Trump’s border wall would slice through wildlife refuges and cut off U.S. territory in Texas

Apparently, Mexico may have to host the wall, too

Oh, and, according to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, it now belongs to Mexico. Well, sort of.    Zinke’s suggestion? We build it on the Mexican side of the river so we don’t “cede” that territory to our southern neighbors. There are a few problems with that idea, but one is more immediate than others: Under Zinke’s formulation, we’ve already “ceded” a lot of land to Mexico. Here’s part of the border between Mexico and Texas near where the Rio Grande enters the Gulf of Mexico. Areas in white are in the United States; the brown line is the existing wall, miles and miles of which already exist. Everything south of the brown line that is colored white is land that has been “ceded” — including, in this case, the Sabal Palm Sanctuary.  There is a lot of territory that falls into that category, as you can see if you zoom out on the map above or as seen below. Everything between that orange line and that black line: ceded.    It would, however, irritate Mexico. Trump’s long-promised pledge to have the Mexican government pay for the wall was never realistic, and, as president, he has offered no plan to make that happen. It seems perhaps more unlikely that he will persuade a foreign nation to allow the United States to construct on its property, particularly given that the point of the wall is, among other things, to block the movement of people from that nation. Trump could theoretically get Mexico to “pay” for the wall by cutting off aid and funding to the country. But there’s essentially no way he could get Mexico to give up its territory. Zinke’s overall point is correct: Building the wall involves balancing a lot of concerns and problems. How do you build in the mountains? Where do you run through environmentally sensitive areas? And how do you deal with the river? In the past, the river has been dealt with by isolating some small group of Americans on the other side of the barrier. In the future, it’s almost certain that the same compromise will be reached.

5 challenges Trump may face building a border wall

To report a multipart visual series on border barriers around the globe, we drove the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border — from Brownsville, Tex., to San Diego, with crossings into Mexico scattered throughout — talking to locals and experts about President Trump’s promise to build the wall. Trump’s action to start construction leaves unclear whether the administration will build a wall along the entire border or just in certain areas. Below are five notable challenges to building the wall that we observed along the journey. **1\. The terrain is very rough in some areas** The nearly 2,000-mile border features a variety of climates, vegetation and terrain. Most of the current border fence exists west of El Paso, Tex., where the border switches from relatively straight lines to the winding path of the Rio Grande. On its way to the Gulf of Mexico, the river cuts through the mountains of Big Bend National Park and rests in reservoirs including near Amistad Dam. Both present clear challenges to wall builders. Byron Hedges, a local who has fished in the Amistad Dam, said he thought the topography would make construction difficult. He said, “If Donald Trump went and flew the whole border, just in Texas, he would realize it’s infeasible. It’s too rough of country.” **2\. Unlike the Western border states, most of Texas is privately owned** A significant amount of border land in Arizona and New Mexico is owned by the federal government. But most Texas land is privately owned, thanks to its terms of entry into the Union centuries ago. This difference led to lawsuits between Texans and the federal government during construction of the fencing that exists today. According to a project on the border barrier by the University of Texas’s law school, the United States sued “hundreds of private property owners to obtain title to their land to allow for construction of segments of the wall on that land.” Resuming barrier construction on private lands will likely invite more lawsuits and logistical challenges. **3\. Most of the border is natural, but a human-made barrier is not** The southern border of Texas is technically somewhere in the middle of the Rio Grande. The river has changed course in the past, creating boundary disputes between the United States and Mexico. The existing border fencing in southern Texas often sits far from the river, outside its flood plains — creating wide seams between the fence and the official border. Some Americans live on the Mexican side of the border fence. River Bend Resort, a golf course and residence in Brownsville, Tex., sits between a gap in the existing fence. If the wall were completed, based on U.S. regulations, it would bisect the property, according to owner Jeremy Barnard. Roughly 200 residents and 15 of the 18 golf holes would sit south of the border wall. “What is the government’s plan? Are they going to come and buy out 200 people of their houses?” he said. “There’s so much more to it than ‘let’s just build a wall.’ ” **4\. Surveillance makes the barrier effective** Security experts say that border barriers are merely obstacles to would-be crossers unless they are watched. Former homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano famously remarked, “You show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” Fencing is just one part of the effort by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to secure the country’s borders. The number of Border Patrol officers has doubled in recent years. Checkpoints strategically line roads along the border. Where no fencing exists, cameras and sensors do. Efforts to build a “virtual fence” to supplement the physical barrier have proven challenging. SBInet, an initiative to augment border patrol agents with advanced technology, struggled to meet deadlines and faced repeated technical problems before it was terminated in 2011, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. **5\. Migrants are determined and often have few options** Increased violence in some Central American countries has pushed migrants and asylum seekers to the U.S. at a breakneck pace. Apprehensions of unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled in the last three years, according to Border Patrol figures. UNHCR reported that asylum seekers from those three countries have increased fivefold since 2012. Ramon Reyes, a Guatemalan migrant in Reynosa, Mexico, recounted tragic stories of war, corruption and murder in his home country. He said he left because of the violence and a lack of jobs. “Look, my opinion about fences, about those obstacles they’re placing, is that, no. No matter how many barriers they may place, they won’t stop us.”

Endangered animals are already cut off by a border wall. Trump wants it to be much bigger.

The “big, beautiful wall” that President Trump vowed again this week to build along the Mexican border won’t block just humans. Dozens of animal species that migrate freely across the international line in search of water, food and mates would be walled off. A list of animals that dwell near the 1,300-mile expanse that the proposed wall would cover seems endless. In May, in a report called Trump Wall, Outside magazine, using information compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, pointed out more than 100 species between California and Texas that are listed as threatened and endangered under the Endangered Species Act, or are candidates for a spot on the list.  But outside the government, scientists who’ve studied how 670 miles of walls and fences erected as part of the Secure Fence Act under former president George W. Bush in 2006 tell stories of animals stopping in their tracks, staring at barriers they couldn’t cross. “At the border wall, people have found large mammals confounded and not knowing what to do,” said Jesse Lasky, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State University. Deer, mountain lions, jaguar and ocelots are among the animals whose daily movement was disrupted, he said. Trump’s proposed wall, estimated to cost between $15 billion and $25 billion, would cover parts of the border that the Bush project, which was essentially abandoned because of its cost in 2009, does not. Research on the impact of the current barrier fence is limited because the 2006 act gave the Homeland Security secretary sweeping power to build quickly, without the need for environmental impact studies or other analysis that would show how the land would be disturbed and how flora and fauna could potentially be harmed. While at the University of Texas, Lasky led a study on the impact of barriers published in the journal Diversity and Distributions in 2011. The study’s main conclusion was that the “new barriers would increase the number of species at risk.” A big concern, Lasky said in an interview Friday, was that over time the populations of threatened and endangered species would decline. A wall cutting off isolated populations from those on the other side of the wall would exacerbate the problem because they couldn’t mate, at least not in a sustainable way. “There are concerns about small populations mating with each other and inbreeding, and getting genetic disorders from inbreeding,” Lasky said. Their problems wouldn’t end there. “We didn’t talk about it much in the paper, but with climate change, if an animal or any organism is going to stay in the temperatures it prefers, it has to move to track those conditions. That’s going to be important for the persistence of a lot of species.” A 2008 study mentioned the decline of carnivores, such as the grizzly bear and gray wolf, at the U.S.-Mexico border and renewed interest in protecting Neotropical cat species there. “In the U.S.A., there are no known breeding populations of jaguars and only two…populations of ocelots,” according to the study by scientists at Pace University in New York and the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in Mexico. The cats “are threatened by land development and land conversion, predator control by cattle growers, an increase in disease exposure, construction of highways, international bridges and immigration-control infrastructure,” meaning border walls. More walls would greatly magnify the threat, the researchers said.

No room for the wall

Mission, Tex., Mayor Beto Salinas was wrong in his characterization of the attitudes our community feels about the proposed border wall construction [“Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ will be much smaller than billed,” news, April 25]. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone living here who wants it. The wall would turn our homes into prisons, with our children growing up in the shadow of a symbol of hatred for the Latino immigrants living here. It would not deter border crossers but would force them to traverse harsher terrain where many would die. The wall would also steal our landowners’ property and wall off the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and World Birding Center on which our local economy depends greatly. Both our precious ecology and our economy rely heavily upon our sister cities in Mexico, and we share with them a cultural heritage and landscape that, once severed, we would never regain. We want to see our community continue to benefit, as it has since its inception, from the synergy with our Mexican neighbors for generations to come, and that means we have no room for walls or fences. ****John-Michael Torres** , Mission, Tex.** **The writer is the communications coordinator for La Union del Pueblo Entero.**

Another group Trump’s wall would hurt: Animals

In her Sept. 7 op-ed, “If animals could vote,” Kathleen Parker called attention to indications that, as president, Republican nominee Donald Trump would not follow President Obama’s example of being a staunch defender of wildlife. She mentioned that Mr. Trump’s two sons enjoy big-game hunting, as shown by several photos of them with their lifeless trophies. She mentioned that Donald Trump Jr. said he would like to head up the Interior Department, which oversees trophy-hunting imports, and that the Humane Society Legislative Fund called candidate Trump’s agricultural advisers a “rogues gallery” of anti-animal welfare activists. Ms. Parker missed the opportunity to point out the disastrous impact that Mr. Trump’s proposed border wall would have on wildlife. According to the Worldwatch Institute, the U.S.-Mexican border region has the highest rate of species endangerment in the United States. Existing border barriers are known to have already degraded habitats for endangered species. Mr. Trump’s promised wall would make things much worse. ****Henry Haussling** , Cross Junction**

The areas where Trump’s wall would be built voted heavily against Trump

On the surface, this is surprising: Even members of Trump’s own party in one of the states that directly adjoins Mexico offered some hesitation. But in another sense, it’s not that surprising. If built the length of the border, the wall would be traversing mostly Democratic-blue territory.  In this one area, there are three types of fence: pedestrian fence 225 (PF225), vehicle fence 300 (VF300) and legacy pedestrian fencing, illustrated in magenta. Viewed from the Mexican side, looking in the direction of the arrow, this is what that intersection looks like. In a relatively flat, populated area, constructing a barrier is fairly easy. Along other parts of the border, it isn’t.      Will Hurd is not Hispanic, but is the Republican who holds the most tightly contested district of those adjacent to the border. He released a statement about the wall this week that echoes what he told the Texas Tribune last year. “Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border,” Hurd’s statement read. “Each section of the border faces unique geographical, cultural, and technological challenges that would be best addressed with a flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers the agents on the ground with the resources they need. A wall may be an effective tool in densely populated areas, but a variety of tools are needed between Brownsville, Texas and San Diego, California.”   Back to the wall. Zoom in on Pima County, Arizona. The gaps in the wall there? Mostly a function of the terrain.  In other words, President Trump’s proposed wall will be built mostly in places that voted against him and to some extent in places that don’t want it. And at this point, there’s no reason to think that anyone besides American citizens will end up paying for it.

Trump says building a U.S.-Mexico wall is ‘easy.’ But is it really?

For centuries, societies have erected walls and fences to separate themselves from their neighbors, from the Great Wall of China through the Berlin Wall right up to the barrier that today divides Israel from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The United States has debated putting up security barriers of its own along the Southwest border and has spent billions of dollars in recent years fencing one-third of it. Now, Donald Trump is proposing to go even further, vowing to build a massive, impenetrable wall along the U.S.-Mexico frontier to keep out illegal Mexican migrants.   “Building a wall is easy, and it can be done inexpensively,” the Republican presidential candidate said in an interview. “It’s not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing.’’ The wall has become the signature proposal of Trump’s campaign, which has stirred widespread controversy over its focus on illegal immigration and his comments about immigrants. Any wall-building effort would cost billions of dollars and encounter a variety of obstacles, according to experts, documents and federal officials, including some of the same difficulties that bedeviled the federal government as it spent more than $7 billion on border fencing. The hurdles include environmental and engineering problems; fights with ranchers and others who don’t want to give up their land; and the huge topographical challenges of the border, which runs through remote desert in Arizona to rugged mountains in New Mexico and, for two-thirds of its length, along rivers. “It’s extremely challenging to put a brick-and-mortar wall along the Southwest border for any number of reasons,” said Richard Stana, who wrote multiple reports on border security for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office before retiring in 2011. “It seems very simplistic.” If such a barrier could be erected, experts and government officials agreed that making it impenetrable would be virtually impossible, as is completely securing the entire 1,954-mile border. The Department of Homeland Security is already spending millions of dollars a year to maintain existing fences and to repair breaches, according to government reports and officials, while drug traffickers and smugglers are increasingly using tunnels to pass underneath. While a wall along much of the border might theoretically be possible, said Thad Bingel, a former senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, “is it desirable? At what cost, and what do you give up to pay for that?’’ Bingel — who was involved in border fence-building during the George W. Bush administration and is now a partner at Command Consulting Group in Washington — added: “Every wall can be circumvented. People can go under it, they can go over it. . . . No one should go into this with the idea that if you just build the right kind of wall, no one will get through.’’ Trump disputed that, saying that a wall “would be very effective” in deterring illegal migrants and that seismic and other equipment could detect and stop any underground tunnels. “A wall is better than fencing, and it’s much more powerful,” he said. “It’s more secure. It’s taller.” The veteran builder acknowledged that environmental impact studies would be difficult but said he is the one person who can rise to the challenge. “I’m considered a great builder, by everybody,” he said, adding that cost is irrelevant because he would force Mexico to pay for the structure. Asked whether that was realistic, Trump said: “It’s realistic if you know something about the art of negotiating. If you have a bunch of clowns negotiating, it’s not realistic.” Trump has emerged as a leading GOP candidate partly because of his strong statements about immigration, which have included describing Mexicans entering the country illegally as “rapists” and “murderers.” He has suggested at times that his proposed wall would be extensive and would cover nearly the entire border, but said in the interview: “You don’t have to build it in every location. There would be some locations where you would have guards, where you don’t need it because the topography acts as its own wall, whether that’s water or very rough terrain.” The concept of a wall or fence along virtually the entire border has bubbled up occasionally in the nation’s immigration debate, with some Republicans supporting the idea. Today, there are more than 45 such walls and border fences worldwide, perhaps most prominently Israel’s West Bank barrier. While Israeli officials say it has reduced attacks, security specialists say that barrier, slated to be more than 400 miles long when finished, is not comparable to what would be required along the far more extensive U.S. Southwest border. The Israelis, they add, supplement the physical concrete barrier with a mix of border police and technology, much as the Department of Homeland Security does in the United States. The U.S. government began building border fencing near San Diego in 1990. As DHS cracked down on illegal immigration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush dramatically expanded the effort. Spending on border fencing and related infrastructure such as lighting shot up from $298 million in 2006 to $1.5 billion the following year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Overall, more than $7 billion has been spent to build what is now almost 653 miles of Southwest border fencing — costing nearly $5 million per mile in some spots — nearly half in Arizona. The costs could rise substantially if extensive new fencing was built, since it would be in increasingly remote regions without roads and in mountainous terrain, said Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. Adding even more to the expense, he said, would be acquiring private land near the border and maintaining existing fencing. Trump’s wall would probably cost far more than fencing, Stana said, given the greater needs for construction materials and labor. While current and former DHS officials say the fencing has been effective in deterring illegal immigration, they say it is only one part of a broader border strategy that includes expanded sensors, drones and other technology, along with growing numbers of Border Patrol officers. “Our southern border is a mixture of winding river, desert and mountains. Simply building more fences is not the answer,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an October speech. The government’s difficulties in erecting fences highlight the challenges of building a wall, experts said. The fencing mandated by Congress in 2006 was beset by delays, surging construction costs and disputes with private property owners, mostly in Texas, DHS officials have said. The biggest failure was the virtual fence, a Bush administration effort to cover the border with a high- tech surveillance system. “It’s a huge effort to construct anything at the border,” said one DHS official, who has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and spoke on the condition of anonymity because Trump’s plan is part of a political campaign. “You have lots of requirements to do construction: the environmental piece, engineering assessments. And a private landowner might not want fencing.” Wayne Cornelius, director of the Mexican migration field research program at the University of California at San Diego, called Trump’s proposal “ludicrous. . . . Any physical barrier can be tunneled under or climbed over or gotten around. There will always be gaps, and smugglers and migrants will seek out those gaps and go through.” Robert Costa and Alice Crites contributed to this story.

Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ will require him to take big swaths of other people’s land

The wall will cost a lot more — politically and economically — than Trump has publicly acknowledged. To build the wall along the nearly 2,000-mile border — and fulfill a key campaign promise — Trump will need to wield the power of government to forcibly take private properties, including those belonging to his supporters. Much of the border, especially in Texas, snakes through farms, ranches, orchards, golf courses, and other private property dating back to centuries-old Spanish land grants. As a signpost to the troubles ahead, the government has still not finished the process from the last such undertaking a decade ago. “It's going to be time consuming and costly,” said Tony Martinez, an attorney who is mayor of the border town of Brownsville, Tex. “From a political perspective, you have a lot of rich landowners who were his supporters.”  The battle has been fought before. The last wave of eminent domain cases over southern border properties dates back to the 2006 Secure Fence Act authorizing President George W. Bush to erect 700 miles of fencing.     “It will be a huge challenge for his administration. It will clog up the courts,” said Terence Garrett, a security studies and public affairs professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville. “It’s just an affront to property rights.”                  Trump reiterated his support more recently, calling eminent domain “wonderful,” in a 2015 Fox News interview, when “you need a house in a certain location because you're going to build this massive development that's going to employ thousands of people.”

