By Robert
Reich
At his turbulent January 11 news
event (I won’t dignify it by calling it a news conference), Trump reiterated
that he will build a wall along the Mexican border. “It’s not a fence. It’s a
wall,” he said, and “Mexico will pay for the wall.”
Here are 6 reasons why Trump’s wall
is an even dumber idea than most of his others.
1. The
U.S.-Mexican border is already well defended, and a wall won’t improve the
defenses.
The
United States now spends $3.7 billion per year to keep some 21,000
Border Patrol agents on guard and another $3.2 billion on 23,000 inspectors at
ports of entry along the border, a third of which is already walled or fenced off.
2. The cost of Trump’s fence would be a whopping $25 billion on top of
this.
That’s the best estimate I’ve seen
by a Washington Post fact checker. (When Trump discussed the cost last February he put it at
$8 billion, then a few weeks later upped the cost to $10 to 12 billion. )
3. There’s no way Mexico will pay for it.
On January 11, Mexican President
Enrique Peña assured Mexicans they would not be footing the bill. “It is evident
that we have some differences with the new government of the United States,” he
said, “like the topic of the wall, that Mexico of course will not pay.”
4. There’s no reason for the wall anyway because undocumented migration from Mexico has sharply declined.
The Department of Homeland
Security’s estimates that the total undocumented population peaked
at 12 million in 2008, and has fallen since then.
According to the Pew Research Center, the overall flow of Mexican immigrants between the two
countries is at its smallest since the 1990s. The number of apprehensions at
the border is at its lowest since 1973.
5. The decline isn’t because of rising border enforcement but because of Mexico is producing fewer young people and therefore less demographic pressure to migrate to the U.S.
In 1965, Mexico’s fertility rate was 7.2 children per woman; by 2000 it
had fallen to 2.4; today, it’s at 2.3 children per woman, just above
replacement level.
6. There’s
little or no evidence undocumented immigrants take jobs away from native-born
Americans, anyway.
A new analysis of Census data finds that immigrants
take very different jobs than Americans. In fact, the United States already
allows a significant amount of legal immigration from Mexico under the “guest-worker”
program –1.6 million entries by legal immigrants and 3.9 million by
temporary workers from Mexico over the last 10 years – because farmers can’t
find enough native-born Americans to pick crops.
Of course, Trump lives in a
fact-free universe designed merely to enhance his power and fuel his
demagoguery. But you don’t have to, and nor does anyone else.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
