Not just the wall but do you agree with the government spending on border control at all? Do you think there should be less, the same, or more? Are there other methods of control that you think would be more effective?
The wall is an ineffective, expensive, wasteful way to do it but at the end of the day it is border control. Do you think we should be stopping people from crossing it?
The sort of wall imagined by the Tweeter-in-Chief could be an environmental problem. Environmental problem is a euphemism to explain that there are various species -- some endangered -- for which the southern border has no significance.
Back in 2003, I went backpacking with two friends in a little place called the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, bordering on the Organ Pipe National Monument, and bounded by El Camino Diablo -- the famed trail traversed by Father Kino in the southwest, following the border. We spent the night very close to the border. I was using a ZZ-Zip stove that burned pine cones and wood chips; it would make water boil in ten minutes. But that morning next, I had some trouble with it, and it was puffing clouds of black smoke until I got it heated up.
Within minutes, there was a border patrol helicopter circling our location. Apparently, we "appeared to be Americans," and the helicopter flew away, realizing there had been a false alarm. Somehow, I think someone saw the smoke.
Also interesting about that wildlife refuge: during the 19th century, there was a gold rush, and some 450 Mexican nationals were swarming all over that area. They all died of thirst. Then, there's the story about the water salesman. He had occupied a small cabin near a "tank" -- a depression in the rock where rain-water accumulates, and he thought to make a business selling "his" water. Two men shot him to death.
Between helicopters, sensor devices, cameras and other means, we don't need Emperor Tweet to build a "Great Wall." The bigger problem consists of businesses too unscrupulous to vet their low-wage employees. If "Sanctuary Cities" are defined as the problem, the issue there is one of jurisdiction.
I just think we have bigger problems to solve, and that the immigration "problem" can be resolved without a lot of fanfare. The bigger problems seem more attached to phenomena we cannot so easily see. Gripes about immigration seem to arise from the annoyance of finding a crowd of dark faces looking for work in the Home Depot parking lot -- work that no legal citizen much wants to do. It all seems to be about dark faces, anecdotal folklore morphed into propaganda about someone who was shot to death by an "illegal." One or two incidents make the news, and the notion of statistics goes out the window.
Then, there's the work-visa issue -- people coming to the US legally to do work in high demand, when local labor is in short supply. Any meth-freak in Western Pennsylvania should see that jobs at the steel-mill are a thing of the past. Why not take the hard road to fill the positions taken by these special green card workers? And why blame skilled immigrants? Or China? When somebody keeps inventing more robots to take the place of folks who do "heavy lifting."