My Discontentment

The so-called President's 2019 budget reportedly includes an expanded border wall, more immigration agents, and more immigration judges, while most other federal agencies would see their funding cut, some by as much as 26% (looking at you, EPA). 

About $1.6 billion of the budget is allocated toward building 65 miles of wall in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the easternmost section of the border and the one that historically has seen the highest number of undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S.

The idea of a border wall is ludicrous to begin with.  Although the Rio Grande Valley has historically had the most crossings, most undocumented immigrants are here simply due to people arriving and then overstaying their visas.  In the face of a $1.6 billion wall, people who wanted to come here illegally would simply arrive at airports and then disappear among the general population.  Others who couldn't afford the airfare would hire traffickers to bribe security agents along the wall to look the other way as groups pass through, or use any combination of boats, tunnels, and small aircraft to get over, under, or around the wall.  

The ludicrousness of the wall is made even more apparent by the so-called President's empty campaign slogan that Mexico was going to pay for it.  Even though he was never able to explain how or why Mexico would pay for the wall, his followers fell for the fantasy of the skilled, art-of-the-deal negotiator who could pull off the seemingly impossible, but now it appears that we Americans are going to have to pay for the 1.6 billion Rio Grande wall, along with the rest of the $18 billion over the next 10 years to build additional walls and fences along the border.  Maybe the negotiator was skilled after all, and somehow hoodwinked a nation into paying for something they were tricked into believing Mexico was going to pay for. 

But here's the really sad part:  the wall, even if built, will not last long. The next Administration, certainly the next Democratic Administration, will take it down, and there's a whole generation of millennials and post-millennials who want no part of walled nation-states and will have it taken down at the first chance possible. So 1.6 to 18 billion dollars will have been wasted on a stupid, ineffective, and ultimately meaningless political gesture to temporarily satisfy a small, aging portion of the electorate.

But the damage caused by the off-setting cuts to other programs, like the EPA, may not be so easy to reverse, and it may take decades to reverse the harm caused by the lapse in environmental enforcement.