Sierra Club
During the worst years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was known in the Spanish-speaking world as the Wall of Shame. In 1963, President Kennedy, in a memorable speech, said, “The Wall is an offense not only against history, but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.”
Half a century later, another US president, Donald Trump, in a memorable historic error, pretends to build another Wall of Shame along the 1,900 miles of the US-Mexico border.
This boondoggle that would cost us all more than $20 billion aims at ending undocumented immigration in the US, even though net migration between both countries equals zero. In fact, the Pew Research Center concluded in a 2015 study that more Mexicans were leaving the US than those coming in.
This Wall of Shame is not only unnecessary, but also an environmental, economic and humanitarian disaster. And the barriers already built along more than 650 miles of the border are there to prove it.
“By invoking the REAL ID Act, the Bush administration waived dozens of protections and safeguards to build those stretches of wall,” says Dan Millis, an expert in border issues with the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Program. “People here are living in places where the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act do not apply. This is not anything like equal protection under the law as stated in the Constitution.”
The existing wall acts as a dam that facilitates flooding, like the ones that took place in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, which caused death and devastation on both sides of the border.
“The elimination of all these laws really scares me because of what Trump could do. He says he’s a law-and-order person but he can block the law so he can look tough on television,” says Millis.
The wall’s economic damage could also be profound. Trump’s persistent verbal aggression against Mexico —the wall talk, the terrifying ICE raids, the insults against the dignity of an entire country— threatens to backfire spectacularly.
Some six million jobs in the US depend on trade with Mexico. Another outrageous Trump idea is to impose a tariff on all imports from Mexico to finance the building of his wall. But the ones who would end up paying for it would be the US consumers, including Trump voters.
Those same voters justify Trump’s military operation rounding-up mostly Latino undocumented workers by saying they are stealing their jobs.
Really? The Center for Global Development published a study in 2013 about this alleged robbery, including the announcement of 6,500 farm jobs in North Carolina. Out of those, 163 US workers showed up for work under the hot sun. How many of them completed the whole harvest season? Seven (7). And California’s farmers, after supporting Trump during the election, are afraid now that their produce will rot on the fields because of the lack of workers.
Truth is undocumented immigrants enthusiastically accept jobs US workers are repelled by. And Trump’s intensifying military operation threatens the country’s very economic security. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, deporting all undocumented workers would cost the country $3 trillion over 10 years.
The immigration crisis will not be solved by scapegoating undocumented workers. The environmental, economic, and above all, moral solution lies in comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for 11 million people who suffer the abuse of polluters and Trump’s xenophobic wrath.
At stake is our country’s reputation as a civilized nation.