On Trump's Wall, the Southern Border Crisis and Joe Biden
I've been trying to contextualize my thoughts on the situation at our southern border for a while now. Rather than try to craft rhetoric, I thought it might be interesting to look at it from a quasi-historical perspective. It's a longish read - and it's probably important to look at the material behind the links that are embedded below. Unfortunately, the story is not going to reflect well on the former president -- nor the current one.
We have to start with "the Wall" in order to put this into context. Former president Trump campaigned on the idea of building a "big, beautiful wall" (his words) along our southern border; he claimed, on many occasions, that Mexico was going to pay for this wall. But like many of former president Trump's initiatives, it was not well thought out and the funding from Mexico never materialized as then president Trump promised it would.
At the end of the day, the Trump administration was only able to build about 80 miles of new barrier (in total, 458 miles of wall was either refurbished or built new) where no structure was previously in place. So president Trump mostly presided over repairs and enhancements to the existing wall -- and Mexico paid for none of it.
The costs were enormous (on the order of $15 billion), and exacerbated by the fact that there was an apparent lack of competitive bidding -- Trump campaign contributors seemingly received lucrative contracts to perform much of the work. In the end, the US taxpayers paid billions of dollars for this combined old/new wall. The bottom line: WE TAXPAYERS PAID OVER $4,200 PER FOOT for "Trump's wall". With such a steep price per foot for welded steel, the taxpayers could at least have expected the most secure, impenetrable wall in the world, don't you think? Unfortunately, the people crossing the border have found that it is FAR from impenetrable, requiring only ladders and readily available hand tools to quickly enable their ingress.
https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-15-billion-supposedly-impenetrable-150044690.html
Let's discuss the money trail. As I mentioned, Mexico did not pay a single penny for "Trump's wall". So where did the money come from? I'm so happy you asked!
In order to fund his legacy project at the border, former president Trump redirected massive amounts of money from the Department of Homeland Security and the US Military budgets - much of which was intended to fund narcotics interdiction in that specific area! So, in effect, this action served to hamstring our DHS and military people at/near the border by taking away the budget needed to enable their interdiction of the drug traffickers. Another significant portion of the budget was redirected from DOD and this apparently including funds intended to fund the production/resupply of the same types of missiles that we are currently sending to the Ukraine to allow them to better defend themselves against Russian aggression. Stockpiles of those weapons are now running low due to the Ukraine support effort in combination with the effect of president Trump's redirection of previously appropriated defense funds in favor of the wall that he had previously claimed Mexico would pay for.
https://www.statista.com/chart/19280/trump-wall-budget/
One of the good things former president Trump did, in my opinion, was to push for the Title 42 border crossing restrictions. Title 42 was a not-so-elegant piece of policy that was conveniently used to restrict the flow of immigrants across our borders on the basis of health concerns. Under Title 42, they were deemed to be potential COVID carriers and that was the basis to block them at the border. President Biden rightfully kept this piece of Trump-era policy in place during the first year of his presidency. Unfortunately, as the impact of the virus wound down, it was difficult to argue its continuation in the face of a likely challenge in the court system. Consequently, the Biden administration was, in effect, forced to let the Title 42 restrictions lapse.
Which brings us to the topic of all the border crossings. Republicans and Democrats love to throw darts at each other about our southern border. However, the facts suggest that the current situation there is neither a unique crisis nor the result (at least yet) of Biden’s policy changes.”
Moreover, this is not a new crisis. It has been going on since 2014, when we first saw unaccompanied minors and family units arriving at the border and turning themselves in, and the problem has plagued each administration since.
Multiple immigration experts, writing in the Washington Post, agreed that “the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.” It’s “not a surge,” they said.
Indeed, the patterns of migration do not seem to correlate to any specific U.S. immigration policy (see attached links for data). The numbers seem to go up and down based on a logic of their own. The bottom line is that people leave their home countries for reasons other than U.S. policy, such as deteriorating economic, political or public safety conditions.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/03/the-facts-on-the-increase-in-illegal-immigration/
That brings us to the current point in time. The reality is that we do, indeed, have a problem at our southern border. In particular, beyond the asylum seekers and usual immigration requests, we have a problem with drugs such as fentanyl crossing illegally there. The efforts by former president Trump were insufficient to remedy the problems, for the reasons outlined above. And current president Biden seems to be dragging his feet on the implementation of policies that could provide the necessary tools for the country to manage these problems. There's enough blame to go around, in any case.
But the one truth here is that the Republicans and, to a lesser extent, the Democrats continue to weaponize misinformation that flies in the face of common reason, facts and truth. The Democrats did NOT cause the border problems. Neither did the Republicans. But, there's a pretty good argument for blaming both parties together for these problems. If we can all get past the devisive political rhetoric and start dealing with each other in terms of facts and known truths, maybe someday we can collectively solve these kinds of problems. But that will never, ever happen while we are needlessly shooting barbs at each other.