Beto's Feeble Objection

From time to time, one reads of people who, in an attempt to illegally break into a home or building, get caught in a chimney and sometimes die there. Or they fall through sky lights, sometimes to their deaths, or touch an electrical cable and are electrocuted.

I thought of these unfortunate incidents when reading a piece by Madeline Osburn at The Federalist on Beto O'Rourke's opposition to a border wall.

Osburn quotes O'Rourke:

[The border wall] has cost us tens of billions of dollars to build and maintain, and it has pushed migrants and asylum seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, ensuring their suffering and death.

More than 4,000 human beings — little kids, women and children — have died. They’re not in cages, they’re not locked up, they’re not separated — they’re dead.

There are two things to note in O'Rourke's comment. First, is the tacit admission that where walls exist along the border they apparently work since people are being diverted to much more hostile areas.

Second, is his argument that a wall is cruel because it forces people intent upon entering the country illegally into this more dangerous terrain.

This is a very thin argument. It's not unlike arguing that home and business owners should leave their doors unlocked during off hours so that anyone who wants to enter illegally is not forced to seek entry through the chimney or other dangerous portals.

It's tragic that people bring children with them into these inhospitable climes, but to argue that therefore we shouldn't build a wall is like insisting that because intruders into your house may have children with them you should therefore make access to your home easy and safe for them.

O'Rourke also claimed that the wall in El Paso has not made residents safer, but this is contradicted by the city's mayor:

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told Fox News in December that they need the rule of law, negotiations with Mexico, and a solution to problems in Central America. “We have a fence already in El Paso that was done during the Bush administration, I think back in 2008, and it has stopped criminal activity and it works.”

There may be good arguments against building a border wall, I am open to being persuaded, but I have yet to hear one (see here for more examples), and O'Rourke's effort is certainly no exception.

There are really only two reasons, evidently, why Democrats oppose a wall: First, they want open borders so they can increase their voter base. If they thought for a minute that all or most immigrants would, once they gained citizenship, vote Republican they'd be scrambling all over each other to allocate the entire national budget for a wall.

Second, they can't stand the thought of allowing the President to make good on his signature campaign promise. If Barack Obama had declared a need for a wall there'd be no opposition to it whatsoever. Everyone in the media and in congress would be coming up with reasons why we do indeed need a barrier.

It's a shame that our leaders put political power and petty posturing over the needs of the people, but unless the Democrats can offer a better argument than they have so far it certainly seems that that's what they're doing.