(01-27-2018 10:01 AM)bullet Wrote:  I'd like to see some discussion of the border wall and what the objections to it are.

Trump himself has said its not going to be 2,000 miles long, that other measures make more sense in mountainous or remote areas.

I've seen people wading or swimming across the Rio Grande and then climbing over or under chain link border fences within 100 yards of an official border bridge. In other places you can wade across or, in my case, we paid a guy a buck to row us across. The southern border is very porous and is used by drug smugglers and terrorists in addition to illegal aliens. Border barriers have existed virtually everywhere in the world but on the US/Canadian border.

What are the objections?

I'm neither for nor against.

There are places along the border where it is unlikely to ever be built either because the geography makes it impractical (which makes those places impractical crossing points) there are going to be environmental issues that will preclude it at some points, and then there are going to places where the politics of it all will be sticky because there are going to be people whose families have lived on that land for 100 or more years who are not going to willingly sell an easement to the Federal government and will fight for years in the courts to not lose the land on the wrong side of the fence and not want to lose the land for the fence and deal with easements to the government to drive across their land for upkeep and monitoring.

As a practical matter it won't stop much because that's not the bulk of your illegal entry.

It will shift more entry to container ships and trucks meaning it becomes much more of an organized crime business than it currently is.

But it holds symbolic value and if the bulk of the nation is willing to pay for that symbolism, I really don't care.