Trump’s dubious claim that his border wall would cost $8 billion

_“It’s $8 billion.… And of the 2,000 [miles], we don’t need 2,000, we need 1,000 because we have natural barriers, et cetera, et cetera, and I’m taking it price per square foot and a price per square, you know, per mile, and it’s a very simple calculation. I’m talking about precasts going up probably 35 to 40 feet up in the air. That’s high; that’s a real wall. It will actually look good. It’ll look, you know, as good as a wall is going to look.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **— Donald Trump,interview with MSNBC, Feb. 9, 2016**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Donald Trump put a price tag on the wall he wants to build on the 2,000-mile border with Mexico – $8 billion. He also described the wall in a bit more detail — it would be 1,000 miles long, made of precast concrete slabs, rising 35 to 40 feet in the air. Trump has repeatedly said Mexico will pay for the wall, though Mexican leaders dismiss that as a fantasy. He has suggested that the money would come from reducing the $50 billion trade deficit with Mexico — which as our friends at PolitiFact have documented, is simply nonsensical.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But is his $8 billion estimate in the realm of possibility? As big government projects go, $8 billion is not a huge sum. A single aircraft carrier these days costs about $13 billion. But then that’s sophisticated ship — and Trump is just talking about a very long wall.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the United States has already spent $2.4 billion for fencing across nearly one-third of the border (670 miles). It’s unclear if Trump would replace the fence with the wall or supplement the fence with the wall. (The fence is mostly vehicle barriers and single-layer pedestrian fence, which presumably is inadequate for Trump’s purposes.) But the fence, while different from a wall, does provide some sense of the numbers involved. The Government Accountability Office in 2009 said the cost to build a mile of the fence initially averaged between $2.8 million and $3.9 million. But that was in the easiest areas, near metropolitan centers; other areas in the desert or mountains could cost as much as $16 million a mile.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So 1,000 miles of fences is at best $3 billion, and certainly much higher than that. A concrete wall would clearly be an order of magnitude. (We have not even begun to consider upkeep and maintenance. The Corps of Engineers estimated that the 25-year life cycle cost of the fence would range from $16.4 million to $70 million per mile; the total cost of the fencing so far has been $7 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We can also look at the Israel’s experience with building a separation barrier between Israeli-held areas and Palestinian-held areas. For the first 525 kilometers (326 miles), the cost was $2.6 billion. A simple calculation of expanding that to 1,000 miles yields a calculation of $7.99 billion, suspiciously similar to Trump’s estimate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But only one-tenth (33 miles) of the Israeli barrier is an eight-meter (25-foot) concrete wall. The other 90 percent is a two-meter (six-foot) high electronic fence. Trump says he wants a 1,000-mile long concrete wall. Assuming the cost of the fence was equivalent to the U.S. fence ($3 million a mile), that suggests about $1 billion of the cost was for the fence; the other $1.4 billion was for 33 miles of the wall (which was built in mostly metropolitan areas). Believe it or not, that translates to $42 billion for 1,000 miles of a 25-foot wall. (Recall that Trump wants a 35-to-40-foot wall.) In an interesting article for The National Memo, a structural engineer tried to do the calculations just for the concrete. He even produced a possible sketch.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico His calculations were for a 2,000-mile, 25-foot-high wall, so we have updated them for a 1,000-mile, 35-foot-high wall. That’s about double the amount of concrete in the Hoover Dam. A cement manufacturer said prices are now running $85 to $90 a cubic yard, so that works out to about $700 million just for the concrete. As the engineer noted, a lot of reinforcing steel (rebar) would also be necessary. We figured that the steel would add up to about 1.6 million tons, which works out to about $1 billion at current per-ton costs, but perhaps Trump could get a volume discount. So just for two raw materials, we are looking at nearly $2 billion. But of course, the wall would need to be designed, land would need to be acquired, environmental impact statements would need to be done, concrete-casting facilities would need to be built, materials would need to be shipped, and workers would need to be hired, housed and fed. We consulted with several experts, who said even a rough estimate of the total cost was extremely difficult. We will update if we obtain an estimate from a credible source. **Update:** We spoke to a retired estimator and economist for one of the nation’s largest construction firms. He worked through some of the math, though he did not want to be identified publicly. Roughly, he said a wall of this type would cost at least $25 billion — and that is not counting a video system to keep watch on the border. Building the wall would also require at least 40,000 workers a year for at least four years, but he doubted it could be built so quickly.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The concrete panels would need to be at least 8 inches thick and be 40 feet tall (35 feet above ground and five feet under ground). He estimated that it would cost about $10 billion for the concrete panels and $5-6 billion for steel columns to hold the panels, including labor. Concrete footing for the columns and a concrete foundation would add another $1 billion. A road would need to be built so 20-ton trucks could deliver the materials; that’s another $2 billion. Then you need to add another 30 percent for engineering, design, management and so forth. That adds up to nearly $25 billion–three times Trump’s estimate. Some of the calculations are staggering. The foundations would require nearly 2.5 to 3 million cubic yards of concrete, which requires poured-in-place concrete delivered in concrete trucks. “That’s 250,000 to 300,000 truckloads, 20-ton each of concrete,” he said. Then the excavated earth would need to be hauled somewhere and disposed–nearly 3 million cubic yards, or enough soil to cover 17 acres 100 feet deep. That’s 90,000 truckloads of 40 tons each. **Update, July 26:** Bernstein Research issued a comprehensive report on the potential cost of the wall, concluding it would cost at least $15 billion and as much as $25 billion.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trump’s claim that the wall would cost $8 billion is highly dubious. We would welcome a serious discussion of the costs, rather than mere assertions, and are open to new information, either from Trump or from experts in construction engineering who have crunched the numbers. But based on the costs of the Israeli security barrier (which is mostly fence) and the cost of the relatively simple fence already along the U.S.-Mexico border, an $8 billion price tag is simply not credible. We are open to adjusting the rating if credible new information or estimates can be obtained, but based on the information we have now, this is yet another Four-Pinocchio claim from Trump. _Update:_ In a Feb. 17 interview with MSNBC, Trump upped his estimate of the cost: “The wall is going to cost a fraction of that [trade deficit with Mexico], maybe $10 billion or $12 billion, and it’s going to be a real wall.” We still believe that figure is not credible.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  (About our rating scale)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  **Send us facts to check by filling outthis form**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Check out our2016 candidates fact-check page**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Sign up for The Fact Checkerweekly newsletter**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

A new age of walls

A generation ago, globalization shrank the world. Nations linked by trade and technology began to erase old boundaries. But now barriers are rising again, driven by waves of migration, spillover from wars and the growing threat of terrorism. The numbers are clear: In 2015, work started on more new barriers around the world than at any other point in modern history. There are now 63 borders where walls or fences separate neighboring countries – nearly quadrupling in just 15 years. In many ways, the barrier-building is being driven by fear. “We are fencing out the south, and much richer countries are fencing themselves in,” said Elisabeth Vallet, a barriers expert at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Most of the new walls are being erected within the European Union, which until recently was nearly borderless. Britain is going further, rolling up its bridges to the continent by voting to exit the E.U. Intended to counter migrants and terrorist attacks, these moves are not limited to Europe. In the Middle East, Tunisia is erecting a desert barrier with lawless Libya to insulate itself from unrest and an Islamic State-led insurgency. This new age of barriers is not just about chain links and concrete. It also reflects the rise of populist politicians. The effectiveness of their nationalist rhetoric suggests that even as globalization was working its magic on trade, mobility and investment, a seditious resentment was brewing among those left behind. Donald Trump has made no secret of his plan to build a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border — and persuade Mexico to pay for it. The Republican presidential nominee has been remarkably vocal about the proposal, one that 6 in 10 voters disagree with. The wall, he argues, is needed to curb illegal immigration, reduce gang violence near the border and stop drugs from reaching the United States. For now, fences cover just 700 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile-long border. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, opposes completing the wall — but as a senator, she voted for the 2006 bill that led to construction of most of the existing fence. The idea of “completing the wall” has been part of political rhetoric since the first 14-mile stretch was completed 23 years ago, jutting eastward from the Pacific Ocean. But opinions remain divided on whether a barrier spanning the entire border is necessary — or even feasible. And nowhere does the debate roil more loudly than in the dusty cantinas and lively migrant shelters in the arid reaches of the border region. Mile by mile, the landscape and culture along the border varies wildly. West of El Paso, through New Mexico, Arizona and California, where most of the existing fence has been built, the border is largely a series of straight lines drawn by men. But to the east, in Texas, it follows the winding path of the Rio Grande. Most of the border land here is still unfenced. Fencing is just one part of the effort by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to secure the country’s borders. The number of Border Patrol officers has doubled in recent years. Where no fencing exists, cameras and sensors do. Barrier construction in this area would be difficult because of the region’s isolation and rough terrain. The federal government owns very little land in Texas, so a bigger fence would require the use of private land, adding to the legal and logistical challenges. But most challenging of all, the Rio Grande is a natural feature — not a man-made boundary. Rivers erode the land they pass. They flood. They dry up. They sometimes change course. A completed border barrier would have to navigate these natural challenges. Data released by CBP officials suggests illegal immigration has decreased since 2001, but it’s difficult to show which specific policies made a difference. The Great Recession, which began in 2008, almost certainly deterred some economic migrants, researchers say. Today, most deaths reported by the Border Patrol occur in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where most of the border remains unfenced, and in the Tucson area, which is mostly fenced. Border enforcement has pushed migrants off existing routes into more deserted areas. In southern Arizona, migrants walk dozens of miles through the desert, carrying water in plastic jugs. Immigration is a complicated issue; a barrier along the border addresses just one part of it. An estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already live in the United States, representing 5 percent of the labor force. Emma Sanchez embodies the intertwined nature of border protection and immigration policy. She is married to a U.S. veteran and has two American children but was deported 10 years ago after being found without documents. Every Sunday, dozens of deported mothers like her meet for a church service at Friendship Park, the only binational meeting place between the United States and Mexico. Situated at the west end of the border, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Tijuana, the park provides divided families a chance to catch up with their loved ones — if only for a few hours, and only through an 18-foot-tall steel and mesh fence. It is in Europe, not the American Southwest, where the cauldron of migration has truly begun to boil over. Until the upheaval of 2015, Europe was home to the world’s most open frontiers. But within months, a messy effort to halt a mass flow of migrants fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan cascaded into the construction of more border fences than anywhere else on the globe. The sheer numbers of migrant arrivals — nearly 5,000 a day to southern Europe alone — was shocking, though at first, the newcomers had arrived largely unhindered,. Some Europeans welcomed the refugees, arguing that they had a moral duty to aid people displaced by war. Yet a backlash quickly grew. The European Union had no system in place to properly vet the newcomers — at time when jihadists who fought in Syria with the Islamic State were seeking to reenter Europe. The fact that the influx also included economic migrants passing themselves off as asylum seekers did not help. Hungary began building a fence in June 2015, with completion of the its barrier rerouting migrants toward neighboring countries. By early 2016, Austria and other nations had banded together to halt migrant transit through the Balkans, and the E.U. signed a deal with Turkey to stop asylum seekers from crossing the Aegean Sea. The combined moves left nearly 60,000 migrants trapped in Greece, with the single largest bottleneck forming in Idomeni, a border town that formerly served as a waystation for those heading deeper into Europe. This coordinated effort largely worked. With the completion of each new fence, the flood of migrants entering that country slowed to a trickle. A combination of barriers and diplomacy sent a deterrent message to desperate migrants across the Middle East and beyond. Even now, though some in Europe are now asking whether the new walls are enough. To prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel, Britain is funding construction of a wall in Calais, France. Austria is preparing to erect more barriers if migrant numbers again begin to surge. There is reason for uneasiness. The E.U. deal with Turkey to halt the flow across the Aegean Sea is in danger of falling apart. European nations are charging Ankara with human rights abuses following a failed July coup attempt. Turkey has threatened to scrap the deal unless the E.U. honors its pledge to grant Turkish citizens visa-free access to the bloc. The heavy weight of terrorism also hangs over the discussions, after revelations that attackers in Paris and Brussels entered Europe disguised as migrants. A wave of sexual assaults in Germany last New Year’s Eve has further inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment. And yet, a continent that prided itself as the global standard-bearer for human rights is also confronting a moral dilemma. A plan to resettle migrants stranded in Greece has broken down as European countries reneged on pledges to accept them and Greek officials have been slow to process asylum claims. Although the E.U. offered to relocate 66,000 migrants, it has so far absorbed only a fraction of that number. Those left behind appear willing to take fresh risks despite the new obstacles rising in their paths. Many will employ dangerous smugglers — precisely a pattern the Europeans say they were trying to break. Europe’s new barriers have made it impossible for hundreds of thousands of Syrians to escape relentless war. Their message is clear: Keep out. _To see the full project, which includes video, sound and interactive graphics, please visitwapo.st/barriers._

Trump’s border plans are walling off better alternatives

Regarding the April 25 front-page article “Trump eases wall demands”: Candidate Donald Trump promised two things about a border wall: It would be great, and it would not cost American taxpayers anything. Now he wants to fulfill only the first part of his promise. I wonder how the election would have turned out if we knew he would stick taxpayers with the billions of dollars in cost instead of spending it on needed and job-creating infrastructure improvements. ****Glenn Kerr** , Davidsonville** **Sealing a border with a wall** is a strictly medieval approach. In the 21st century, one should be using the latest equipment and techniques. This could consist of an extensive network of electronic ground sensors backed by around- the-clock aerial reconnaissance using a large fleet of drones. All this equipment would be operated by increased numbers of border guard personnel equipped with a fleet of helicopters. This would be far more effective and would cost substantially less than a wall that, inter alia, would have to cope with rugged terrain and would require obtaining private property from reluctant owners. ****William Lloyd Stearman** , North Bethesda**

History suggests Donald Trump’s big, beautiful, brick-and-mortar border wall may not be so outlandish

But the idea of building a brick-and-mortar wall — or at least some kind of barrier — on the U.S.-Mexico border is hardly new. Over the past few decades, Congress has in fact authorized hundreds of miles of fencing along the border. True, it’s not actual brick and mortar. But if Trump gets elected president and Congress stays controlled by Republicans, it’s not hard to see how the political will is there for hundreds of miles of fence to turn into Trump’s “great, great wall.” I recently caught up with Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, to get a better sense of Congress’s approach to border barriers, which has shifted over time from redirecting the flow of illegal immigration to trying to stop it completely. Here’s a timeline of the big flash points: For decades, U.S. Border Patrol had been playing an endless game of cat and mouse on the vast, largely empty U.S.-Mexico border: They would catch immigrants crossing illegally, ship them back to the Mexican side of the border, and both sides would repeat. In 1990, Border Patrol shifted its strategy from catching immigrants on the U.S. side to trying to stop them from crossing in the first place. And so the first wall was built. Actually, it was a fence — a 14-mile-long, about 10-feet-high fence along the San Diego border. There were barriers for vehicles, too, kind of like the guard rails you see along the highway. “Outside of a port of entry, this was the first physical barrier” along our Mexican border, Nowrasteh said. In 1996, Congress passed a law that gave the U.S. attorney general and Border Patrol the authority to build even more barriers along the border. So up went more fences. But they were mostly congregated around higher population areas, such as San Diego and El Paso. That’s because Border Patrol’s immediate concern was to respond to complaints from U.S. residents about immigrants coming onto their private property. Texas’s borderland in particular is about 95 percent privately owned. “Residents were so upset about waking up and finding an illegal immigrant sleeping on their yard,” Nowrasteh said, “so to solve public complaints, they built a fence around El Paso and funneled these border-crossers elsewhere.” Put another way, this first series of border walls wasn’t aimed at keeping all illegal immigrants out. It was aimed more at directing the flow of traffic away from population centers. Illegal immigration from Mexico had been steadily climbing in the ’90s, peaking in 2000 at 1.6 million per year, Nowrasteh said. But the 2005 to 2006 period was also big. More than a million people were apprehended on the border pretty much every year starting in 2004, in fact. It’s no coincidence that that was also when a Republican-controlled Congress, with a Republican in the White House, took its first big step toward fencing off the entire border. In 2005, they passed a law that waived any legal barriers to putting up fences. If Border Patrol wanted to build a barrier that ran into conflict with, say, federal noise control or conservation laws, this new law said the fence took precedence.  At that point, there were only a few dozen miles fenced off, so this new law marked a big shift in how Washington approached securing the border. The message from Congress was clear: Building a physical barrier was an acceptable and even desirable policy solution to illegal immigration.  Even those who had been pragmatic when it came to immigration reform and giving illegal immigrants a way to stay in the United States felt the pressure to toe the line. “Complete the dang fence,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) memorably said in a 2010 campaign ad, as he was facing a more conservative primary challenger. Up until this point, we’ve been talking about actual laws — you know, bills passed by Congress and signed by the president. But to talk about today’s relationship with the border, we have to reframe the discussion to plain old bills — proposals that have been tried and mostly failed. That’s because Congress has tried and failed for several years now to pass immigration reform. The closest it got was in 2013, when a Democratic-controlled Senate voted to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. It didn’t call for more fencing, but to appease Republicans who wanted to make sure the border was secure, it planned to send 20,000 more border agents.   The bill was never brought up in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives anyway. Fast-forward to the 2016 presidential campaign. Nearly every single Republican presidential candidate talked about how the border needs to be secured before any other immigration laws can change. The senators running for president had long, winding debates about who was more adamant on border security.

For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work.

