Trump's Wall: total fantasyland says engineer

You need the guards to make sure a prisoner doesn't get to spend two weeks boring a hole through the wall. We're not trying to stop the 100 most inventive illegals, we're trying to stop the 100,000 that keep on wading in. Even children are walking across in waves.

1) sources
2) where do they go instead?

Are you? According to the fear mongers, you are afraid of highly trained terrotists entering the country. Aren't you?

I was reading through your article, until it bombarded me with obtrusive full screen ads. Not gonna bother with a website that doesn't want visitors to read its content.

Oh, they terrorists just fly in on an Obama visa. We don't even vet them because it might violate their religious sensibilities.

Murder your family and then kill yourself.

So you're saying a wall of ads stopped you?

I'm with Penn & Teller on this one.

The wall would, obviously, need guards but that can be done. The point of the wall is to deter and slow people down so the guards can intercept them. Walls work well for that.

Yes, they do. Pointing guns at people also works well for that. Both together definitely works best. The point here is that building any kind of structure is the least investment into securing a long border, and the fixation on the image of the wall which will actually be a fence and interrupted and only useful because you're really staffing the whole border with an army of newly hired guards in order to keep out a workforce your economy desperately needs -- is all just one more facet in the picture that shows how all of this feeds off xenophobic rhetoric rather than realistic politics.

We need the workforce only because we haven't showed liberals how to do anything useful. Millions of them aren't even in the workforce, and we only need so many pole dancers, Best Buy clerks, and puppeteers. Yet we're not utilizing the immigrants to beat the living fuck out of them until they're not so fragile, so we're really not getting much other than lawn care and free nachos out of the deal.

Obama has also encouraged millions of Central American kids to abandon their families and walk north, hopefully avoiding most of the child slavers along the way, although at this point the child sex slave market is probably saturated, but fuck 'em, they're Central Americans. What we're doing is reducing any pressure those governments would feel from people who can't find jobs because their economies aren't creating any jobs outside the drug and sex slave industries. Normally the discontented masses would start agitating, then organize and boil over and make fundamental changes, but unfortunately the most discontented have been told that it's easier just to be a grounds keeper in Portland.

The helps maintain the security of the oligarchs and aristocrats south of the border who are about as useful as a broke dick in the world economy. - even the world economy of 1850, while simultaneously making sure that blue collar Americans never see any wage increases above inflation for several decades because an illegal will work for half the price.

Of course having guards matters. Stop trying to pretend barriers don't help and can get the same job done with fewer guards. It is not xenophobic to actually enforce the laws and prevent criminals from breaking the law. You are so spineless claiming that even just enforcing the law is some how bad.

How about you start giving a shit about the actual citizens who are daily victimized in a million different ways by these illegal alien economic migrants who don't even belong here?

Oh, sorry, did you not get the memo? Only gturner and a few others were supposed to click on that link. I'll send you a PM with instructions for removing the spyware.

Everyone who wants a wall get the fuck out of this country because you obviously have no idea the principles on which it was founded. /thread

Walls are the opiate for the fearful. The irony is that we are at net negative immigration via the Mexican border, so there really is no question about the wall's true purpose.

Paving is at ground level most of the time. You are basically talking about the difference between a 2 dimensional object and a three dimensional object.

The cost per square foot is roughly the same. A tip-up concrete wall, such as you might have an a major building like an arena or distribution center, is about $15 to $20 per square foot, installed. A multi-lane concrete highway will be $20 to $30 per square foot, whereas a bridge will be about $120 per square foot. A 20-foot wall 1000 miles long is about 100 million square feet.

Building a border wall/fence is just like installing the TSA at airports. It's a good way to make it look like you're doing something when you really aren't doing anything at all. The greatest security improvement to come out of 9/11 was the reinforced cockpit door. Everything else is just theater to make people THINK that they're safe. The same goes for a border wall. Sure, it'll look impressive to the voting drones, and it'll serve as a concrete (pun) example of something being done, but it's the smaller, unseen solutions that'll be more practical. Want to stop people from coming here illegally? Stop giving them a reason to try. Make life so unbearable for illegals here that it's no longer worth their effort.

This.

I thought a "wall" was just an expression and what has more seriously been wanted was a two or three layered fence system. Monitored by border agents both remotely and in person depending on the rates of attempted crossings.

You seem to be two of many who don't quite grasp the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It's the difference between inviting a guest into your home to share a meal and spend the night, and someone breaking into your house, demanding you feed them, and sleeping on your couch.

WTF? Which set of American principles advocate illegally entering this country and feeding off the goodwill of the citizenry?

I agree thst if you make it impossible for them to get a job they will stop coming but 15 years of pushing for E-verify and tougher penalties for hiring illegals hasn't resulted in anything. The lobbyists all oppose it and meat packing companies are still running ads in Mexico promising to hire every illegal who comes to their factories in the US. Hell, the Republican shit stains even passed a law saying the INS can only raid a factory once per year even though they know those factories only hire illegals.

