Terrible Symbolism
I know that many of my readers have more skepticism than I about open immigration. We will leave that for another day. But I am not sure how any American who prides themselves on American exceptionalism and our leading role in the world promoting freedom wouldn't cringe at seeing these pictures. What a terrible image they will make running for thousands of unbroken miles.
I am not sure why we are going through all this engineering effort when we could just be borrowing from the experts:
Postscript: Congrats to our local entrants from the Phoenix area firm that submitted by far t
he ugliest design.
Update: Just to confirm, based on the comments: Yes, I do not see an ethical difference between stopping people from coming in and stopping them from going out. Others of you do see a difference, and we will have to disagree. I don't think the Berlin Wall would have shifted from evil to OK had it been built by the West Germans instead to keep communists bottled up on their side. I know folks love to use the home analogy, that it is OK to fence folks out of your home but a federal crime to fence them in. But I have always thought equating a whole country to private property is a bad analogy. Basically, such an assumption rests on socialist community property ownership assumptions. A Mexican man wants to drive a car he owns, using gas he buys along the highway, along a road paid for with the gas taxes he just paid, to take a job at my company I freely offer him and rent an apartment I freely lease to him. Voting, government benefits, holding office -- we don't necessarily have an obligation to offer any of those things, at least initially. But I don't think it is ethical to erect this wall in his path to exercising free exchange.
[The election of Trump and mere threat of a wall on our southern boarder has sent illegal immigration to record lows.]
Evidence? Or are you simply practicing your CHEPH fallacy chops? You must keep on practicing your fallacies lest you lose your touch?
What a tissue of fallacies your whole comment is!
[ However, the inclusion of the modern welfare state makes that impossible.]
Thank goodness for the progressives, hey? Now you can renege on principles of freedom and blame them!
[No he is a libertarian. Who will supply us with all the drugs that libertarians are always pining for if we build a wall?]
You really couldn't do better that that misrepresenting stereotype?
[In the Northeast and large parts of the Midwest, drugs have destroyed lives - and is lowering the general well being of the nation.]
Riding cars have destroyed lives. Let's blame cars and start a "War on Cars."
PS. That is just to show how decontextualised simplistic your superficial argument is.
[After all they were the ones who alone with rich elites decided it would be great to export jobs from the Midwest and northeast to China - telling us these people would find more productive jobs. That didn't happen, so in despair they all sit around and abuse opioids.]
Argument by fabricated cause and effect narrative. Sheesh! What is happening to Western intellegence!!??
[I cringe at the author's ignorance of the nature and purpose of the Berlin Wall.]
I cringe at YOUR ignorance of the nature and purpose of the Berlin Wall.
[But the outrageous comparisons by Coyote have prompted me to have a lot more sympathy toward the Wall now.]
Hhhmm, it seems facts are not relevant enough to you. According to your own comment, what seems to convince you are allegedly "outrageous comparisons."
Well, clearly no need to try and debate logically with you...
[There is no cost if the product is produced locally and it is also possible the 10 percent import tax offsets other taxes.]
Please think your "argument" through.
Highly specific and intelligent comment. I am now enlightened.
We need a wall and E-verify for a start. There is a place for immigration but it should serve the needs of the citizens.
Absolutely. Unlike libertarians I live in the world of reality.
The point of the tariffs is to decrease imports and increase in-country production of goods and services. Every nation and empire does this. It has always been done this way. Some exceptions are made for products a nation can't produce, i.e., coffee and bananas in Scandinavia.
Name a free trading society from the past. It is tough to find one and I think I can quickly debunk most examples. Just google tariffs in the Hanseatic League for example. Hint: you won't find free traders in Europe, the fertile crescent, Persia, China, India, etc. Maybe there are prehistoric examples. There might be some free trade in Yemen and South Sudan but warlords make up for the lack of tariff officers.
Free trade is an aspiration that rarely exists in real life. "Love they neighbor as thyself" is another example.