_Adam T. Smith is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University._ Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico to block the flow of migrants has been justly criticized on moral, economic and political grounds. But while the Trump Wall (as he has called it) is the most provocative proposal of the election season, it is not particularly original. Over the past five millennia, politicians have repeatedly turned to large walls to solve problems. We should look carefully at the track record of this ancient technology before we invest what some estimates suggest could be $25 billion in construction costs for a 2,000-mile- long wall, plus millions more in annual maintenance. One of the earliest examples of a large-scale barrier wall was constructed by the rulers of the city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, at the end of the third millennium B.C. The kings of Ur faced a considerable challenge along their northwestern border from a semi-nomadic people known as the Amorites. Cuneiform texts suggest that Amorites not only pressed in on grazing lands but also for decades had moved into the cities of southern Mesopotamia, where they were regularly identified as foreigners. During the 21st century B.C., the kings of Ur resolved to block further migration by building linear barriers, some of which may have extended as far as 155 miles. But the walls were spectacular failures. After decades of wall building, Ur’s kings were eclipsed and, for the next three centuries, Amorite kings ruled over much of Mesopotamia. Hadrian’s Wall, initiated by the Roman emperor Hadrian in A.D. 122 across the northern boundary of the province of Britannia, was more successful, largely because it was never intended to cease the everyday flow of people across the border, as the Trump Wall seeks to do. Indeed, the wall became an important entrepôt for trade and a funnel for population movement. The strategic objectives of Hadrian’s 73-mile wall were to provide the military infrastructure for parrying violent attacks from the north and to define the symbolic limits of the Roman world. But even military walls, with their more limited ambition, have an undistinguished track record. During the 6th century A.D., the Sassanian king Khosrau I erected a series of extraordinary walls at the city of Derbent, in what is today the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. Khosrau’s walls, thought at the time to be impregnable, were up to 60 feet high and stretched for 30 miles. And yet not even a century later, they were overrun during the third Perso-Turkic War. The walls of Derbent illustrate the fundamental trouble with barriers. We imagine them to be impregnable, but they are in fact porous. They can always be circumvented (witness the Amorites) or simply overwhelmed (as at Derbent). What static barriers do provide is an illusion of security. The porosity of walls is best illustrated by the most famous of all pre-modern barrier walls: the 5,500-mile-long Great Wall of China. The most significant portions of the Great Wall that remain standing today were built by the rulers of the Ming dynasty starting in the 14th century A.D. to check the advance of the Mongols. The emperors built early components of the Great Wall in areas of strategic military concern, much like Hadrian’s Wall. But Mongol armies proved remarkably adept at simply going around the barriers, necessitating new investments in still more walls. Ultimately, however, it was not the ease of circumventing walls that undid the Ming. In 1644, a former Ming general opened the gate of the critical Shanhai Pass, allowing the forces of the upstart Qing dynasty to pass through. Porous indeed. What is most captivating about barrier walls, like the Trump Wall, is neither the scope of their construction nor the resoluteness of their strategic vision. Rather, they are powerful symbols of a particular kind of hubris, the conceit that the translation of mania into masonry can alter the decisions, fortunes and futures of countless others through architectural intimidation. Here, the Berlin Wall should still live in all of our memories as a potent symbol of how walls and totalitarian politics often find common cause. Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking. The Trump Wall, the past shows, does not promise a solution to the forces driving migration along the U.S.-Mexico border. But it does offer the illusion of a solution. So if the Trump Wall is ever built, no one should be surprised when it is bypassed, breached or bombarded, just like those that came before it. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: The shaky foundation under Mr. Trump’s wall Eugene Robinson: Will Latinos wall off Trump from the White House?

GOP congressman: A wall is the least effective way to secure the border

_Will Hurd, a Republican, represents Texas’s 23rd Congressional District in the House._ Because the world we live in is more dangerous than our parents’ was, and our children are set to inherit a world more dangerous than ours, Congress must get right our mandated mission to provide for the common defense of our country. With a unified Republican government, we now have a commander in chief who takes protecting our borders as seriously as Congress does. But taking action for action’s sake rarely leads to positive results. Our leaders have the solemn obligation to know the proper steps to take before acting upon them, and building a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf Coast of Texas is a third-century solution to a 21st-century problem. President Trump’s recent executive order on border security is vague when it comes to what the term physical barrier means. I am hoping that our new secretary of homeland security is afforded significant latitude regarding the implementation of this order. I agree with Secretary John Kelly’s comments during his confirmation hearing that a wall does not solve our security problems. In fact, building a wall from sea to shining sea would be the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border. For the past eight years, we had an administration with a one-size-fits-all approach to border security. We must change the strategy, not simply adopt a different one-size-fits-all solution. Each sector of the border faces unique geographical, cultural and technological challenges that would be best addressed with a flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers the Border Patrol agents on the ground with the resources they need. What you need in San Diego is very different from what you need in Eagle Pass, Tex. The Rio Grande serves as the international boundary for 1,200 miles of the Texas-Mexico border — including more than 800 miles in my district — and the majestic Big Bend National Park runs along more than 100 miles of it. The tallest peak in the park is almost 8,000 feet. Building a wall in the middle of a river or at the top of a mountain would be a waste of taxpayer money. The Texas-Mexico border is also home to a significant part of the largest desert in North America — the Chihuahuan Desert. Building a barrier through hundreds of miles of desert on the border is useless if you do not have Border Patrol agents available to respond to challenges to the barrier. Furthermore, much of the property along the Texas-Mexico border is privately owned, and seizing land to build a wall is not popular among these landowners. There are already almost 700 miles of fencing along the 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and hundreds of miles are in need of repair because criminal organizations have cut through and dug under it repeatedly. Part of the existing wall along the border in places such as Arizona has been used as the foundation of a ramp upon which drug traffickers have moved heavy equipment. For every move we make to defend ourselves, our adversaries will make a counter-move. True border security demands a flexible, defense-in-depth strategy that includes a mix of personnel, technology and changing tactics, all of which come at a lower price tag than a border wall. During the campaign, Trump suggested his wall would cost between $8 billion and $12 billion. A further analysis of these proposals by the MIT Technology Review suggests the cost could be as much as $40 billion. To give some perspective on this number, the entire national intelligence program’s (the CIA, National Security Agency, etc.) annual budget is $53 billion. As a conservative legislator, I believe the U.S. government has a responsibility to use the hard-earned taxpayer dollars entrusted to it wisely. Some of this border wall money should go to increase CIA and NSA operations targeting the criminal organizations operating in Mexico and the rest of Central America. Improved intelligence and closer working relationships with our partners in Mexico could solve the problem before it hits our country. The president has said that he will ensure that Mexico pays for the construction of a border wall. Mexico is our friend and partner. Our national security depends on working together to ensure the integrity of our Southern border. While chasing terrorists as an undercover officer in the CIA, I learned a few life lessons, such as: Be nice to nice guys and tough with tough guys; and make sure your friends trust you and your enemies fear you. Asking our friends to pay for something that won’t solve our problems is not how to ensure that our children inherit a country less dangerous than ours. ****

The biggest problem for Trump’s border wall isn’t money. It’s getting the land.

In 2008, the George W. Bush administration, which had started building about 670 miles of border fencing on mostly federally owned land in Arizona, California and New Mexico under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, tried to seize an acre or so in Cameron County, Tex., that belonged to Eloisa Tamez. Things did not go quickly.         As Eloisa Tamez’s case demonstrated, that’s a lot of ammunition for hundreds of landowners. If the rollout of Trump’s hastily drafted travel ban is any indicator, we should expect sloppy execution of statutory requirements and takings procedures if the administration attempts to condemn border land.

The missing dimension in the NAFTA debate

Then there are the random presidential tweets:   To use the parsimonious language of social media: this this THIS!!      The Trump administration assumes that the benefits of unilateral action — building the wall, slapping import tariffs on Mexican goods — will be more effective than bilateral cooperation with the Mexican government. This bet is consistent with the foreign policy blinders that Trump has always displayed: He cannot perceive the benefits of a relationship unless they are tangible and directly in his line of sight. Trump supporters tend to think that there’s no way things can get worse along the Mexican border. It would appear that the 2018 Mexican election will prove to be a great natural experiment in whether that assumption is correct.

If you thought getting Mexico to pay for the wall couldn’t get weirder, you were wrong

President Trump has come up with a new idea on how to cover the costs for a proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico: build it with solar panels.  The U.S. border with Mexico is almost 2,000 miles long. Trump has said his wall, designed to prevent immigrants from crossing into the United States illegally, will cover 1,000 miles, with natural obstacles doing the rest of the work. That's a lot of solar panels, potentially generating a significant amount of energy. But the realities of building a 1,000-mile wall covered with solar panels — and then getting that electricity to market on either side of the border — are not so simple. With few actual details about the design of the wall, the cost of building it or the price that would be paid for the electricity, it is difficult to make any realistic conclusions about the impact of Trump’s solar wall — assuming it ever gets built. Predictions vary dramatically based on what assumptions about solar wall construction are factored in to the calculations.  Gleason Partners in April released an image of what the wall could look like.   Fixing the panels vertically could lead to an efficiency loss of around 50 percent, the analysis says, with the angle at which the sun would hit the wall losing an additional 10 percent in efficiency. Given that an average solar panel operates at about 20 percent efficiency, and factoring a few other challenges, this leaves the solar border wall operating at just 8 percent efficiency. That's a big disadvantage. In addition, solar panels degrade over time. The requirements dictated by the security aspects of the border wall — bricks and spray paint, for example — could further reduce efficiency. Then there is the question of finding a market for any electricity that would be generated by a solar wall in a remote section of the country. With less than 2 percent of the U.S. population living within 40 miles of the Mexico border, the electricity generated by the wall would mostly be useless — unless costly transmission lines were built to take the electricity to other areas of the country.  This means, to transmit power from the Mexico border to North Dakota, Trump would have to factor in costs of more than $8 billion, at least — in addition to the cost of the solar array, the wall and workmanship.   Shah elaborated on his idea in an interview with The Washington Post. “In this case, the monopoly utility company of Mexico is CFE,” he said. “CFE is an arm of the government, and if they sign a 20-year contract to buy the power at 6 cents a kilowatt hour, then that technically would be coming from the government.” But it is still a long shot. “There’s lots of reasons this would never work,” Shah said. While Mexico has been openly hostile to the wall, it remains to be seen whether the government would be more open to cooperating with the U.S. president if the wall also turned out to be a source of clean energy. “Once CFE got wind of what Trump would do, they would say, even if this is a great deal for the Mexican people, 'We’re not going to sign this contract on principle, because we don’t want Trump to fulfill his promise,' ” Shah said. Others argue there is still a compelling political and economic case to build a solar wall that would generate power for Mexico.  “Even without buy-in from Mr. Trump, the Mexican president could pursue this wall on his own territory, with financing from private investors,” they write. “This would put a positive spin on Mr. Trump’s idea of a structure to divide the two countries. [President Enrique] Peña Nieto could invite his northern neighbors to take part in the initiative, or Mexico could simply reap the financial and environmental benefits for itself.” Mexico is aiming to peak its emissions around 2026 and reduce its emissions intensity by about 40 percent from 2013 to 2030. Trump apparently told legislators that they could talk about the wall as long as they said it was his idea. Aside from the big economic and technical hurdles to building a massive solar wall, there’s no indication to suggest that the president has considered the domestic political consequences of his decision. Knocking coal plants offline to make way for a solar panel wall is unlikely to chime with the president's “Trump digs coal” mantra. Given China's global domination of the solar-panel-making industry, it might be hard for Trump to defend himself against the charge that building a wall out of made-in-China solar panels would be a gift to an economic competitor — let alone an energy boost to Mexico.

Mexico may strike back. Here’s how.

PRESIDENT TRUMP has a good idea of the power the United States wields over Mexico, and the pain it may inflict — the construction of a wall Mexico fiercely opposes; taxes that could be slapped on Mexican imports, wreaking havoc on its economy; deportations of undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the United States, who would be thrust back into a country that would struggle to absorb them. Mr. Trump might have a fuzzier idea of the pain Mexico, its people furious and its pride wounded by his taunts and contempt, might inflict on the United States. Start with those deportations. At least half of America’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants are Mexican, but many have no documents proving their nationality. For the Trump administration to deport them, it would need cooperation from Mexico, which cannot be forced to accept deportees without certifying that they are Mexicans. As former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda has already warned, Mr. Trump can round up hundreds of thousands or millions of migrants, but without Mexico’s cooperation, they could clog U.S. detention centers and immigration courts — at enormous cost and, conceivably, for years. Consider, too, the effect on America’s southern border if Mexico were to loosen immigration controls on its _own_ southern border — the one over which Central American refugees are already streaming north in near-record numbers. Even with what U.S. officials say are aggressive interdiction efforts by Mexican authorities, the Border Patrol detained more than 220,000 mainly Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans crossing from Mexico into the United States in the fiscal year ending last fall, exceeding the number of Mexicans apprehended, which has fallen to a 45-year low. If you think the Border Patrol is swamped now, as Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly insists, imagine if Mexico, which last year sent home more than 140,000 Central Americans, simply stepped aside. U.S. and Mexican officials work closely on an array of other bilateral concerns, from drug trafficking and organized crime to human smuggling and antiterrorism programs. Privately, U.S. officials may grouse that their counterparts aren’t always paragons of efficiency; they also acknowledge that, without Mexico’s help, combating crime and controlling the border would be infinitely more difficult. In launching his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called Mexicans rapists, and he has taunted the Mexican government at every turn. Those displays of public humiliation are not constructive elements in diplomacy; they may easily come back to haunt Washington. Already, his disdain has inflamed Mexican popular opinion, improving the prospects of Mexico’s anti-American left in next year’s presidential elections. Mr. Kelly, who as a Marine led U.S. Southern Command, said in his confirmation hearing that partnerships “as far south as Peru” are more important to U.S. border security than building a wall. Along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he headed to Mexico on Wednesday, just after the Department of Homeland Security released its new deportation guidelines. If the goal was to widen bilateral cooperation and soothe the harsh feelings Mr. Trump has engendered with our neighbor and ally, the timing was pitiable. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: The Trump administration’s blueprint for mass removals, with a streak of cruelty Ernesto Zedillo: Mexico can thrive without Trump The Post’s View: Trump is starting a trade war we don’t need Robert J. Samuelson: Trump’s senseless war on Mexico

Trump proposes a border wall. But there already is one, and it gets climbed over.

Debate has raged in recent months about the size and practicality of Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The wall’s proposed height — gleaned from the Republican front-runner’s speeches and interviews — has ranged from 30 to as high as 55 feet. The goal of the wall, Trump has said, is to curb illegal immigration and drug smuggling. But a newly released video shot by a Mexican film crew filming along the border in Nogales, Ariz., last month, captures just how elusive that goal can be, even with a massive obstruction already in place.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Such was the case during the illegal crossing caught on camera. Rocha told the AP that three U.S. Border Patrol trucks were within yards of the two men, but no agents approached.

No wall is impenetrable — just ask the French

The July 18 front-page Campaign Debrief article, “Building Trump’s border wall not exactly ‘easy,’ experts say,” included a graphic highlighting famous walls in history, but the graphic omitted the Maginot Line, perhaps the best example of what Trump’s “impenetrable wall” would become. To prevent the repeat of German incursions into France during World War I, the French completed in the late 1930s state-of-the-art barriers and fortifications along their border with Germany. In 1940, the Germans invaded France by violating Belgian neutrality and sweeping around the Maginot Line. As long as Mexican wages are considerably lower than U.S. wages and U.S. employers are eager to hire undocumented workers, no wall built along our southern border will be impregnable. Human traffickers, to say nothing of tunnel-building drug dealers, will go over, under or around it. Just ask the French. ****Martin Ford** , Laurel**

Trump’s plan for a border wall is literally on shaky ground

President Trump’s border wall appears to be on shaky ground — on Capitol Hill and on the rocky, shifty terrain where it’s slated to be built. Congress is showing signs that it might not approve funding for the wall, forcing the president to all but abandon plans to fulfill his promise for a barrier to keep immigrants from crossing the border from Mexico. But even if Trump tried to erect a 2,000-mile fence, it would have to straddle waterways prone to flash floods that would hurtle boulders at the wall and fault lines that could jerk at any time and bring down massive sections of stone or steel. First consider the evolving politics. Trump recently demanded that a spending bill to keep the government running include funding for the border wall. He pledged to follow that up with an executive order on border security. Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who described the wall as “immoral,” balked.   Trump: “We’re going to build a wall. Who’s going to pay for it?” Supporters: “Mexico!” Geologists probably weren’t in the crowd. Aside from politics, they said, an even greater force was set to undermine the great wall: Earth. “In California/Baja, the border traverses nearly the entire Pacific-North America tectonic plate boundary, so the western end of the wall is riding the Pacific plate several centimeters north per year relative to the border on the North American side of the San Andreas fault system,” Austin Elliott, a researcher at the University of Oxford in England who studies earthquakes around the world, wrote in an email. Elliott is an earthquake nerd who tweets about them seemingly nonstop. Like this: And this reply to geophysicist Mika McKinnon: “Any wall that is built straddling the fault lines in this region will have to be able to cope with this ongoing deformation, including being abruptly severed in earthquakes,” Elliott said. There have been at least three earthquakes in the past 125 years that rocked the U.S. southern border, most recently in 2010. The earliest was 1892, when immigration wasn’t a big issue. Another followed in 1940. The earthquake about seven years ago would have split a wall in two as tectonic plates slid by each other beneath it. Other geologists are not so sure about the feasibility of building a wall on the scale that the president imagines, the entire border with Mexico, an estimated $21 billion venture.  The tower is a reminder that marvels of present-day engineering “don’t necessarily stay upright,” McKinnon said. Others on Twitter noted enormous challenges to building a wall. But the politics of it all might make the entire question moot.  On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) ripped into the notion of building a wall but gave Trump an opening, suggesting that smart technology and law enforcement, such as the use of drones, could work as a way of protecting the border. The suggestion echoed a congressional debate in 2006, when George W. Bush was urged to consider tech over brick and mortar.  And so, before Earth can consume the “great wall” that the president promised and asked contractors for bids to build, politics appears to be whittling it away.

The first brick hasn’t been set, and Trump’s border wall is already going south on him

Mexico won't pay for it. Democrats hate it. Border-state Republicans don't like it. Congressional GOP leaders would rather not undertake it. There could be an avoidable government shutdown over it. And yet President Trump's budget director is pushing Congress to spend $1.4 billion to start building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.  Here's why: “Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.”     Congress is facing a deadline of midnight Friday to pass a spending bill to keep the government open. Both Democratic and Republican leaders say they are successfully navigating the sinkholes that come with such a spending debate. (Similar political dynamics shut down the government in 2013 and very nearly in 2015.)     If Congress funds Trump's wall, Democrats can argue that the president has broken yet another campaign promise by building a wall without getting Mexico to pay for it. (Trump says he eventually will force Mexico's hand.) They can also argue that Republicans are raising the deficit and that they're teetering on the brink of a shutdown when they control Washington because of this wall. Perhaps most important, Democrats have public opinion on their side.   Trump's relationship with Congress right now isn't great.   For the president, pushing his centerpiece campaign promise right now is undermining the rest of his agenda by alienating the very people he needs to pass laws.