That needs to change.

A few a years back I drove a friend of a friend to the welfare office here in San Diego so she could sign up for food stamps and medicaid. 75% of the people there were non-English speaking hispanics (read: illegals). The insanity of rewarding criminality needs to stop.

everybody who is Hispanic and speaking Spanish is by default an illegal? Dinner, you are fast becoming a caricature of the Lonely Squire.

You're really telling an immigration lawyer he doesn't know what illegal immigration is?

It's not about just letting anyone in. But these sorts of draconian measures do not help at all. People have all manner of reasons for trying to immigrate, and you can't simply just lock people out and take it for granted that everyone who doesn't get, for instance, a work visa, doesn't still have a legitimate reason for trying to get in (be it as a refugee under the Refugee Convention, the spouse/immediate relative of an American or whatever else). A reason that ultimately legally qualifies them in the long term. In such circumstances an "illegal" immigrants would go from illegal to legal.

A wall also in no way prevents people who come legally initially, be it with a tourist visa, family visa or spouse visa, and then overstay. They go from being legal to illegal. Plus it doesn't stop the entering from other ports of entry, such as airports, docks and so on. So it's not remotely cut and dried as Trump, and it seems you, think. Certainly in my own country it is probably only a small minority who grasp the actual complexity of immigration, and I suspect it's the same in yours as well. Walls are ridiculous, impractical and third world ideas based on the notion that the vast majority of immigrants are unsavoury and that border hoping from the south is all it takes, and really the only way of entering. Rather there needs to be a robust, effective immigration system that preserves the rights of those in need or with legally sounds reasons to enter or remain, and a functioning system for removals for those who commit criminal offences or overstay their visas with no good reason. When @Jenee talks of people forgetting things she is talking about the fact that the US was a country of immigrants from day one, and those people made it what it is today (or was anyhow). If you do not operate a fair and effective immigration system then you forget your own history. A wall is not part of a fair system as you would often run eh risk of blocking out those that enhance your society as much as those that don't.

The hispanics who grew up here speak English. The ones who don't speak English are almost always illegals around here. We just don't get that many Puerto Ricans around here (other than military who already speak English) but we do get a lot of illegals as we are right at the border.

A typical misconception of immigrants. In the UK this is rife. When in reality economic migrants who get benefits account for an extremely small minority of total immigration to the UK, and even then it's mostly only those who have a legal right to them (such as EEA applicants). The vast majority (whether illegal or legal) don't seek benefits and instead work, even if it's low paid jobs (I suspect it is similar in the US). That, in turn, means economic stimulation and what @Dinner doesn't understand as part of his xenophobic, racist narrative is that if you block them from coming in it's like a flicking a light switch. All of a sudden all is well. But what you're also doing is removing a majority that work and contribute to the economy for the sake of a minority who seek benefits. That means if you stop all those people then there is an economic impact. Nobody seems to grasp that when they talk about immigration simplistically.

Also, if this notion of easy access to welfare for illegal migrants in the US is true, then the answer isn't building a wall. It's reform of the welfare system so that only legal and/or naturalised migrants have access to welfare. That is, of course, assuming that's not always the case. Dinner's assumption that all claimant's in his friend's office must all be illegal is ignorant to the extreme and betrays his bigotry (and notice we're not even talking about Muslims now - once again rebbishing his claim earlier today that his hatred was just directed at Islam).

I think that even the staunchest Republican would tell you that they aren't against immigration so long as it's done in a legal manner. What they are against is people running across a land border and intentionally breaking the law from the get-go with little or no consequence. That's not the principles that American was founded on. That's not even the principles that Mexico was founded on. So, when the more obstinate call for a wall to be built, what they really want is a greater impediment to people who intentionally flout our laws in order to come here and sponge off the system. A wall would be something that they could point to as an example of something being done about the problem. As I said above, a wall would just be theater, but the drones love good theater.

Since you seem not to grasp the basic concept, yes.

The rest of your argument boils down to "it doesn't work perfectly so we shouldn't do it at all." What the wall (really a fence, as has been pointed out) actually represents is an aspect of "defense in depth," also known as a layered defense. When you want to discourage an activity, you can try one very strong measure or a series of overlapping moderate measures. Generally a series of overlapping measures will work better, as it reduces the opportunities for weak points. A single strong barrier is likely going to be brittle, but a few overlapping lesser barriers will reinforce each other.

Oh, and I should probably point out that Britain already has a "wall" to bar immigrants. It's called the English Channel. Britain does not share a long land border with any other country (I don't think you can really count Scotland as a source of large numbers of illegal immigrants). The US/Mexico border is almost 2000 miles long, largely undefended, and sees more people going across it each year than any other border in the world.