The Border Wall Would've Been Cheap

During the last years of the Obama administration there were lots of arguments over whether we should or shouldn't build a wall on our southern border.

Opponents often said that walls don't work, or that they'd "send the wrong message" about "who we are," or that they'd be too expensive.

None of those arguments made sense. Israel's wall separating it from Gaza seems to be working just fine. Who we are and what message we should be sending is that we are a welcoming country to those who arrive legally and through the proper entry points.

No one thinks, after all, that you are somehow unwelcoming or uncompassionate because you lock your doors when leaving your home or your car. The only way "locking the doors" to the country is different is in terms of scale.

The argument that it would cost too much always seemed especially laughable given Washington's willingness to spend trillions on all sorts of things we don't need, won't help and only drive up inflation.

The "cost too much" argument just suffered another humiliating refutation with the release of data that show that since Mr. Biden took office, illegal immigration has cost taxpayers four billion dollars more than completing Mr. Trump's wall would've cost if Mr. Biden hadn't canceled it.

An article at HotAir cites a study done by The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which found that the millions of new illegal aliens who have entered the country just since January of 2021 will place a more than twenty billion dollar burden on the system each year for the next ten years.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has crunched the numbers and calculated that,

The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents.

FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrant costs $9,232 a year to support.

Aside from completing the wall, what else could that much money be used for? Here are some possibilities suggested in the article:

• Giving every homeless veteran in the U.S. $50K a year for the next 10 years.
• Hire 330,000 teachers
• Provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to more than 7 million extra families
• Provide every family earning less than $50K a year a $410 grocery voucher.

In any case, opposition to the wall makes very little sense. There seems to be only one reason that the left opposes it: If we open our southern border to everyone who wants to come in either one of two things will happen that'll please the left.

Either our institutions will be so overloaded by the demands placed upon them by millions of immigrants that they'll collapse bringing about the destruction of our semi-capitalist system and facilitating the shift to a socialist or communist takeover of our government, or all those immigrants will eventually be given citizenship and will reward the Democrat party by voting fo Democrat candidates, thus ensuring a permanent Democratic hegemony.

It's hard to come up with any other reason why the chaos, humanitarian tragedy and economic burden is allowed to continue.