Map: Europe is building more fences to keep people out

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, for a while it seemed like border fences and barriers were a thing of the past in Europe. Many on the continent hoped for a new era of integration and receptivity. It didn't happen. Instead, various pressures have led Europe to adopt wall-building projects that would make Donald Trump proud. This summer Hungary drew international criticism for a 109-mile-long barbed wire border fence along its southern frontier with Serbia – a project made bitterly ironic by Hungary's 1989 decision to cut its border fence with Austria and help break the Iron Curtain. Hungary hoped that this fence would stem the flow of migrants and refugees traveling through Hungary on what has been referred to as the West Balkans route into the European Union. Many outsiders were appalled. "We have only recently taken down walls in Europe," European Union spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud said when news of the fence spread in June. "We should not be putting them up."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Despite the outrage, Hungary's wall was apparently a success. Not only did the country extend its fence along its border with Croatia, other countries appear to be following its example. Slovenia has also proposed a fence along its border with Croatia, and Austria has taken the more remarkable move of beginning to build a fence along parts of its border with Slovenia – a move which would mean that a fence had been built inside Europe's border-control- free Schengen Area.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico One police chief even suggested that Germany needed to build a fence along its border with Austria, although he was swiftly criticized by Chancellor Angela Merkel's office.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Hungary wasn't the first European nation to build a wall in recent years. This summer, Bulgaria announced its own plan for a border fence that will eventually span 100 miles of its border with southern neighbor Turkey, although Reuters notes that migrants and refugees continue to enter the country at an unprecedented rate. Bulgaria's wall sits not too far from a wall built by Greece in 2012. This wall, constructed with the intent of keeping out migrants and refugees crossing from Turkey, pales in comparison to the more recent walls. It covers just 6.5 miles of land border with Turkey (barriers were put up along the Evros River as well) and failed to stop the growing number of migrants who reached Greece by boat.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In the French town of Calais, the British government recently spent $10 million to erect improved fencing around the Channel Tunnel, a train link between France and Britain that has recently attracted relatively large numbers of migrants. Pascal Aerts, who leads the police assigned to the migrants in France, told the BBC that the fences would only push the problem elsewhere, most likely to ports in the Netherlands and Belgium. Barriers around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, significantly expanded in 2005, have done little to stem Europe's overall migrant issues.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The walls going up in Europe aren't all about migrants and refugees. In Ukraine, an enormous, $250 million plan to seal the 1,200-mile-long border with Russia is born of fear of Moscow's destabilizing influence. Estonia has also pledged to build a fence along almost 70 miles of its border with Russia.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **More on WorldViews:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico David Miliband: The refugee crisis is here to stay    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The forgotten story of when the Germans were the refugees    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 8 reasons Europe’s refugee crisis is happening now    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Texas GOP congressman slams Trump plan for border wall

“Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border,” Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.) said in a statement late Wednesday. “Each section of the border faces unique geographical, cultural, and technological challenges that would be best addressed with a flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers the agents on the ground with the resources they need.” Hurd, one of 38 Texans in Congress, represents territory stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, including 800 miles of border. His 23rd District is majority-Hispanic and politically competitive: Hurd won a second term over Democrat Pete Gallego by fewer than 4,000 votes in November. His comment on Trump’s border wall came amid several days of planned actions on immigration by the new president. Trump signed orders aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration by creating more detention centers, increasing the number of federal border agents and withholding federal funds from cities that do not comply with federal immigration law. Trump said construction of a wall will take place “as soon as we can physically do it.… I would say in months.” Hurd, who campaigned on a promise of standing up to Trump and this week called on the new president to release his tax returns, said it is “impossible” to build a physical wall in the rough terrain of his district. “Big Bend National Park and many areas in my district are perfect examples of where a wall is unnecessary and would negatively impact the environment, private property rights and economy,” Hurd said, advocating for an “intelligence-led approach” to border security.  House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday night that Congress would appropriate money for the project and explore “different ways of getting Mexico to contribute.”

Trump’s wall would be no Berlin Wall

Eugene Robinson’s Sept. 2 op-ed, “Trump can’t ‘soften’ bigotry,” beautifully laid out the holes, the size of which you could drive a truck through, in Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “plan” to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The concept is as gentle as a Brillo pad. I do, however, disagree with this analogy in the op-ed: “Trump wants us to cower in fear behind a Berlin-style wall.” Trump’s wall proposal is idiotic on many levels, but it’s nothing like the Berlin Wall. The Soviets built it to keep East Germans in, not to prevent people living on the other side from entering East Germany. Why would they have wanted to? The German people tore down that malevolent structure, literally block by block. A happy ending for that wall. Hopefully, the one Trump wants to build will remain a disturbing fantasy. ****Danielle Karson** , Pasadena, Calif.**

Large majorities on both sides of southwestern border oppose a wall, poll finds

Large majorities of Americans and Mexicans living in cities along the U.S.-Mexico border oppose building a wall dividing the two countries, rejecting the proposal that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made a cornerstone of his campaign, according to a new poll released Monday. Fully 72 percent of Americans near the southwestern border are against a border wall, along with 86 percent of those living in Mexico’s northernmost cities, the poll found. Majorities of those surveyed also say the tone of the presidential campaign is hurting relations between the United States and Mexico — 59 percent of Americans along the border feel that way, and 69 percent of those in Mexico. The poll — sponsored by Cronkite News, Univision and the Dallas Morning News — comes with several important caveats. It interviewed people in seven pairs of U.S.-Mexican “sister cities,” and cities in the United States tend to be more liberal-leaning than rural areas, which could mean residents would be more inclined to oppose a border wall. Most of the cities also have overwhelmingly Hispanic populations — for instance, Nogales, Ariz., is 95 percent Hispanic. That could also affect the results, since Latino Americans tend to have more liberal attitudes on immigration issues. Still, the poll is among the first to provide some insight into how people who would be most affected by a wall feel about idea that helped fuel Trump’s improbable rise to the top of the Republican field. According to a Pew Research Center poll this spring, 62 percent of Americans nationwide opposed building the wall, while 34 percent favored it. The issue divides along partisan lines, with more than 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents supporting the wall in the Pew poll, while more than 8 in 10 Democrats were opposed. Trump has said he wants to build a massive structure, anywhere from 30 to 55 feet tall, along the 1,954-mile southwestern border to curb illegal immigration and drug smuggling. He says he would force Mexico to pay for it — at a cost of about $8 billion — by threatening to cut off the flow of billions of dollars in payments that immigrants to the United States send home to that country. Democrats and current and former Mexican leaders have scoffed at the wall proposal, which has been incorporated into the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention that begins Monday. Experts and federal officials say a wall would face major obstacles, including environmental and engineering problems; fights with ranchers and others who don’t want to give up their land; and the huge topographical challenges of the border, which runs through remote desert in Arizona to rugged mountains in New Mexico and, for two-thirds of its length, along rivers. The U.S. government has already spent more than $7 billion to build what is now about 650 miles of southwestern border fencing — nearly half in Arizona. It cost nearly $5 million per mile in some spots. Throughout his campaign, Trump has expressed confidence in his ability to erect a wall. “Building a wall is easy, and it can be done inexpensively,” he said in an interview last July with The Washington Post. “It’s not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing.” Trump argued that a wall “would be very effective” in deterring illegal migrants. “A wall is better than fencing, and it’s much more powerful,” he said. “It’s more secure. It’s taller.” In addition to Nogales, the new poll surveyed people in Brownsville, Laredo, Del Rio and El Paso in Texas; Yuma, Ariz.; and San Ysidro, Calif. No questions specifically mentioned Trump. The border wall question asked: “Should the United States of America build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. in an effort to secure the border?’’ In other findings, the poll reported that border city residents have overwhelmingly positive views of those living across the border; 86 percent of U.S. residents said they liked their “neighbors in Mexico,” while 79 percent of Mexicans said the same. When asked how much their city depends on the sister city across the border, 79 percent of Americans and 69 percent of Mexicans said they were at least somewhat dependent. Large majorities of both Mexican and American resident in border cities also favored a program allowing workers to cross the border and return home freely. Despite the mutually positive feelings, the poll found widespread concern about crime and drugs and distrust of law enforcement among those living on the Mexican side of the border. A 54 percent majority of those living in Mexican border cities said crime and drugs were the most important issue they face, as did a smaller 18 percent of those in U.S. border cities. And while more than 8 in 10 American border city residents said they trust law enforcement officers in their country, that dropped to barely 2 in 10 among city dwellers in Mexico. The Cronkite-Univision-Morning News survey was conducted April 29 to May 10 by telephone and through in-person interviews among a sample of 1,427 adults living in cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. A random sample of roughly 100 interviewers were conducted in each city. The data were not weighted to population size.

Why Trump’s comparison of his wall to the Great Wall of China makes no sense

_“The wall is going to cost $10 billion. It’s so easy. … They say you’ll never be able to build a wall. Well, it’s 2,000 miles but we really need 1,000 miles. The Great Wall of China, built 2,000 years ago, is 13,000 miles, folks. … They didn’t have cranes. They didn’t have excavation equipment. The wall is 13,000 miles long. We need 1,000 miles and we have all of the materials.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **— Donald Trump, news conference at Mar-a-Lago, March 1, 2016**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _“Two thousand years ago, China built the Great Wall of China. This is a serious wall. And they didn’t have Caterpillar tractors. … But they didn’t have the equipment. And they built a wall. Think of this: 13,000 miles long, and this is a serious wall, okay? This wall is wide.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **— Trump,campaign event at Liberty University, Jan. 18, 2016**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As we all know by now, Trump wants to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. China did it, after all, and Trump’s wall will only be a fraction of what the Chinese built, he frequently explains. And the Chinese didn’t even have the building materials we do now! We get why it’s easy to invoke the world heritage site whose name contains two of Trump’s favorite words (“great,” “wall”), as it may seem like an iconic physical barrier erected to protect a country’s borders. But this is a moot comparison, as history buffs know. Trump keeps making the comparison anyway, and he has done so since early on his campaign, joking that he would name the wall the “Great Wall of Trump.” And he insists on a questionable estimate for the cost of his wall, which we have debunked. Let’s look at the facts.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Unlike what its name implies, the Great Wall of China is actually a non-contiguous series of walls, trenches, natural barriers and fortresses built in different locations along the border between northern China and southern Mongolia. It took a long time to build — over _dynasties_. The earliest construction of fortifications dates to the Warring States period from the 7th through the 4th century B.C., and the Qin Dynasty of 3rd century B.C. to protect against foreign invaders. The fortifications and castles were used to control commerce or prevent rebellions under Mongolian control of China.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The majority of what we consider now as the Great Wall was built over some two centuries  from 1368-1644 during the Ming Dynasty, after Beijing was made the new capital of China. The Ming Dynasty wall measures at 5,499 miles — of which 3,889 miles (70 percent) were actual wall. The figure that Trump uses (13,000 miles) is the updated calculation of the entire wall system combined, including watchtowers, trenches and natural defensive barriers like rivers and hills.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ming rulers invested in its construction to prevent future attacks from Mongols from the north and to deny a trade relationship with barbaric nomads attacking Chinese farmers for grain and other products. “They are better understood as capital rather than national defenses. Vast amounts of money were spent and they had some effect. But late in the [Ming] dynasty, a genius of a minister decided to permit markets to serve the nomads — and defense expenses collapsed,” said Arthur Waldron, University of Pennsylvania historian in Chinese studies and author of “The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.” Plus, it wasn’t an effective security barrier. As our colleague Ishaan Tharoor of WorldViews wrote: “The Great Wall of China, for all its majesty, was very porous. While a towering monument to Chinese civilization, it was hardly impregnable. The Mongols, Manchus and others all breached this great defense and went on to establish their dominion behind its ramparts. Perhaps that’s the best way for Trump to understand the Great Wall’s significance — not as a security barrier, but as a work of political propaganda.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trump says the Chinese were able to build the wall even without imported equipment, like Caterpillar tractors. Sure. The Chinese didn’t have tractors, but they did use forced labor of peasants, criminals and soldiers. Labor conditions were so appalling that some 400,000 people are estimated to have died building the wall. The longest human construction project in history was also called the “longest cemetery on Earth” when it was being built.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In Chinese poetry and through most of Chinese history, the wall was a negative symbol of oppression, cruelty and death, Waldron said — the wall as a symbol of strength and resourcefulness is a part of the myth and misconception of its true history.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trump says he would only need to build 1,000 miles of new walls along the U.S.-Mexico border because there are “natural barriers.” Border security experts say he is most likely is referring to the deserts along the border, where many migrants have died. Trump continues to assert that the wall would cost $10 billion, without providing any serious discussion of the costs. But that’s simply not credible, and we’ve awarded him Four Pinocchios for this claim.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For major government projects, $10 billion is not a huge sum. The cost of 1,000 miles of fences — not even a concrete wall — is at least $3 billion. That’s not even including the upkeep and maintenance. The Corps of Engineers estimated that the 25-year life cycle cost of the fence would range from $16.4 million to $70 million per mile; the total cost of the fencing so far has been $7 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A concrete wall would cost much more than that. We updated calculations done by a structural engineer in an article in The National Memo and found raw materials alone would cost $2 billion. A retired estimator and economist for one of the nation’s largest construction firms worked through some of the math and said a wall of this type would cost at least $25 billion. That’s not even counting the video system to keep watch on the border.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The border is much harder today to cross than in the past, experts said, thanks to a mix of the proliferation of fencing and walls, increased Border Patrol presence, aerial surveillance and ground sensors. New walls alone wouldn’t help increase security, as a physical barrier is just one portion of border security. Increased enforcement efforts along the border may explain about 35 to 40 percent of the decline in illegal immigration flow, said Edward Alden, trade policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump’s wall is “a rhetorical talking point and a half-thought-out idea that sounds good to people who don’t understand what they’re talking about,” Alden said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The focus on building a wall overlooks many of the other reasons that have led to the number of unauthorized migrants in the country, experts say. Walls are not impregnable — as shown in the example of the Great Wall of China — and simply putting more of  it up doesn’t help. “You’re dealing with symptoms. You’ve really got to look at the deeper issue of immigrant labor that our economy uses,” said Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Texas at Austin professor and immigration researcher. Unless Trump is running to be the emperor of the United States and plans to build a series of fortresses, walls and trenches that will be added on to for dynasties to come beyond a Trump Dynasty, he should really drop this nonsense assertion. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison that shows the Republican front-runner’s lack of understanding of the history behind the Great Wall of China, which was built over many millennia to meet a variety of commerce and defensive needs of certain dynasties. And as a security measure, it was not an effective barrier. Moreover, Trump continues to assert a questionable estimate for his wall that is much lower than experts have calculated. As we’ve said before, we welcome a serious discussion of costs and benefits of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, rather than wild rhetoric. We contemplated awarding Four Pinocchios, as neither his comparison to China nor the wall estimate is rooted in any factual basis. We’ll spare him a Pinocchio and give him credit for using the updated length of the Great Wall of China. It’s refreshing that he apparently bothered to look up an up-to-date factoid.  (About our rating scale)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  **Send us facts to check by filling outthis form**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Check out our2016 candidates fact-check page**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Sign up for The Fact Checkerweekly newsletter**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

A 75-mile-wide gap in Trump’s wall? A tribe says it won’t let it divide its land.

For 75 miles, a swath of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona — specked with mountains and tall saguaros — straddles the border with Mexico. It is the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation the size of Connecticut that for thousands of years extended south into Sonora, Mexico.  In light of Trump’s presidential win, Tohono O’odham Nation tribal leaders said they would refuse to support building a border wall on their land.  Without the tribe’s support, Trump could be forced to accept a 75-mile-wide gap in his wall.  Amy Juan, an O’odham tribe member and co-founder of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network, said a border wall would be “devastating,” not only for the tribe but for the animals, wildlife and water that flows across the border. It would make it even harder for tribe members to visit and care for burial sites in Mexico. “The effects would be bigger than ourselves,” Juan said in an interview with The Washington Post. “As a people, as a community, it would be a literal separation from our home. Half of the traditional lands of our people lie in Mexico.” Today, 28,000 members occupy Tohono O’odham land in southwestern Arizona, according to the tribe’s website. Nine O’odham communities in Mexico lie directly south of the 2.8 million-acre Tohono O’odham Nation. Much of the land is separated only by the border. Traditional Tohono O’odham land once extended south to Sonora, Mexico, north past Phoenix, west to the Gulf of California and east to the San Pedro River. But through the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the land became divided between the United States and Mexico.  Some in the O’odham community initially welcomed the checkpoints as a way to address the drug cartels crossing the border illegally, but many in the O’odham community are now protesting what they see as a “militarization” of their home, Juan said. “It really creates a culture of fear,” Juan said.  U.S. Customs has also prevented tribe members from transporting raw materials and goods, and has confiscated cultural and religious items such as feathers, pine leaves or sweet grass. These items are “essential for their spirituality, economy and traditional culture,” the website wrote. Members no longer feel they can hunt on the reservation without triggering Border Patrol scrutiny, the Arizona Daily Star reported. Juan, a high school teacher on the reservation, said she recently asked students to tell her the first thing that came to mind when they thought of the border. The students mentioned words like “harassment,” “checkpoints,” and “identity,” Juan said. She said it hurts her to see young people “questioned about who they are.” “They don’t know what it’s like to not have Border Patrol, they don’t know what it’s like to not have to go through checkpoints,” she said.  She said she also fears that a Trump presidency could lead to further militarization of her community. Juan is, however, encouraged that her tribal leaders — who are often fairly passive about dealing with the Department of Homeland Security — are taking a stand against the wall. “We can now continue with our work with a little more hope and support,” she said. Jose, the tribe’s vice chairman, said the Tohono O’odham Nation had always hoped to work with whoever would be elected president. But it was still too early to tell exactly how Trump’s administration would affect the tribe, he said. “I do wish to work together with people so we can truly protect the homeland of this place they call the United States of America,” Jose told KJZZ. “Not only for our people but for the American people.”  “We were here before America was America,” Juan said. “We have always been here, before these lines were drawn, before these borders were created.” “We are the roots of America,” she added.

Trump’s border wall ignores a long history of U.S. cooperation with Mexico. That’s a problem.

In late January, Trump’s executive order on border security called for the construction of the wall, along with increased border patrol activities to control immigration.  Here’s what’s missing: There’s no mention of cooperating with Mexico to achieve the order’s stated objectives. This executive order, and comments and tweets from the Oval Office, obscure the fact that Mexico is an ally, not an adversary, in border security efforts.   Developing a U.S.-Mexican border control partnership has been a long and tenuous process. Given our shared history and the power imbalance between the countries, Mexico has always been cautious about protecting its sovereignty and is sensitive about engaging with the United States on migration issues.

Yes, Trump will build his border wall. Most of it is already built.