Great Britain was the workshop of the world in the nineteenth century. After a couple of generations of free trade (partial free trade) they were pushed aside by the high tariff nations, the US especially. By World War I they could barely outfit their military forces. Later they reverted to high tariffs.
[No he is a libertarian. Who will supply us with all the drugs that libertarians are always pining for if we build a wall?]
[[You really couldn't do better that that misrepresenting stereotype?]]
What stereotype? Do you read Warren's or libertarian blogs often?
Please just think.
We aren't trying to keep the Mexican military from invading us. We are trying to keep incidental 3rd world immigrants from running in and getting our services for free. Different proportion there. Yeah, you are right, none of these walls could take the onslaught of tanks, but until the illegals get tanks, I am sure it will be OK.
And that is what libertarians and all elites are most upset about. How to placate the unemployed masses without drugs. Goodness, when the masses find out what the elites have been doing to them, there could be revolution.
Dishonest? I find your intentional obfuscation of the truth that the Berlin was built to keep people moving freely ONLY IN ONE DIRECTION quite dishonest.
"Simply identified a convenient difference"? Talk about dishonesty.
Actually, I think Scott Adams take on Trump as a Communicator is the best one to use about the Wall. The symbolism of it, the results in the media, are the real effect. Reducing illegal crossing is a good, allowing legal crossing is good, and there is a highway with open gates to allow that.
And the Vatican too
My wife is very much against the wall. I agree and we now leave our doors to our home and our automobile unlocked, with the keys left in the ignition.
public health & public safety.
the state has a duty to filter immigrants AT THE BORDER, and a wall is absolutely necessary to achieve a proper & effective filter.
when that prospective mex. employee shows up w/ menengitis or pox, you/employer gonna protect the community from an outbreak? when that prospective mex. employee rolls over the border w/ a dirty bomb in the trunk, you/employer gonna pull a "superhero" move to save the community?
no developed country anywhere lets immigrants saunter across a border w/o proper, common sense health & safety protocol. a wall/barrier must be in place to apply such a health & safety filter to a political border, period.
I'm a libertarian & I agree w/ you 100%.
"Open borders" is an absolute fiction. Rank stupidity. Can never happen. Should never happen.
Well-regulated immigration policy is good/fine/necessary, but conflating immigration policy w/ "open borders" - as most libertarians do - is insanity.
No developed country in the world allows anything akin to "open borders", for good reasons...
Public safety demands a "hard" border, period. Public health demands a "hard" border, period.
Who pays for your pension/medical in old age? Who subsidizes your travel & security? Social Security helping out? Do you get free services in all those countries you visit? So why not just settle down in the safest/wealthiest country and live off of their social welfare system?
You do see the absolute impracticality of this 'no borders' fantasy that you desire, yes?
I am not a libertarian but have lots of libertarian views were freedom must be protected.
The counter I use to the "open borders" argument, or the argument that illegal immigrants should get welfare benefits, is why not save them a trip and just start paying them out to anyone, anywhere that applies.
YOu think people should just be able to traipse across other people's property? Have you ever seen how careless and destructive people are when they do these things? It isn't that you are special, it is that people will steal everything that is locked down; will litter and damage anything and everything; and are complete liabilities to the home owner when they are on the property even if they are at fault. In today's world you are a moron if you do not control the access to your property.
Of course I do. That was my point. The only way you CAN have open borders is if the entire world lived within the same "no help from tax payers" kind of system. Which is a libertarian dream world, but completely impractical in today's world.
But to answer your questions... for me anyway. I pay for my "pension/medical" in my old age. I pay for my travel and security. I don't need social security. I don't need free services in the countries we visit. And yes, we will settle down again once our journey is over. Back in AZ... the best place to live in the entire world. At least in my opinion. And I would just as soon starve myself to death than live off the social welfare system. Because it is theft. And I'm not a thief. (Not referring to Social Security as we pay into that so it's not welfare in the strictest sense of the word... I'm referring to actual welfare programs. I would NEVER do that as long as I have the power to choose.)
