and again by lawsuits by pro open border advocates which slowed down funding and construction.

"maintenance nightmare" Nah. People require wages, overtime, etc. Walls just keep standing. The opposition to the wall was not because a well built one Not work, its because it Would work. Which would lessen cheap labor wanted by some, and new votes wanted by others.

They are easily defeated with ladders or shovels. Or, angle grinders? I'm a little surprised I haven't heard of people harvesting the metal slats for recycling.

If this was true all the wall companies would be out of business.

Seems to work in Isreal and other places.

The Israeli wall is tiny compared to what needs to be built and secured on our southern border.

Guess what? A ladder turns parallel immigration into serial immigration. It's a lot easier for border patrol to wait for people to climb over the ladder to arrest them than it is to chase 500 people all running in different directions.

I cannot take your comments seriously.

>Its not hard to build a wall

As it turns out it is extremely hard to build a wall across a whole border. It is a big project that requires a lot money and support. Trump has clearly failed to deliver.

Again the physical building of a wall would require like 1% of the annual military budget for 3 years. Its a wall. Isreal has done it.

Can argue don't want to build it, but pure fiction it can't be done.

I’ve wondered if Universal Basic Income could be designed to eliminate illegal immigration.

First, we eliminate minimum wage.

Second, we provide a weekly UBI check based upon hours worked for that week. The hourly UBI payment would be roughly equal to the current minimum wage. Only US citizens would be eligible for UBI.

The results would be full employment of US citizens, and a horrible financial hurdle for any non-citizen to command the required wage to survive without the UBI. Those who couldn’t make the sufficient unsubsidized wage would be economically motivated to leave the US.

That doesn't sound like UBI to me. Sounds more like a corporate welfare program.

It’s only UBI if a person can sit around, smoke weed and play video games without working?

Ok, then your roommate can hire you for $0.10/hr to clean the apt, and you can hire your roommate to do the dishes for $0.10/hr.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com