Can Donald Trump actually keep his pledge to build a Southern border wall?  Critics were as dismissive of Trump’s wall as they were of Trump as a presidential candidate. The wall proposal, they said, was nothing more than a political fantasy. But under President Trump, the wall will not only be for real, but it may be one of his biggest political successes. Here’s how.  Words matter. When one thinks of a wall, one thinks of something solid — which, no doubt, is part of its enormous political appeal for Trump supporters. But the term “wall” is actually surprisingly fuzzy. The various Oxford dictionary definitions of a wall include “any high vertical surface, especially one that is imposing in scale.” That broad definition would seem to leave Trump a lot of wiggle room.  But times have changed. Trump broke the taboo. His fans have loved him for it. So regardless of what Trump ends up building, calling it a “wall” will sound like something new and make his followers cheer.      What’s much more realistic is that Trump will simply add more miles of fencing; reinforce existing fencing in key, visible places; and deploy even more border guards, stadium lighting, and the latest high-tech detection and surveillance equipment. The newest, tallest part of the Trump Wall — probably erected at one of the most visible, urban spots on the border — would be an effective backdrop for the president’s celebratory news conference announcing its construction. In the end, Trump’s wall is likely to be the latest addition to the border barrier-building frenzy first launched by President Bill Clinton, greatly expanded by George W. Bush and continued by Obama. But Trump will take full ownership of it as the only president willing to actually call it a wall. It will not stop migrants from entering the country illegally — going over, under or around it, with many of them dying in the process. But when Trump supporters grumble that the wall is too porous, Trump will no doubt promise to make the wall even longer, taller and stronger in his second term.

Can Donald Trump actually keep his pledge to build a southern border wall?  Critics were as dismissive of Trump’s wall as they were of Trump as a presidential candidate. The wall proposal, they said, was nothing more than a political fantasy. But under President Trump, the wall will not only be for real, but it may be one of his biggest political successes. Here’s how.  Words matter. When one thinks of a wall, one thinks of something solid — which, no doubt, is part of its enormous political appeal for Trump supporters. But the term “wall” is actually surprisingly fuzzy. The various Oxford dictionary definitions of a wall include “any high vertical surface, especially one that is imposing in scale.” That broad definition would seem to leave Trump a lot of wiggle room.  But times have changed. Trump broke the taboo. His fans have loved him for it. So regardless of what Trump ends up building, calling it a “wall” will sound like something new and make his followers cheer.      What’s much more realistic is that Trump will simply add more miles of fencing; reinforce existing fencing in key, visible places; and deploy even more border guards, stadium lighting, and the latest high-tech detection and surveillance equipment. The newest, tallest part of the Trump Wall — probably erected at one of the most visible, urban spots on the border — would be an effective backdrop for the president’s celebratory news conference announcing its construction. In the end, Trump’s wall is likely to be the latest addition to the border barrier-building frenzy first launched by President Bill Clinton, greatly expanded by George W. Bush and continued by Obama. But Trump will take full ownership of it as the only president willing to actually call it a wall. It will not stop migrants from entering the country illegally — going over, under or around it, with many of them dying in the process. But when Trump supporters grumble that the wall is too porous, Trump will no doubt promise to make the wall even longer, taller and stronger in his second term.

Here are 76 of Donald Trump’s many campaign promises

Most presidential candidates are careful to not promise too much on the campaign trail. That’s not at all the case for Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Listed below are 76 things that Trump has said he would do if elected, or has predicted would occur as a result of his election. If he were to win the White House, Trump has promised to: **1\. Build a wall along the southern border** that's taller than the arenas where Trump holds his rallies, taller than any ladder and one foot taller than the Great Wall of China. This "artistically beautiful" wall will be constructed out of hardened concrete, rebar and steel, and it will be "the greatest wall that you've ever seen" -- so great that the nation will likely one day name it "The Trump Wall."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **2\. Make Mexico pay for the wall.** If Mexico refuses, then the United States will impound all remittance payments taken from the wages of illegal immigrants, cut foreign aid, institute tariffs, cancel visas for Mexican business leaders and diplomats, and increase fees for visas, border-crossing cards and port use.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **3\. "If I become president, we're all going to be saying 'Merry Christmas' again."**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **4\. Get rid of Common Core** because it's "a disaster" and a "very bad thing." Trump says he wants to give local school districts more control and might even eliminate the Department of Education.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **5\. The Environmental Protection Agency might also disappear.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **6\. Get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something "terrific"** that is "so much better, so much better, so much better."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **7\. Knock down the regulatory walls between states for health insurance,** making plans available nationally instead of regionally.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **8\. Rebuild the country's aging infrastructure** \-- especially bridges and airports that look like they belong in a third-world country -- **for one- third of what the United States is currently paying for such projects.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **9\. Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cutting benefits.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **10\. Defund Planned Parenthood.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **11\. "I will take care of women,** and I have great respect for women. I do cherish women, and I will take care of women."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **12\. Frequently use the term "radical Islamic terrorism."**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **13\. Temporarily ban most foreign Muslims from entering the United States** "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." Trump would allow exceptions for dignitaries, business people, athletes and others who have "proven" themselves.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **14\. Bar Syrian refugees from entering the country and kick out any who are already living here.** Trump says wealthy Persian Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia should pay to set up a heavily guarded "safe zone" in Syria.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **15\. Heavily surveil mosques in the United States.** Trump has said he's open to the idea of closing some mosques.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **16\. Create a database of Syrian refugees.** Trump hasn't ruled out creating a database of Muslims in the country.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **17\. Never take a vacation while serving as president.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **18\. Prosecute Hillary Clinton** for her use of a private e-mail server while serving as secretary of state.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **19\. Make medical marijuana widely available to patients, and allow states to decide if they want to fully legalize pot or not.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **20\. Stop spending money on space exploration** until the United States can fix its potholes. Encourage private space-exploration companies to expand.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **21\. Pick Supreme Court justices who are "really great legal scholars."**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **22\. Ensure that Iowa continues to host the nation's first presidential nominating contest.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **23\. Strengthen the military** so that it's "so big and so strong and so great" that **"nobody's going to mess with us."**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **24\. Be unpredictable.** "No one is going to touch us, because I'm so unpredictable."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **25\. Allow Russia to deal with the Islamic State in Syria** and/or work with Russian President Vladimir Putin to wipe out shared enemies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **26\. "Bomb the s--- out of ISIS."** Also bomb oil fields controlled by the Islamic State, then seize the oil and give the profits to military veterans who were wounded while fighting.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **27\. Target and kill the relatives of terrorists.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **28\. Shut down parts of the Internet** so that Islamic State terrorists cannot use it to recruit American children.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **29\. Bring back waterboarding,** which the Obama administration considers torture. Trump has said he's willing to use interrogation techniques that go even further than waterboarding. Even if such tactics don't work, "they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **30\. Leave troops in Afghanistan because it's such "a mess." Protect Israel. And increase U.S. military presence in the East and South China Seas.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **31\. Find an "out" clause in the Iran deal** and then "totally" renegotiate the whole thing.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **32\. "I promise I will never be in a bicycle race.** That I can tell you." (This promise is connected to criticism of Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who was injured while riding a bicycle amid the Iran negotiations.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **33\. Refuse to call Iran's leader by his preferred title.** "I guarantee you I will be never calling him the Supreme Leader... I'll say, 'Hey baby, how ya doing?' I will never call him the Supreme Leader."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **34\. Negotiate the release of all U.S. prisoners held in Iran before taking office.** (Five hostages were recently released, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian; Trump has taken some credit for this.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **35\. Oppose the killing of journalists:** "I hate some of these people, but I would never kill them."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **36\. Find great generals -- like the next Gen. Patton or Gen. MacArthur -- and do not allow them to go onto television news shows to explain their military strategy:** "I don't want my generals being interviewed, I want my generals kicking a--." Trump likes generals who are rough, foul-mouthed and beloved by their troops.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **37\. Drop that "dirty, rotten traitor" Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane into desolate Afghanistan without a parachute.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **38\. Fire "the corrupt and incompetent" leaders of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs** and dramatically reform the agency. Allow veterans to take their military identification card to any medical facility that accepts Medicaid patients to receive care. Embed satellite VA clinics in rural hospitals and underserved areas, and ensure than every VA hospital is permanently staffed with OBGYN doctors.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **39\. Invest more heavily in programs that help military veterans transition back to civilian life,** including job training and placement services. Also increase funding for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and mental health issues. Veterans who apply for a job at a VA facility will have five points added to their qualifying scores.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **40\. Bring back jobs from China** \-- and Mexico, Japan and elsewhere.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **41\. "I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created."** Trump says cities like Reno, Nev., will "be a big fat beautiful beneficiary" of these new jobs.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **42\. Students at Wofford College in South Carolina, where Trump attended a town hall, will all have jobs at graduation.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **43\. Aggressively challenge China's power in the world** by declaring the country a currency manipulator, adopting a "zero tolerance policy on intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer" and cracking down on China's "lax labor and environmental standards."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **44\. Rather than throw the Chinese president a state dinner, buy him "a McDonald's hamburger and say we've got to get down to work."**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **45\. Replace "free trade" with "fair trade."** Gather together the "smartest negotiators in the world," assign them each a country and renegotiate all foreign trade deals.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **46\. Put billionaire hedge fund manager Carl Icahn in charge of trade negotiations with China and Japan** , and pick an ambassador to Japan who is "a killer," unlike the current ambassador, Caroline Kennedy.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **47\. Tell Ford Motor Co.'s president that unless he cancels plans to build a massive plant in Mexico, the company will face a 35 percent tax on cars imported back into the United States.** Trump is confident he can get this done before taking office. (Last year he incorrectly said this had already happened.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **48\. Force Nabisco to once again make Oreos in the United States.** And bully Apple into making its "damn computers" and other products here.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **49\. Impose new taxes on many imports into the country.** Numbers thrown around have included 32 percent, 34 percent and 35 percent.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **50\. Grow the nation's economy by at least 6 percent.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **51\. Reduce the $18 trillion national debt** by "vigorously eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs and growing the economy to increase tax revenues."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **52\. Cut the budget by 20 percent by simply renegotiating.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **53\. Get rid of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **54\. Simplify the U.S. tax code and reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to four.** The highest earners would pay a 25-percent tax. The corporate tax rate would fall to 15 percent. Eliminate the "marriage penalty" for taxpayers and get rid of the alternate minimum tax.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **55\. No longer charge income tax to single individuals earning less than $25,000 per year or couples earning less than $50,000.** These people will, however, be required to file a one-page form with the Internal Revenue Service that states: "I win."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **56\. Ensure that Americans can still afford to golf.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **57\. Allow corporations a one-time window to transfer money being held overseas** , charging a much-reduced 10 percent tax.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **58\. Get rid of most corporate tax loopholes or incentives** , but continue to allow taxpayers to deduct mortgage interest and charitable donations from their taxes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **59\. On his first day in office, Trump would get rid of gun-free zones at military bases and in schools.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **60\. Use "common sense" to fix the mental health system and prevent mass shootings.** Find ways to arm more of the "good guys" like him who can take out the "sickos." Get rid of bans on certain types of guns and magazines so that "good, honest people" can own the guns of their choice.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **61\. Impose a minimum sentence of five years in federal prison for any violent felon who commits a crime using a gun** , with no chance for parole or early release.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **62\. Fix the background check system used when purchasing guns** to ensure states are properly uploading criminal and health records.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **63\. Allow concealed-carry permits to be recognized in all 50 states.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **64\. Sign an executive order calling for the death penalty for anyone found guilty of killing a police officer.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **65\. Provide more funding for police training.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **66\. And provide more funding for drug treatment** , especially for heroin addicts.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **67\. On the first day in office, terminate President Obama's executive orders related to immigration.** This includes getting rid of "sanctuary cities" that Trump says have become refuges for criminals.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **68\. Deport the almost 11 million immigrants illegally living in the United States.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **69\. Triple the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **70\. Continue to allow lowly paid foreign workers to come to the United States on temporary works visas** because Trump says they are the only ones who want to pick grapes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **71\. End birthright citizenship.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **72\. Say things that are politically incorrect,** because the country does not have time to waste with political correctness.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **73\. Make America great again** \-- and strong again, as it has become too weak.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **74\. Be a cheerleader for America and bring the country's spirit back.** "Take the brand of the United States and make it great again."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **75\. Bring back the American Dream.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **76\. Start winning again.** "We're going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't stand it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep winning. We're never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

For 75 miles, a swath of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona — specked with mountains and tall saguaro trees — straddles the border with Mexico. It is the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation the size of Connecticut that for thousands of years extended south into Sonora, Mexico.  In light of Trump’s presidential win, Tohono O’odham Nation tribal leaders said they would refuse to support building a border wall on their land.  Without the tribe’s support, Trump could be forced to accept a 75-mile-wide gap in his wall.  Amy Juan, an O’odham tribe member and co-founder of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network, said a border wall would be “devastating,” not only for the tribe but for the animals, wildlife and water that flows across the border. It would make it even harder for tribe members to visit and care for burial sites in Mexico. “The effects would be bigger than ourselves,” Juan said in an interview with The Washington Post. “As a people, as a community, it would be a literal separation from our home. Half of the traditional lands of our people lie in Mexico.” Today, 28,000 members occupy Tohono O’odham land in southwestern Arizona, according to the tribe’s website. Nine O’odham communities in Mexico lie directly south of the 2.8 million-acre Tohono O’odham Nation. Much of the land is separated only by the border. Traditional Tohono O’odham land once extended south to Sonora, Mexico, north past Phoenix, west to the Gulf of California and east to the San Pedro River. But through the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the land became divided between the United States and Mexico.  Some in the O’odham community initially welcomed the checkpoints as a way to address the drug cartels crossing the border illegally, but many in the O’odham community are now protesting what they see as a “militarization” of their home, Juan said. “It really creates a culture of fear,” Juan said.  U.S. Customs has also prevented tribe members from transporting raw materials and goods, and has confiscated cultural and religious items such as feathers, pine leaves or sweet grass. These items are “essential for their spirituality, economy and traditional culture,” the website wrote. Members no longer feel they can hunt on the reservation without triggering Border Patrol scrutiny, the Arizona Daily Star reported. Juan, a high school teacher on the reservation, said she recently asked students to tell them the first thing that came to mind when they thought of the border. The students mentioned words like “harassment,” “checkpoints,” and “identity,” Juan said. She said it hurts her to see young people “questioned about who they are.” “They don’t know what it’s like to not have Border Patrol, they don’t know what it’s like to not have to go through checkpoints,” she said.  She said she also fears that a Trump presidency could lead to further militarization of her community. Juan is, however, encouraged that her tribal leaders — who are often fairly passive about dealing with the Department of Homeland Security — are taking a stand against the wall. “We can now continue with our work with a little more hope and support,” she said. Jose, the tribe’s vice chairman, said the Tohono O’odham Nation had always hoped to work with whoever would be elected president. But it was still too early to tell exactly how Trump’s administration would affect the tribe, he said. “I do wish to work together with people so we can truly protect the homeland of this place they call the United States of America,” Jose told KJZZ. “Not only for our people but for the American people.”  “We were here before America was America,” Juan said. “We have always been here, before these lines were drawn, before these borders were created.” “We are the roots of America,” she added.

‘Impenetrable, physical, tall’: Colbert uses Trump’s speeches to calculate border-wall costs

If President Trump is the finicky client describing what he wants for a monstrous wall-building project along the Mexican border, Stephen Colbert is the flummoxed architect trying to fashion a blueprint from his bombastic adjectives. On “The Late Show” Friday night, Colbert assembled a team of builders to come up with a ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to erect the president’s promised wall. The answer: a lot, based on Trump’s descriptions. “That wall is going to be so big and so strong and so powerful,” then-candidate Trump said at a campaign stop in Holderness, N.H. “Impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful,” he said in another speech. We know the length of the United States’ southern border — about 2,000 miles, Colbert said — and Trump gave people watching the GOP debate in Houston a sense of how tall it would be: “A heck of a lot taller than the ceiling you’re looking at.” That was all Colbert needed to pull out his whiteboard and start in on some simple calculations. Colbert’s efforts are a comedic version of what builders have been doing since Trump was elected after making campaign promises about a massive border wall.  The candidate field will be narrowed by March 20, and finalists would submit offers with their proposed costs by March 24. Trump has suggested the wall would cost $12 billion, the AP reported. Republican leaders say it would cost between $12 billion and $15 billion, although an internal Department of Homeland Security report for Secretary John F. Kelly said the final total could reach $21 billion. Colbert’s estimate came in a heck of a lot higher — 200 million cubic yards of wall, his team of builders concluded, would mean $400 billion — just for concrete. That number more than doubled to $985 billion when the team factored in other costs — 12,000 workers, portable concrete plants, a road next to the wall and the cost of draining swamps along the border. Total cost: $2 trillion. But that doesn’t account for another of Trump’s adjectives: “beautiful.” Beautifying the border wall would take something like 100 million rolls of wallpaper, one of Colbert’s experts estimated. Clearly, the costs were adding up. Fortunately — at least for the United States — Trump has announced where he would send the bill. And Colbert had the Mexican Consulate on speed dial. “This is Stephen Colbert from ‘The Late Show,’ ” he told the woman who answered the phone. “We’re trying to come up with just some rough numbers. Obviously, don’t hold my feet to the fire over this, but we’ve got a rough number of $2 trillion to build the border wall and I was wondering if you had that in petty cash right now.”