"Voting, government benefits, holding office -- we don't necessarily have an obligation to offer any of those things, at least initially"
Well, we do give some of these things, like public school education, the part of the infrastructure that isn't funded by gas taxes or user fees, and effectively socialized health care in the form of hospitals racking up and writing off uncollectible debt for care rendered to illegal immigrants that they are obligated to provide, by law, to anyone, in emergency situations, to the immigrants themselves. Others, only their kids born in the US are likely to get. But the key word here is "initially". Immigration restrictionists are concerned primarily with the long term: what changes will likely happen in the future as a result of certain immigrants coming in? We sort of have a test case in California, which has gone in fifty years from being a battleground state to effectively being a Democrat One-Party State, driven almost entirely by immigration-related demographic change, with an accompanying increase in government intervention.
Can you point to states that have little immigration and a high degree of support for government intervention? Sure, most New England would qualify. But how many states have become more friendly to libertarian ideas that have experienced high levels of immigration in the last fifty years? Even the shift towards populism among Republicans, indirectly, has been driven by immigrants, as the Republican party can only survive the importation of pro-big government ethnics by appealing to a larger percentage of Whites - which, if current trends continue unabated, will ultimately be a doomed strategy. At that point, we get either competing coalitions of racial interest groups vying for control of the federal spigot, or one-party rule. Either way, it's not something that's likely to turn the US into a libertarian paradise.
As long as we have representative government, the existing citizens of country have a perfectly valid interest in excluding people with a vastly different political culture gaining more power, through the ballot box, in that government in the future. Unless you propose a monarchy consisting only of rulers who share your libertarian views, or have some way, that's never been tried before, to reverse the decades-long preference of immigrant groups, especially nonwhite immigrant groups, for an expansive government to provide them with benefits, clinging to open borders effectively negates, in the long run, any other "libertarian" positions you may have.
Yeah, that's neato, but there aren't torrents of Americans trying to escape to Mexico.
How are we defining "not a great track record"? Compared to what? Do you have some kind of study about countries that have historically fortified their borders being better or worse places to live than countries that didn't? One that controlled for, just to name an example, neighbors who consistently propagandize their citizens to believe that their own countries have a rightful claim on the territory the country fortifying its border occupies?
"If your (not TruthisaPeskyThing, but general 'you') goal is to minimize reliance on the US welfare state, then fine - let's have relatively open immigration, but no welfare state for folks who aren't citizens."
How does that work when the immigrants, or their children, vote in a government that believes not only in keeping the existing welfare state, but expanding it?
http://www.people-press.org/values-questions/q40f/government-should-help-more-needy-people-even-if-it-means-deeper-debt/#race
me,
What happens when the immigrants finally can vote, and decide you should provide them with more benefits through the government? Because that's what happened to California, and what's likely to happen to the US as a whole if we do nothing. As for the expense of the wall, that wasn't the point of the OP, it was the "symbolism", but just to address the issue since it was brought up: There's no reason why the wall would be prohibitively expensive, or ineffective. Israel's wall is quite effective at its stated goal, and is not too much expense for them to bear, despite it being a much smaller country, compared to the length of the fortification, than the US vis a vis proposed wall if such a wall were equal to the length of the US-Mexico border. Calculation:
Population of Israel (8,500,000 people)/length of West Bank Barrier (440 miles) = 19,318 people/wall mile
Population of United States (323,000,000 people)/length of US-Mexico border (1,954 miles) = 165,302 people/border mile
Of course, there would most likely be more people per mile because the wall wouldn't have to run the entire length of the border, just the areas with few natural barriers to prevent crossing. The US per capita GDP is also roughly $57,000 while Israel's is roughly $37,000. So clearly, from a financial standpoint, the wall is perfectly feasible for the US though there might be diseconomies of scale (though on the other hand, there could just as well be economies of scale). As to the question of whether a wall is the most effective measure for preventing illegal crossing - well, that's an open question. There may be other policies that would work better, but a wall is probably relatively inexpensive compared to other measures, and not terribly intrusive to regular citizens.