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.