Fearing Trump’s wall, Central Americans rush to cross the U.S. border

MCALLEN, Tex. — Along the route through Mexico, no one was really sure how to say Trump’s name. Smugglers called him “El Malo” (the bad one) or “El Feo” (the ugly one) and told the migrants they had better hurry north before his wall went up. The U.S. agents who took them into custody said he would be president, and it was a new day at the border. “They said it to the whole group: We would all be deported because Trump won,” said Octavio de Leon, 43, a Guatemalan who was detained with his son while crossing into Texas right after the election. President-elect Donald Trump has promised major change to the U.S. immigration system at a time when Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers, many fleeing warlike  conditions and poverty back home. Border Patrol has captured more migrants over the past three months than during the same period in each of the past five years. Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms. By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico. Others were hoping that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would win and offer them some form of blanket amnesty, according to Border Patrol agents. So many families have arrived in recent weeks that U.S. authorities announced last weekend that they are sending 150 agents to shore up this portion of border in the Rio Grande Valley. Here at the border, the obstacles to Trump’s plans appear daunting. To hold, quickly process and deport the tens of thousands of arrivals each month, the Trump administration would have to add scores of immigration judges and dramatically expand detention facilities, which have faced legal challenges. A wall could cost billions. Some here welcome a Trump crackdown. Many Border Patrol agents resent what they see as a “catch-and-release” approach to the flood of Central Americans. To them, Trump’s win has delivered the morale-boosting equivalent of a Red Bull. “We’re going to be able to do our jobs again,” said Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent and a spokesman for their union, which endorsed Trump for president. “We’ve turned into a detention agency,” he said. “We’re not out there enforcing. We’re doing jailer work and sometimes babysitting.” But analysts, lawyers and elected officials on both sides of the border say it is a place that has always defied easy fixes and expensive barriers. What is often lost in the debate about border control is the dramatic change in who is trying to migrate. The number of Mexicans caught trying to illegally cross has been dropping — from more than 400,000 in fiscal 2010 to about 177,000 this year. Meanwhile, the number of migrants from violence-plagued El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has nearly quadrupled in the same period, to almost 179,000. Many of the Central Americans do not sneak over under the cover of darkness; they are delivered by smugglers to the banks of the Rio Grande and wade across in broad daylight to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. That’s because most of the migrants are asking for some type of asylum and, therefore, are entitled to go before an immigration judge to plead their case, rather than being quickly deported. But it often takes months, if not years, for the backlogged courts to determine whether asylum seekers face danger at home and deserve protection. In the meantime, most of the migrants are released from detention after a few days. Often, they do not appear for their court dates. Of the 20,000 families whose legal proceedings ended with deportation orders between July 2014 and August this year, 85 percent did not show up in court, fueling the perception that migrants are gaming the system and intending to remain in the country illegally. Border Patrol union leaders want more agents and immigration judges, plus longer detention periods for asylum seekers awaiting court dates. Sending a stern message will discourage future migrants, said Hector Garza, a Border Patrol agent in the Laredo, Tex., sector and a union representative. “You do have to take some action,” he said. “Right now, it’s out of control.” But U.S. courts have already ruled that asylum seekers can’t be held simply to deter other migrants from coming. And “you can’t get rid of the due-process proceedings,” said Lorilei Williams, director of the immigration unit at Staten Island Legal Services, in New York. Asylum applicants are generally entitled to court hearings under the terms of international law. A big increase in judges would take time and money. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D), who represents the Texas border and received budgetary approval for 55 more immigration judges in fiscal 2016, said it was unrealistic to think the courts could quickly accelerate their processing of cases. “Right now, we’re backlogged half a million [cases] with the current judges that we have,” he said in an interview. “Practically, you’re talking about years and years” to process those cases. Two years ago, after a flood of families from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala overwhelmed border authorities, the Obama administration launched a public-relations campaign to discourage migrants from making the trip, stepped up deportations of migrants who were denied asylum and pressured Mexico to crack down on its own southern border. Fewer migrants arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2015, but the figures have been climbing this year. Violence and poverty continue to drive people north, along with election-year factors: Some migrants had expected that it might be more difficult to enter the United States if Trump won. Others hoped that a Clinton victory would offer them some form of amnesty, Border Patrol agents said. In October, Border Patrol apprehended 46,195 migrants, nearly 11,000 more than in the same month during the immigration crisis in 2014. In McAllen, at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which takes in migrants once Border Patrol agents release them for their immigration court appearances, there were days in October when nearly 500 adults and children arrived, prompting authorities to erect tents to house the Central Americans in the parking lot. “We’ve seen more people show up dehydrated, sick with scabies and chickenpox. We need to get more medical treatment,” said Josh Ramirez, McAllen’s health director. Spikes in illegal migration to the United States occur for different reasons, including misinformation about potential amnesties and fears of a stricter climate in the future. “I’m sure that the discussion about a wall and getting tough on immigration was used by people down there to say, ‘Get up here now before it’s too late,’ ” McAllen Mayor Jim Darling said in an interview. Ever Javier Palma Romero, a 24-year-old fish processor from coastal El Salvador, spent six weeks on the road with his daughter, Jackeline, 4, to reach the U.S. border. Rival gangs control huge swaths of territory in his country, and Palma said he had been beaten and robbed by gang members, who also killed his uncle. In his pocket, he carried a folded copy of a statement that his mother gave to police last year saying two gang members had knocked on the family’s door and threatened to kill him. “We fled here for a good reason,” he said. Two years ago, the border-crossers were mostly women and children, but a significant number of the families at the church shelter were single men traveling with children. Without the kids, they said, their chances of being allowed to stay would be much lower. Several migrants who arrived at the Texas border in recent days said that Border Patrol agents taunted them about Trump’s victory and threatened deportation. “They told me: Trump doesn’t want you here. He’s going to kick you out,” said Doris Medina, 43, taking shelter from the rain on a cot inside one of the tents at the church shelter. About 20 other adults and children, many of them coughing, sat around her. Medina was on her way from Honduras to New Orleans to reunite with her husband. She first came to the United States in 1992, and she had spent most of her adult life in Los Angeles, working in a cafeteria at DreamWorks Studios and making deliveries for Pizza Hut. Medina won a form of asylum known as “temporary protected status,” but when her mother was diagnosed with cancer in Honduras, she went home without permission and could not return legally. A smuggler was her only ticket back to the United States, she said, and he had told her that “I needed to get across before that man won.”

Trump has brought down border crossings — by scaring people away

BY NOW it is clear that no big new stretch of physical wall will rise anytime soon along the Southwest border. Owing to President Trump, however, a towering wall of hostility directed at Mexico is already surely in place. And its effects, while impermanent, are nonetheless real. Those effects are already imposing stiff costs on the United States in prestige, goodwill and moral authority, as well as more tangible expenses: International travel associations, as well as U.S. hotel executives, warn that rising nationalism, stoked by Mr. Trump, is likely to constrain the flow of tourists into the United States this year. Given that travel and tourism contribute more than 8 percent of America’s gross domestic product, amounting to some $1.5 trillion annually, the unintended business losses could be stiff. The more direct, and intended, impact of Mr. Trump’s fiery rhetoric has been a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions by Border Patrol officers along the frontier with Mexico. While crossings and apprehensions during the Obama administration’s second term were already at their lowest level in four decades, the level since Mr. Trump took office has plummeted further. In March, the number of illegal crossers apprehended — just under 12,200 — fell 64 percent from the same month last year. The likely main cause of that precipitous drop is the rhetoric Mr. Trump has aimed at undocumented immigrants, reinforced by media coverage of actual and threatened deportation sweeps, and expectations that the administration will assemble the bigger and more aggressive deportation force that the president promised in his campaign. For Central Americans who would enter the United States illegally, the perceived heightened risk of detention and removal has shifted their cost-benefit calculus — especially given that smugglers demand rates as high as $10,000. Stanching the flow of illegal immigration at the border is a good thing, as long as it lasts, notwithstanding the irony that it undercuts Mr. Trump’s own argument for a big wall. There is little dispute that the United States, like any country, is entitled to control its borders and demand that those who enter do so legally. How to treat unauthorized immigrants who have lived here for years, and now form part of the United States’ fabric, is a different question. Mr. Trump’s success in jawboning down the flow of illegal border crossings relies on the fear he has inspired, which is likely to dissipate unless his words are backed up by sustained action, including expanded capacity in detention centers and immigration courts. The danger is that the collateral damage stemming from that fear — in ill will from the United States’ neighbors and the wider world, in addition to divided, distrustful communities at home — may outlast the temporary benefits derived from Mr. Trump’s bombast. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Border agents can look at everything on your cellphone. Congress should change that. David Cole: The states’ rights that Trump doesn’t like The Post’s View: The Trump administration may be deporting ‘the good ones’ Jonathan Roos: I’m a rabbi. Here’s why my congregation offers sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. The Post’s View: Mexico may strike back. Here’s how.

Why Trump’s wall contradicts today’s immigration trends

Illegal border crossings into the United States have decreased by two-thirds since peaking in 2000. In the last decade, more undocumented immigrants have been arriving to the U.S. through ports of entry than by crossing the border illegally. For every three people who crossed illegally in 2014, six others crossed legally and overstayed their visas. Meanwhile, the number of asylum seekers has risen. In 2015, for every 12 detentions between ports of entry, six others were declared inadmissible after presenting themselves at ports of entry. A significant number in these two groups asked for protection under the U.S. law. Today, the main immigration challenges are at the nation’s doors. When President Trump signed his executive order on immigration in January, he declared his desire to build a “contiguous and impassable physical barrier” along the southern border. Two months later, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly told the Senate that “it’s unlikely that we will build a wall or physical barrier from sea to shining sea.” Trump’s desire to build a wall seems to run against the opinions of immigration officials who have years of experience in U.S. border enforcement. Although many agree the border needs more funding and improvements, the overwhelming majority say a wall along the entire Southwest border is unnecessary. Since 2012, more immigrants have been choosing to present themselves to authorities directly at ports of entry. Gil Kerlikowske, chief of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under President Barack Obama, said immigration authorities have recognized this as a new trend. “We have seen a change in this last year,” he said. “Over the past several years, people were walking up and turning themselves in between ports of entry. In the last year, we saw more people walking to ports of entry and turning themselves in.” Norma Pimentel, who has helped immigrant families at her Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Tex., since 2014, said that she has seen an increase in those choosing to turn themselves in. “A wall is not going to address that,” she said. Some immigrants choose to turn themselves in because they seek protection. Antonio says he and his family fled Mexico in May from a gang that killed his aunt. “Two cars arrived and armed men got out of the cars. They broke down the door. I could see them,” he said. “My wife, my kid and I started to run to the back door in order to escape. I circled the block, waiting until they were gone. They circled the block, too, searching for us.” Antonio’s family hid until they could escape by car. When they got to a port of entry, they turned themselves in, asking for protection under U.S. law. In 2016, an average of 752 immigrants a day who turned themselves in were deemed inadmissible while Border Patrol made 1,140 apprehensions. Although there is no official tally on how many individuals turn themselves in between ports of entry, Kerlikowske said, they represent an important number of new arrivals today. “A vast number of people are turning themselves in. They are not trying to elude Border Patrol. ... I don’t even use the word ‘apprehensions.’ It is much more of a border management problem,” he said. Michael Fisher, who was head of U.S. Border Patrol from 2010 to 2015, confirmed this: For Border Patrol statistics, immigrants who turn themselves in between ports of entry are still considered apprehensions, as they crossed the border illegally. “At the end of the day, those individuals, once it has been determined they are illegally in this country, that is an arrest — whether they are waiting for us in the lobby or whether we have to chase them,” Fisher said. Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly told the Senate that his agency had seen a “massive drop” in apprehensions in February and March. In a statement in March, he said the drop was the result of the administration’s “implementation of Executive Orders to enforce immigration laws.” For David V. Aguilar, a former Border Patrol chief who also served as deputy and acting commissioner for CBP, this drop shows the new administration is “having an impact in the flow into this country. Can that be sustained? One of the ways is keeping the removals that are being carried out now,” he said. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors across the country to make immigration cases a higher priority and look for opportunities to bring serious felony charges against those who cross the border illegally. Still under U.S. law, individuals who show credible fears can be allowed protection. The number of asylum seekers claiming fear of persecution or torture if returned to their country of origin has grown from 5,241 in 2006 to 94,048 in 2016. According to an annual report by DHS in 2016, the backlog of pending asylum cases has increased 1,400 percent in the last five years, and asylum applications and credible fear claims are reducing agency resources on a significant scale. Individuals who visited the U.S. legally but overstayed their visas have outnumbered those who arrived illegally since 2007. In addition to those who voluntarily present themselves to U.S. authorities, there is a larger group that wouldn’t encounter the wall: People who cross legally on a temporary nonimmigrant visa and overstay. In 2014, visa overstays accounted for two-thirds of new unauthorized immigrants, according to a recent report by the Center for Migration Studies authored by the group’s executive director, Donald Kerwin, and Robert Warren, former director of statistics for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). According to the report, overstays have exceeded illegal crossings at the southwest border since 2007, and in 2014 they accounted for 42 percent of the undocumented population, a percentage that “will continue to increase as long as overstaying continues to be the predominant mode of arrival.” This trend follows years of border fortification and a reduction in the number of migrants from Mexico choosing to make the journey. “I think it is important that policy makers have the best information for making new policies,” Warren said. “They should be giving feedback to the people in the embassies.” But counting overstayers efficiently has always been a challenge for the United States, as there is no system in place at ports of entry to keep track of those exiting. Almost two decades passed between the last report on the subject, by the INS in 1997, and DHS’s report in 2016. Even more striking is that information is still missing on how many overstayers crossed through land ports because there is a lack of infrastructure to collect information on exiting visitors. At sea- and airports, carriers are responsible for doing so. As described by Robert Warren, the change in modes of arrival raises important policy questions, “not just about the need for a 2,000-mile wall but about the allocation of immigration enforcement resources” compared to other strategies. Kerlikowske, who retired as a commissioner of Customs and Border Protection in January, said no one in the new administration had consulted him during the transition. This could raise questions on how information was being transferred between inbound and outbound teams and whether the most recent trends are being reflected in budget allocations. According to him, “There’s never really been a good system for counting people who leave the United States. … Airports in this country were never designed to have facilities for people leaving.” But there is a lack of infrastructure to do so. Ralph Basham led four of the eight operational components of what is now the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and was the director of President George W. Bush’s Secret Service. As the CBP commissioner between 2006 and 2009, he led the agency as it built 670 miles of fencing and doubled the size of Border Patrol in over two years. “Aside from the overstays, the ports of entries are challenged. Their infrastructures need to be replaced to deal with the flow of drugs, illegal coming across and trafficking,” he said. “You don’t need that type of infrastructure along 2,000 miles,” he added. “It needs to make sense where you put your dollars.” “I’ve had numerous conversations with the administration regarding what our experiences were. Whether they take my advices or not is up to them,” Basham said. For Robert Bonner, who served as commissioner of the CBP between 2003 and 2006, there’s no question that the border needs more fencing and that existing fencing needs to be improved. But he doesn’t believe it is necessary along the whole border. “It might be marginally helpful, but more sophisticated sensoring might be even more helpful, at least for some regions of the border,” Bonner said. When asked about creating new physical barriers at the border, Doris Meissner, commissioner of INS under Clinton, said, “The thinking now is fighting yesterday’s battles.” Meissner was responsible for building up the first fence along the border in the 1990s, near urban areas like San Diego. Meissner said Trump created his candidacy by describing a border that is still out of control. “Enough people were persuaded that was what we need. But is it rational? Is it consistent with the facts as we know them? No, it is not,” Meissner said. David Aguilar said Border Patrol needs additional fencing, personnel and more technology, but in addition to border enforcement, he highlighted the need for “building up our capability on immigration judges.” “The people that are from the places other than Mexico are not going to be as responsive to the tactics and the capabilities that we applied in 2000,” he continued. Aguilar, who said the wall could have an important deterrent effect, said that technology might fit better along some segments of the border. For Kerlikowske, more could also be done in countries of origin. “If they were safer, and have opportunities, and their economies were better you wouldn’t have people from those countries subjected to the environment, smugglers, robberies, sexual assault, et cetera,” Kerlikowske said. “So there are things that could be done, but it just doesn’t get as much attention as the big wall.”

Trump’s not the only one who wants a wall. Border walls are trending.

Like it or not, Donald Trump isn’t the only one in the world looking to build a wall to keep out immigrants. Since the migrant crisis in Europe, Hungary and several other European states have begun planning or erecting border fences of their own, which have been referred to as “new iron curtains.” Going back further, 34 interstate fortified boundaries have been built since 1990, not including the recently constructed European ones.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico What explains this trend? Why do leaders and countries build border walls or fences? In a recent article in International Security, “Barriers to Entry: Who Builds Fortified Boundaries and Why?” we tried to understand why states fortify their borders with a wall, fence, or other structure. To do so, we created a new dataset encompassing all 319 pairs of contiguous states worldwide. Forty-five of these borders have featured fortified boundaries since 1945, but we focus on the 34 that have been built since 1990.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico By comparing country pairs that have fortified boundaries to country pairs that do not, we were able to identify what kinds of states construct such boundaries and what kinds of countries are being fenced out. **Why build a wall? To keep out poverty and Muslims.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Dramatic differences in economic opportunity between neighboring countries are often what propel states to construct barriers. Our data show that when there’s a significant wealth gap between two countries, the wealthier state becomes more likely to fortify its border. Among those country pairs that feature barriers, the states building the wall are on average nearly four times as wealthy (per capita) as the states whose citizens are being kept out. Think of the attempts at fortifying the U.S.-Mexico border as but one example. But keeping out poverty isn’t the only reason states fortify borders. Of 34 barriers built worldwide since 1990, 29 were constructed to keep out citizens from Muslim-majority nations. This isn’t just rank Islamophobia, however. Muslim-majority states built 17, or 59 percent, of those 29 barriers against Muslim-majority targets. Put differently, half of all fortified boundaries worldwide since 1990 separate Muslim states from other Muslim states. Samuel Huntington famously stated that “Islam has bloody borders,” a reference to borders between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world. Our data suggest that the Muslim world is uniquely likely to build walls. Of 72 bilateral intra-Muslim contiguous boundaries, 17 — or nearly 24 percent — have barriers. By contrast, out of 191 bilateral non-Muslim contiguous boundaries, only four, or 2 percent, feature barriers. Although keeping out poverty and Muslims may be the main prompts to building barriers, that’s not what nations actually say. We find that states frequently cite fears of terrorism to justify building walls. We find no evidence, however, that the states that build border walls have experienced a disproportionately large number of terror attacks. Wealth gaps and religion explain more of the story. **But aren’t fences hard to build and expensive?**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We might think fortifying a border is too difficult or expensive for most states (plans to get Mexico to pay for a fence aside). States don’t seem to think so. In other words, governments are not deterred by construction challenges or high costs. Several of the world’s barriers cover tremendous distances, traverse incredibly demanding terrain and cost states huge sums of money. For example, Morocco has built the Berm, an approximately 1,700-mile-long system of sand and stone wall barriers, in one of the most desolate places on earth: the Western Sahara. That’s equivalent to the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colorado. Nor was cost a deterrent for Morocco. Designed to thwart incursions by the Polisario Front, an insurgent movement representing the indigenous Sahrawi population of Western Sahara, the Berm cost an estimated 40 percent of Morocco’s GDP to build and defend. **For all that money, do** **fortified** **borders work?**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It’s complicated. First, data on fortified boundaries and illegal border crossings are hard to come by. Governments have little incentive to publicize these figures. Second, we can’t run a clean experiment to see what a situation would be if a country had left the border unfortified or if a state had used an alternative to a fortified border. Only focusing on fortified borders ignores situations where unfortified borders may be just as, or even more, effective for other reasons. Third, any assessment of barrier effectiveness must ultimately account not just for its “stopping power,” but also for its long-term strategic consequences, an even tougher dynamic to measure. Nonetheless, two factors seem to make borders more or less effective. **Walls work if they’re part of a larger border strategy**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Walls don’t work by themselves. They must be backed by a broader repertoire of border control measures, especially including efforts to guard the wall. Without that, migrants can circumvent the fortified boundary or even target the fortifications to weaken or destroy them. The most effective way a state can protect a fortified boundary is to control territory on both sides of the boundary. This can occur in two ways. One is for a state to build the barrier slightly inside its own territory so it can patrol both sides without going into its neighbor’s territory. The other is to build the barrier right on the border, but surveil the other side without putting boots on the ground. Either way, the fortified boundary can be effectively protected. **Rule out alternate routes into the country**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Second, we hypothesize that walls are less effective if would-be migrants can find other ways to get into the country. Because they will, indeed, look for ways around the wall. And if they succeed, fortification becomes irrelevant. In short, if there is a hole in the fence, chances are that migrants will find it. The recent epidemic of European fences can be seen as an effort to close the gaps in the fence between Europe and the Middle East. After Hungary finished its fence along the Serbian border, asylum seekers went to Croatia, which prompted both Hungary and Slovenia to construct new fences along their Croatian borders. In the U.S. case, the holes are as much metaphorical as literal, although those exist too. No one particular boundary controls entry and exit. If undocumented migrants from Mexico can’t get across the border on foot, they can come in at any U.S. port and airport, or even the U.S.-Canada border. Given the myriad airports and ports across the U.S., it’s hard to see how a U.S.-Mexico border fence actually keeps out motivated immigrants. Building a barrier might create its own set of new problems. Impeding human and material traffic increases the financial rewards for smuggling. A wall might thus encourage rather than discourage illicit cross-border activities. Or a wall on one part of a border might simply shift traffic to other regions which may have been previously free of trafficking. And finally, it won’t put an end to terrorism. Border barriers might drastically reduce the influx of terrorists, as it has in the case of Israel’s fortified barriers with the West Bank and Gaza, but they won’t persuade determined opponents to give up. It’s more likely that opponents will find another means of attack. In Gaza, for example, Palestinian terrorists, stymied by a fortified barrier, switched from suicide attacks to short- and medium-range rockets and mortar attacks. States may be able to address these perverse effects. But it’s clear that a barrier alone is not a silver bullet, whichever side you’re on. _Ron E. Hassner and Jason Wittenberg are associate professors of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Hassner is the author, most recently, of “Religion on the Battlefield.” Wittenberg is the author of “Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Building a border wall would hurt, not help, Americans

Regarding the Jan. 27 editorial “A trade war we don’t need”: Building a wall along the Mexican border need not be contentious. Look to the Great Wall of China for inspiration. Our wall could be an architectural inspiration in which both Mexicans and Americans could take pride. Rather than dispute which nation, neighbors by the way, should pay for it, make it self-financing. Create a beautiful wall, a tourist attraction. China’s Great Wall is about 13,000 miles in length and took about 19 centuries to build. It can be seen from space, which will appeal to some Mexican wall proponents. There are up to 70,000 visitors each day, and that’s just in one section. Consider the income to be generated by charging admission fees. Advances in building technologies will reduce the time it takes to build our wall. New jobs will be created. Tourists will need hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and the like — and additional tax income. If the purpose was to keep out barbarians, China’s wall was not very effective, but I digress. Our wall is a winner. ****Harold A. Vaughn** , Washington** **What would Ronald Reagan** say about a fellow Republican president who is working so hard and wants to spend so much money on a wall that will hinder relations with an important ally and cost billions neither country has to spare? Perhaps the same thing he said in Berlin: “Tear down this wall!” ****Kathrine Ebert** , Washington** **I have a degree in economics** , but you don’t need one to know that Mexico isn’t going to just stand by and do nothing if an import tax is put into effect. It will simply tax any products going from the United States into Mexico at 40 percent. Who’s going to lose? We are. ****Steve Hirsch** , Baltimore**  **A 20 percent tax on imports** from Mexico would certainly affect the economies of the United States and Mexico, and perhaps it would in some sense also punish Mexico, but how would it make Mexico pay for the wall? It seems that the customers who buy Mexican products at the new and higher prices would be footing the bill. ****Byron Stump** , West Friendship, Md.**

27 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Europe wakes up to a U.S. president-elect promising one of his own

On Wednesday, Europe woke up to an election result few had expected or favored. They also woke up to the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not take long for commentators to point out the irony of that coincidence: Many Europeans continue to be particularly shocked by Trump's plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. Plans to build walls are not unique to the U.S., of course: The number of border fences has been on the rise for years, in Europe and elsewhere. Hungary, for instance, recently installed a fence to stop the influx of refugees into the country. Other E.U. nations reintroduced border controls for the same reason. Trump's planned wall at the U.S.-Mexican border has nevertheless caused a stronger backlash, particularly in Western Europe — partially because the announcement was accompanied by other statements by the Republican candidate. Across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from Washington, Europe's politicians are struggling to understand the full implications of a Trump presidency. Is he serious about Germans and French facing “extreme vetting” if they travel to the United States, due to recent terrorist attacks in their country? Will he worsen the situation of Muslims living in the U.S.? And what will be the impact of improved relations between the U.S. and Russia on the Middle East and Syria, in particular? In a July poll, only 6.3 percent of Germans said they were in favor of a Trump presidency. Similar numbers were reported from across Europe. As of now, there are few signs that Trump and Europe will get along better than those polls suggest.  The U.S. elections have divided the country. Now, Europeans are worried that a Trump presidency could end up dividing Europe, as well. Donald Trump's relatively friendly attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin has confused European leaders who are increasingly worried about Russia's military movements at the continent's eastern borders and in Syria. Now, 27 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Western-Soviet hostility, tensions are running high again. So far, U.S. military support for Western Europe has remained virtually unchallenged and an integral part of European nations' defense strategy. Will that support remain the same under Trump as president? In Europe, many also fear that Donald Trump could fuel new ideological divisions between liberal governments and more populist ones. This could ultimately end up splitting Europe once again, although in a far different way than 27 years ago. Next year, the French will vote for a new president. Right-wing National Front candidate Marine Le Pen has a serious chance of winning that election. She was one of the first politicians to congratulate Trump on Wednesday morning.

Good walls make good neighbors along the border

The crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border grows each day as thousands of unaccompanied children pour through a poorly controlled national boundary. Yet all we seem to be able to do is throw more money at things that will do nothing to stem the tide [“White House asks Congress for emergency border funds,” front page, July 9]. Dealing with the increased flow of children will require the completion of a border barrier. A formidable physical barrier would deter illegal entry to the point at which our Border Patrol can deal with the reduced numbers of people who will get through no matter what. So far, our attempts at completing the barrier have been half-hearted, and our attempts to use a technological “virtual fence” have been less than successful. We need a wall. The ancient Chinese, with nothing but human labor, were able to build a wall more than 3,000 miles long over difficult terrain — even over mountains. With our technology and resources, why can’t we? Mr. President, build that wall! ****William T. Coleman** , Alexandria**

Donald Trump’s new TV ad: Make America great by keeping the dark hordes out

As the final, frenzied push towards the first presidential voting begins, Donald Trump has unveiled a riveting new television ad that perfectly sums up Trumpism in all its xenophobic glory — and also perfectly captures the problem Trumpism has created for the Republican Party.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The ad, which is set to run extensively in Iowa and New Hampshire, has it all. It reiterates his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, and links this directly to the need to combat “radical Islamic terrorism.” It also again vows to “stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.” All of this leads up to the grand conclusion, in which Trump himself vows to “make America great again.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But here’s something notable: Trump’s spot looks very much like the heavily-immigration-themed ads run by California Governor Pete Wilson in the 1990s. Wilson helped secure passage of the infamous “Proposition 187,” which sought to bar illegal immigrants from a range of state services and is widely believed to have driven Latinos away from the California GOP and set it on a path into the demographic wilderness. Note this footage from the new Trump ad showing dark hordes breaching the border:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now compare that to one of the ads Wilson ran as part of his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, which served up similarly grainy footage of similar dark hordes invading the country. As Brian Beutler noted, this depiction of “illegal immigrants as invaders” offers a striking parallel to today’s Trumpian rhetoric. That parallel should make it hard to avoid reckoning with the possibility that Trump’s appeal to GOP voters just might be partly rooted in the raw appeal of his xenophobia and demagoguery about immigrants, and not just in anxieties that are legitimately traceable to the impact of immigration policy on GOP voters’ economic prospects, as some right-leaning commentators have suggested. Now Trump’s ad has helpfully brought this comparison to full circle.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If you think this comparison is a stretch, note that California Republicans also see warnings for today’s GOP in the wrong turn the party took in that state in the 1990s. E.J. Dionne’s terrific new book on American conservatism features an interview with GOP state chairman Jim Brulte, who says this: “California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes. Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Or as one California Democrat puts it to Dionne: “The one thing no one can stop is that every month, the rest of America looks more like California.” Other Republicans, such as pollster Whit Ayres, broadly agree with this analysis and its ominous portents for the GOP’s hopes in future national elections.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now, it remains unlikely that Trump will actually win the nomination. But even if he doesn’t, the question then becomes: Whither the forces Trump has unleashed inside the GOP? Trump’s candidacy — and to a somewhat lesser extent, that of Ted Cruz — is framed around the idea that the way to win the White House is by unleashing the power of white backlash. This is plainly obvious in Trump’s case, but Cruz, too, has repeatedly suggested a GOP victory must be powered by evangelicals and “Reagan Democrats,” i.e., culturally conservative blue collar whites. Cruz has engaged in more sophisticated demagoguery about Muslims and has flatly ruled out any form of legalization for undocumented immigrants.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico By contrast, Marco Rubio’s long-term strategy seems to be framed broadly (though he has diverted from it at times) around the idea that the way to win is to make peace with diversifying, culturally evolving America, in hopes of cutting into Dem voter groups. (Demographics expert Ruy Teixeira’s hard look at the numbers suggests this may be the better course.) Which will GOP voters choose? We’ll soon find out. And if it’s the latter, and Rubio wins the nomination, how far he has to go in pandering to the forces Trump and Cruz are unleashing in order to get there will also bear watching.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ************************************************************************************** _Update_ : The original headline on the above item contained a word that some readers found offensive. My intention was solely to characterize in blunt terms what I believe is the tacit xenophobic message that _Trump_ is trying to send with his new ad. It was not meant in any way as an endorsement of that sentiment. But I apologize to those who did find the term offensive, and I’ve changed the headline to remove it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico ************************************************************************************** *** PAUL RYAN VOWS AMBITIOUS NEW GOP AGENDA:** The Wall Street Journal reports that House Speaker Paul Ryan is hoping to use the Lower Chamber in 2016 to frame a broad, proactive, GOP policy agenda that helps influence the presidential race. But:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So we’ll be hearing about this new agenda soon, after the gazillionth vote to roll back Obamacare. But no worries: Ryan promises that this agenda will also include the GOP’s long-awaited Obamacare alternative — one of these days, anyway. *** HILLARY TO ROLL OUT NEW TAX PLAN:** In the wake of news that the 400 highest-earning Americans paid an effective tax rate of 23 percent in 2013, Hillary Clinton signaled over the weekend that she’ll soon unveil a broad plan that goes beyond the “Buffett Rule” to push that effective rate up:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Bernie Sanders’ tax plan is also expected soon, and it likely will increase top rates more than Clinton’s would, igniting an intra-Dem debate over tax fairness heading into the early contests. *** BERNIE MAKES BIG PUSH IN IOWA:** The New York Times has a nicely reported look at how Bernie Sanders’ campaign is ramping up its organization in Iowa, in hopes of bucking the conventional wisdom that Clinton is likely to win the first contest:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If Clinton wins Iowa, that would offset a Sanders victory in New Hampshire, probably putting Clinton on track to winning the nomination. But if she loses there, she’ll likely lose both initial contests. Thus, a great deal is riding on Iowa. *** GOP CANDIDATES MUM ON OREGON STANDOFF:** As an armed group has taken over parts of a federally-owned wildlife refuge in Oregon, the GOP candidates have been mostly quiet:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Meanwhile, the group, which is led by one son of far-right hero Cliven Bundy, is prepared to dig in for “as long as it takes.” *** STAKES ARE ENORMOUS IN 2016:** Paul Krugman frames the stakes of the 2016 presidential race:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Also see Jonathan Cohn’s look at Obama’s highly consequential second term and why his long term legacy depends on which party wins the White House next year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico *** SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON BENGHAZI:** Glenn Kessler offers the definitive look at the claim by some family members of Benghazi victims that Hillary Clinton privately told them the video was to blame for the attacks. While some family members say she said this, Kessler talks to three family members who say she didn’t say any such thing, including Ambassador Chris Stevens’ father.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Clinton herself has denied telling the families this, and now it appears that at least some of the family members themselves agree. *** AND THE QUOTE OF THE DAY, TRUMP-HAS-GOP-OVER-A-BARREL EDITION:** RNC chair Reince Priebus:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Yeah, sure you think that, Reince. Better treat Trump _fairly_ , or who knows what he might do, right?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Top Mexican official blasts Donald Trump’s ‘absurd’ comments on migrants

Donald Trump's entrance into the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign on Tuesday led to a slew of bemused and amused reactions in the American media, but perhaps the most important response came south of the border.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trump, after all, had devoted considerable time during his rambling announcement to casting aspersions on Mexican migrants to the United States, suggesting that they were rapists, narco-criminals and general malefactors. He also trumpeted a plan to build a "great, great wall" on the border — with Mexican money. The ludicrousness of this prompted official comment in Mexico City. "The remarks by Donald Trump seem prejudicial and absurd," Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, Mexico's interior minister, told reporters on the sidelines of an anti- discrimination event on Tuesday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "He surely doesn't know the contributions made by migrants from practically every nation in the world, who have supported the development of the United States," Chong said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico On Planet Trump, of course, such a reasonable contention has little impact. In a follow-up interview with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, Trump doubled down on his fear-mongering and borderline racist demonization of Mexico.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "The Mexicans are the new China.... They are ripping us so badly," Trump said. He added that Mexico, a country of more than 120 million people and the world's 15th-largest economy, "is living off the United States" and is "not our friend."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trump has a record of xenophobia, including considerable grousing earlier this year when Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu won numerous Oscars for his film "Birdman."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "This is a man who has a pathological need for attention," Lisa Navarrete, a spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic American civil rights organization, told the Guardian. "I look at him as a two-year-old who will say a naughty word to get their parents’ attention."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Reaction on Mexican social media was equally dismissive.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "This is an exceedingly silly man, who has no idea what he’s talking about," said Navarrete.

Trump tried and failed to build a wall in Ireland. That could mean big trouble for Europe.

DOONBEG, Ireland — Before Donald Trump proposed a 1,000-mile wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop migrants, he tried to build a two-mile barrier on a pristine stretch of Irish coast to rein in an ocean. He didn’t succeed. Irish surfers, weekend beachcombers, environmental scientists, local planners and even a microscopic snail got in his way. In December, Trump International Golf Links backed down from plans it had said were essential to protect the company’s lone Irish course — picturesquely nestled in dunes overlooking the Atlantic — from being swallowed by rising seas. For a man who loves to win, the defeat — just a month after his election as president — has left a bitter taste. And despite the motley nature of the resistance, Trump seems to have singled out a lone culprit: the European Union, whose rules and regulations underpinned many of the objections. In interviews and public statements, Trump has cited his tangle over the golf-course wall as Exhibit A in justifying a jaundiced view of the E.U. that puts him at odds with decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. Previous presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — have seen the E.U. as an essential partner in global stability and a bulwark against the self-interested nationalism that spawned two world wars. To Trump, the bloc’s environmental protection regulations were a threat to his exquisitely manicured fairways and putting greens. “I found it to be a very unpleasant experience,” he told British and German interviewers last month after bringing up the wall dispute, unbidden, when asked his opinion of the E.U. “A _very_ bad experience,” he emphasized weeks later as he raised the issue at his first White House news conference. The bureaucratic battle over a golf-course sea wall makes for an unlikely inflection point in geopolitical history. And yet in Europe, Trump’s hostility toward the union that backers credit with keeping decades of continental peace is seen as a potentially fatal blow. European Council President Donald Tusk recently took the extraordinary step of including Trump on a list of threats to the already teetering E.U., right alongside China, Russia and radical Islam. The golf-course dispute, of course, is not the only explanation for Trump’s disdain. He has also criticized the E.U.’s status as a trading rival to the United States, the predominance within the bloc of German interests and its suppression of national identities. But that a relatively minor spat at a golf course has any bearing on such a major foreign policy stance is baffling to some of those who battled the wall — especially, they say, because Trump has his facts wrong. “He speaks as though it was the E.U. that stopped it. It wasn’t,” said Dave Flynn, co-chair of a local surfers’ group that opposed the sea barrier. “It’s amazing that such a big foreign policy decision like this could be made on such an ill-informed basis.” The 18-hole golf resort in the west Irish village of Doonbeg is a relatively small and recent addition to Trump’s global business empire, which he signed over to his sons just before entering the White House. Ironically, the resort was originally built with the help of a $4 million grant from the E.U. The money was intended to spur rural development. And for a time it did, drawing international tourists and more than 200 jobs to a village where cattle farming, fishing and a handful of pubs had been the mainstays of the local economy. But by early 2014, just over a decade after opening, the resort was struggling, battered by the one-two punch of an Irish economy still reeling from the global downturn and severe winter storms that left the course badly damaged. Trump’s company swooped in and bought it at a deep discount — reportedly for about $15 million. That spring, Trump paid his new asset a visit. At nearby Shannon Airport, he was given a red-carpet welcome, complete with a harpist and a handshake from the Irish finance minister. In a radio interview, he said he would invest about $45 million in a dramatic upgrade and expansion of the resort’s facilities. But as storms continued to pound away at the greens, it became apparent that any investment would come to naught unless the fragile and ever-shifting dunes upon which the course is built were better defended. Initially, the company’s solution was to begin dumping piles of rock along the beach. But the work lacked the necessary permits from County Clare, and was halted. Ultimately, Trump International put an audacious plan before the county council: a two-mile, 200,000-ton, 15-foot-high rock wall that would sharply divide the dunes from the adjacent Doughmore Beach. “It was a quantum leap from anything we had seen,” Flynn said. “It was big and brash, just hugely shocking.” Flynn, who works as a development manager, said that he has been surfing at Doughmore for more than 20 years. The wide, sandy, half-moon beach is regarded as the best surf spot in western Ireland, he said. “During the spring, summer and autumn, it’s perfect. It just tracks in waves.” He and fellow club members quickly concluded that Trump’s wall would destroy their mecca. “Nature doesn’t like hard lines,” he said. “The beach will erode at the front and the dunes will die at the back. They need to work together.” Residents of Doonbeg, a tiny, verdant and windswept village on the Atlantic coast, took a different view. Trump International said it needed the wall to keep the resort open. With course visitors pumping money into the economy, locals rallied around Trump International’s plan. “The scenery is beautiful here, but you can’t eat it. You need to build in order to survive and thrive,” said Rita McInerney, who owns a local cafe and general store and whose family has been in Doonbeg for seven generations. “Some people think we’re selling our souls by dealing with Trump International. But prospects are few and far between in an area like this. And the fact is it’s 200 jobs, plus the spinoff for local businesses.” Coincidentally, Vice President Pence has ancestors who hail from Doonbeg, which has also helped to consolidate local support. “Trump has kept the jobs here and kept the tourists coming in. He made a promise to the people of Doonbeg, and he made good on it,” said Hugh McNally, a local restaurant owner and Pence’s third cousin. McNally said that much of the opposition to the wall was generated based on political opposition to Trump and that it came from outside the village. Opponents acknowledge their outsider status but insist the objections they lodged with county planners are based on genuine concern for an important natural habitat. Some of the legal objections, though not all, were based on the site’s E.U. designation as “a special area of conservation” and a habitat for the narrow-mouthed whorl snail — a rare and protected species. “If you damage the dunes, then you eventually eliminate the snail’s habitat,” said Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment. “They will go if a wall is put in place.” Trump has fumed at such arguments, calling them “environmental tricks to stop a project from being built” in an interview with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild. He also said his company had received “the approvals very quickly from Ireland and then Ireland and my people went to the E.U. to get the approval. It was going to take years.” The reality, however, is that E.U. approval was never needed, and Irish approval was never given. The project was stalled at the county level — with planners weighing objections based on local, national and E.U. law. A petition at the national level was rejected. Trump encouraged Britain to leave the E.U., and has said he believes other members will follow. After the Brexit vote last June, he hailed the decision in a ribbon-cutting at one of his Scottish golf courses, Turnberry, saying the vote was “a positive” because it would depress the value of Britain’s currency. “When the pound goes down,” he said, “more people are coming to Turnberry.” That’s proved correct. The course has seen an upturn in business. So has Doonbeg, with the course benefiting from what its general manager, Joe Russell, said is an investment of over $25 million in upgrades since Trump International bought it. But the resort will not be getting the rock wall — at least not as originally planned. Just weeks after Trump’s victory in November, the company withdrew its proposal rather than answer 51 questions posed by county planners. Russell said the decision was made because approval would have taken “years” that “the company does not have.” Instead, Trump International has proposed two smaller walls, which together are less than a third the size of the original. “We hope [the new plan] will proceed through the planning process quicker,” Russell said. But the battle continues. Many of the same groups that opposed the original wall have objected to the new plan, arguing that when the smaller barriers inevitably fail, Trump International will be back demanding bigger ones. “Sea walls,” Lowes said, “beget sea walls.” Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

Want proof Donald Trump can build a border wall? Look at his D.C. hotel, he says.

Donald Trump is absolutely certain that he can build an impenetrable wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, in the face of skepticism from experts and federal officials. As proof, the developer cites what he’s doing for the federal government itself. Along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, near the White House, Trump is running ahead of schedule on his plan to transform the historic Old Post Office Pavilion into the — aptly named — Trump International Hotel.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The project has attracted small protests since Trump’s controversial remarks about immigration — he described Mexicans entering the country illegally as “rapists” and “murderers” — and two restaurateurs who had leases in the new building have pulled out. [ _Protesters want Trump’s name removed from D.C. project_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Yet even as she labeled Trump’s comments “idiotic” last week, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said the hotel project was important for the city and the revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Republican presidential candidate vigorously agreed, citing his stewardship of the pavilion as evidence that he can erect a southwest border wall, which has become the signature proposal of his campaign. “I get things done,” Trump said in an interview with The Post on Thursday. “All you have to do is look down Pennsylvania Avenue and you will see a job that was supposedly very tough and is instead ahead of schedule and on budget.” The Trump Organization broke ground in Washington two years ago, and construction has in fact stayed well ahead of schedule. The project is being managed by the U.S. General Services Administration. Along the border, Trump said a wall separating the U.S. and Mexico “is absolutely buildable and can be built for far less cost than people think.” Experts have said a massive structure would cost untold billions of dollars and encounter myriad obstacles, but Trump said he could overcome any problems. [ _Experts say Trump’s proposed border wall would be difficult, costly_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It’s not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And nobody knows what they’re doing like I do.”

Mexico’s top diplomat calls Trump’s policies ‘ignorant and racist’

MEXICO CITY — In the sharpest official Mexican government comments to date on Republican front-runner Donald Trump, the foreign minister called Trump’s policies and comments “ignorant and racist” and his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border “absurd.” “When an apple’s red, it is red. When you say ignorant things, you’re ignorant,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu, Mexico’s top diplomat. “It is impossible to think of a 2,000-mile border being walled off and trade between our two countries stopped,” Ruiz Massieu said. “It is impractical, inefficient, wrong and, frankly, it is not an intelligent thing to do.” As for Mexico paying for Trump’s proposed wall, she said: “It is not a proposition we would even consider. It is an impossible proposition.” Ruiz Massieu spoke Friday evening, capping a week in which two former Mexican presidents told The Washington Post that Trump’s policies and growing popularity are poisoning Mexican views of the United States. Former presidents Vicente Fox and his successor, Felipe Calderón, who ran Mexico from 2000 to 2012, have said the fact that Trump is winning Republican primaries and is a front-runner for the White House is damaging the image of the United States abroad. Trump’s comments, and how well they are playing with voters, are especially alarming in this country, which does more than $500 billion worth of trade each year with the United States and buys more U.S. goods than China and Japan combined. Trump’s call for deporting undocumented immigrants and building a massive wall along the length of the Mexican border is a central pillar of his campaign. Millions of Mexicans see it as insulting and racist and say he has specifically targeted Mexicans by saying Mexico is sending its worst citizens to the United States, including “criminals” and “rapists.” Mexican officials see Trump’s calls for tariffs on cars made in Mexico and his giant wall as a threat to the thriving trade that millions of jobs in both countries depend on. Fox used an expletive rarely heard from a politician in public to reject the idea of Mexico paying for Trump’s wall this week. Then Trump demanded Fox apologize for his language. On Friday, La Jornada, a leading left-leaning newspaper, published a cartoon of a furious-looking Trump shouting: “I demand respect. Only I can use bad manners and bad words!” Trump has become a popular target of scorn in Mexico, where he has been trashed in folk songs and in computer games in which players get to fling shoes, cakes and tomatoes at him. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was elected to a six-year term in 2012, has largely avoided responding to Trump directly, but he said in a meeting this week with Vice President Biden in Mexico City that building walls “only means isolating oneself and ending up alone.” Biden was in Mexico for high-level economic talks, which also included the U.S. secretaries of commerce, interior, transportation and energy, and the deputy secretary of homeland security. Biden’s comments this week were top news when he told Peña Nieto that Trump’s views about Mexico were “the exact opposite” of the position of the “majority of the American people.” “I feel almost obliged to apologize for some of what my political colleagues have said about Mexico,” Biden said. “The main message I wanted to say to you is that I understand that you can’t poison the well and, at the same time, work out a real estate arrangement to buy the well,” Biden said. In an interview late Friday evening in her office, Ruiz Massieu, said Trump does not represent the views of most Americans. “It sounds ignorant and racist because it is,” she said. “We are pretty sure that’s not the way most Americans feel. It was a country that was founded on tolerance, on openness, on taking in people from other places and enriching a society by embracing diversity. That’s the way American values are.” She said that saying the Mexican American community does not contribute to the United States’ well-being and growth is “ignorant” and “ignores the facts.” She added: “History has also shown that when anti-immigrant rhetoric turns into policy or laws, it is a bad idea. You lose money, you lose people, you lose trust.” She said the Mexican government would respond to Trump’s rise by urging Mexican Americans in the United States to “participate and become heard in the electoral process, which is not over yet.” “I’m optimistic that people will stand up for themselves and vote in accordance to their values and their views,” she said. “For Mexicans and many people around the world, what this has brought to light is that you have to continuously work to remind everyone that it is better to work together,” she said. “It is better to build bridges than to build walls.”

In Arizona, border security in spotlight amid immigration-reform efforts, sequester cuts

With the winter sun’s glare bouncing off his old red pickup, John Ladd drives slowly along the 10-foot wall of iron stakes and steel mesh that crosses his 14,000-acre cattle ranch, dividing his great-grandfather’s land from the Mexican desert but not always keeping intruders out. “Here’s where the drug smugglers cut through the wall in January,” Ladd says, pointing to a large jagged square in the metal that has since been rewelded. “They use blowtorches and hydraulic grinders. They can get a truck through in minutes, and as soon as they reach the highway they’re gone.” Ladd’s ranch in the southeastern corner of Arizona is dotted with cameras on stilts, and U.S. Border Patrol trucks cruise the range daily, scattering his Herefords and Angus. Beyond the wall, Mexican soldiers patrol in Humvees. Before it was erected in 2007, illegal migrants constantly camped in his bushes on their way north. These days, fewer make the attempt, but a more sophisticated and dangerous threat has replaced them. “There’s less people but more drugs,” Ladd says. “The cartels control everything that crosses. The Border Patrol has a huge presence, but it’s not enough, and it’s not the answer. No matter what they say in Washington, the border is not secure.” The issue of border security — hard to measure but easy to manipulate — has long been a sticking point in the debate over illegal immigration. The Obama administration, hoping to win congressional support for an overhaul of immigration law, increased spending on customs and border enforcement to a record $12 billion in 2012, and it claims to have reduced infiltration of the 2,000-mile U.S.-   Mexico border to its lowest level in decades. But now, with the across-the-board sequester cuts expected to take a $500 million bite out of the immigration enforcement budget and cut the equivalent of 5,000 jobs from a Border Patrol force of 21,000 agents, new concerns over border violence and drug smuggling are being raised by administration critics, immigration officers and some border-area residents. Arizona, a Republican-led border state, has long played an outsize role in the immigration wars. It enacted the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants in 2010, has spawned vigilante border-watch groups and has elected officials such as Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, icons of a national movement to seal the border and fight “amnesty” for the undocumented. Today, as the Obama administration seeks lawmakers’ backing for steps that would legalize millions of undocumented residents, Arizona’s conservative forces are rallying for another fight. This time, they have new ammunition from sequester cutbacks and reports of Mexican drug gangs muscling in on what was once a routine cat-and-mouse game between federal agents and poor migrants. The new battle pits Brewer against another high-profile Arizona figure, Democratic former governor Janet Napolitano, now U.S. secretary of homeland security. Napolitano insists that the U.S.-Mexico border remains more secure than it has been in years, even as she warned that Border Patrol cuts would leave fewer agents to cover rugged rural areas where most illegal crossings take place. Meanwhile, Brewer has accused the White House of using the sequester for political gain at the expense of public safety. Asked about Arizona and its most porous border segment, a 120-mile stretch that crosses ranches such as Ladd’s and the north-south highway between Tucson and Nogales, Napolitano asserted that once-heavy illegal traffic there had fallen to its lowest level in years. The government estimates that border-area arrests across Arizona, mostly in the Tucson-Nogales region, dropped 80 percent to 125,000 between 2000 and 2012. But some members of the border enforcement community charge that officials in Washington have deliberately exaggerated the drop in illegal crossings and unfairly focused budget cuts on their mission. They warn that smugglers of drugs and of humans will take advantage of the sequester, which is expected to reduce thousands of hours of overtime and has already led to the release of hundreds of illegal immigrants from detention. “The real truth is not getting out. The Border Patrol is only catching 5 percent of what crosses, and they are being told not to report getaways,” charged Zack Taylor, a Nogales resident and leader of the national association of former Border Patrol employees. “Arizona is already a lawless area, and with those cuts in manpower it’s going to be wide open.” Several law enforcement observers said illegal migrants are starting to cross in larger groups, anticipating a more tolerant U.S. government policy to result from talks in Washington. “The numbers of illegals have really picked up since they heard amnesty is coming,” Taylor said. Ranchers such as Ladd also remain skeptical of administration claims of success. They often mention violent incidents such as the 2010 shooting death of border rancher Robert Krentz and constantly swap stories of the latest fence cuttings, of drugs being abandoned by couriers and of smugglers using empty barns as hideaways and lookout posts. Yet now there are voices in Arizona sending different messages on immigration. A growing Hispanic electorate is feeling new muscle, some police officials are disgusted with the state’s polarized politics, and a loose fraternity of liberal business and civic leaders, many of whom benefit from cross-border commerce, is expressing discomfort with extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric and the militarization of the border region. One of those voices belongs to Nan Waldon, a lawyer and horse breeder who co-owns a 7,000-acre pecan farm south of Tucson that employs several hundred Hispanics. In a recent interview, Waldon denounced the controversial 2010 law as a “horrible and racist” measure. The law, the toughest aspects of which were upheld by the Supreme Court last year, requires police to report suspected illegal immigrants to federal officials. “It’s wrong for people to stereotype Mexicans and Mexican Americans as criminals and drug smugglers and ignore the fact that they are the backbone of our economy,” Waldon said. “Many people in Arizona are still afraid to speak out, but there is a silent majority who have had enough of the rhetoric that plays on the fears of ignorant people.” Roberto Villasenor, the Mexican American police chief of Tucson, said he worries about the upswing in drug smuggling but complained that the political hijacking of border security has made it much harder to find practical solutions. “Making the border more secure needs to be a priority, but we keep getting into a political circus, with both sides making outlandish claims to advance their agenda,” Villasenor said wearily. “The issue has been so distorted that whatever you do, the other side screams it is political. Nobody knows what to believe anymore.” In the border boomtown of Nogales, officials are cultivating close relationships with their Mexican counterparts and business leaders are lobbying for expanded inspection services to speed the passage of Mexican trucks. Industry officials said more than $6 billion in tomatoes, peppers and other produce from Mexico enters the United States each year, nearly half of it through Nogales. “Things have changed since the last time Congress tackled this issue,” said Doris Meissner, a former federal immigration commissioner and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “The border is not the same place it was five years ago, and the American electoral picture is different. I don’t think the Arizona mind-set is going to have the same traction it had in the past.” The scene at Ladd’s cattle ranch, with its stark evidence of severed steel bars and high-   powered invaders, is an ominous prism through which to view the border. But just a dozen miles east, at the busy, legal Port of Entry between Douglas, Ariz., and Agua Prieta, Mexico, the picture is more complex. On a gray winter afternoon, hundreds of Mexicans hurried home through narrow inspection lanes after another day in the United States — schoolchildren, mothers with shopping bags, and men returning from long days in a tomato processing plant 80 miles from the border. Heading through a separate maze of wide northbound lanes were a dozen tractor-trailers carrying refrigerated crates of Mexican tomatoes, peppers and squash to supermarkets across the United States. To Daniel Ortega, the Mexican American mayor of Douglas, the border is not a menace but a crossroads of commerce and culture. Trade with Mexico provides 80 percent of the town’s commercial revenue, while federal jobs in border-related security have helped revive the community of 18,000 since its once-dominant employer, a copper mine and foundry, shut down in the 1990s. “Our communities are very dependent on each other,” Ortega said, noting that Douglas is now an official “sister city” with Agua Prieta. He said his main concern is trying to streamline the border inspection process, something that sequester cutbacks could easily derail. “People in the East talk about how bad the border is,” Ortega said, “but here our future depends on it.” At one point in the afternoon, a barred government bus crossed from Douglas to Agua Prieta and two dozen Mexicans straggled out. Most carried plastic bags labeled “Department of Homeland Security” that contained wadded clothes, water bottles and other remnants of their failed attempts to sneak into the United States. The little group shuffled into a dingy little building, run by an American volunteer group, which said “Welcome Brother Migrants” in Spanish. Slumped dejectedly in plastic chairs, they said they had been caught soon after crossing into the United States in February, briefly jailed and then bused back to Mexico. There were couples and middle-aged men and a weeping woman who said she might never see her children again. All had borrowed heavily to pay guides and protection fees to drug mafias, hoping to reach a construction job in Chicago, a grape harvest in California or a spouse and children in Nebraska. Gabriel Sosa, a 47-year-old factory worker, said he had paid $2,000 for a guide who led him and two other men to the open border at Naco. The guide told them to climb the 10-foot fence and wait for a cellphone call, then vanished. “We hid in the grass all night and nobody called. We could hear the cattle nearby,” Sosa said. “It got colder and colder. Finally we decided to walk to the highway, and as soon as we saw a Border Patrol truck we turned ourselves in.” The thwarted travelers said they knew U.S. penalties for illegal entry were stricter now and that Arizona was especially tough on border crossers. They complained about the fees demanded by the drug mafia, the cold cells in U.S. jails and the dense Border Patrol presence in populated areas that forced them to risk dangerous desert crossings. Still, all said their desperation to find a job with a living wage was stronger than any of those worries. Asked what would be the best way to stop illegal immigration, several people spoke up at once, saying they would much rather work legally, even for a few months of the year, than endure the expense and hazards of crossing on their own. “If the Americans want to stop illegal immigration, why don’t they give us work visas?” demanded a young man named Julio, who had paid $2,000 and been caught almost as soon as he crossed into Arizona. “This way we are just bait for the mafia.” Then he shouldered his plastic bag and followed his companions to the Agua Prieta bus station and the empty-handed trip home.