The Patriot Post® · Why a Physical Wall Won't Be Built on the Southern Border

By Robert Steven Ingebo

One of President Trump’s biggest campaign promises was to build a wall on the U.S. southern border.

In an attempt to reassure his base concerning his meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi about DACA, President Trump, on Sept. 14, doubled down on his vow to build a wall on the Mexican border and said there would be no citizenship or amnesty for the 800,000 Dreamers in the U.S.

“We have to have the wall. if we don’t have the wall we’re doing nothing,” the president said upon arrival in Florida to inspect damage from Hurricane Irma.

Despite his resolve, nine months into his presidency, there is still no plan for constructing the wall. Proposed wall prototypes, which White House officials had hoped to deploy this summer, are months behind schedule. One of the biggest reasons is that construction firms don’t want to become involved for fear of political retaliation.

Although the president’s promises to build a “big, beautiful wall” and crack down on illegal immigration helped him win the Republican nomination, support for his position among the broader electorate is thin.

A new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll finds that just 41 percent of Americans support the idea of building a wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico, while 56 percent oppose the idea. Seven in 10 Americans say it is unreasonable of Trump to threaten to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t fund construction of the wall.

Only 6 percent of those surveyed said they expect Mexico alone to pay for construction of the wall. Sixty percent said U.S. taxpayers would ultimately pay for it, while 31 percent said both the U.S. and Mexico would.

Democrats are saying that they will close down many government agencies in October unless President Donald Trump gives up his campaign promise to build the border wall, according to Politico.

Politico also said that in response to the Democrats’ threats, Trump deputies are offering to increase domestic spending. The White House is offering this deal to head off a government shutdown. The deal would lift spending caps on programs favored by Democrats in exchange for money for President Trump’s border wall, according to multiple sources.

These sources also said that Marc Short, the White House’s director of legislative affairs, met with leaders from both parties on the Senate Appropriations Committee during the week of Sept. 3 to sell the proposal. Short offered a watered-down version of the wall, saying that the border funding would be used for a “double fence,” stressing that the White House is insisting on a down payment for construction this fall.

If the Democrats block the spending plan, the government will shut down and many government agencies will have to send their employees home. National security agencies, social welfare programs and the big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare would keep running.

The U.S. border with Mexico is roughly 2,000 miles long from California to Texas, more than half of it along the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. Back in 2015, Senate leader Mitch McConnell estimated the cost to be, at most, $15 billion. Trump’s spending request for $1.6 billion in October would build roughly 62 miles of border wall. That will not satisfy the demands of his base even if his request is approved by Congress.

Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are hoping to block any wall construction. This would enable the northward flow of illegal immigrants to Democratic-run cities.

The Pew Research Center’s estimate of the unauthorized immigrant population in 2016 was 11.3 million. Illegal immigrants from Mexico make up at least 75 percent of that number in three states: New Mexico (91 percent), Idaho (87 percent) and Arizona (81 percent). In California, Mexicans make up 71 percent of the state’s illegal immigrant population. The majority of the other illegals crossing the border come from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and China.

Additionally, the federal government imports one million legal immigrants into the United States annually, just as four million Americans turn 18.

The federal government awards about 1.5 million temporary work permits to foreigners, grants temporary work visas to roughly 500,000 new contract workers, such as H-1B workers, and largely ignores the eight million employed illegal immigrants.

The reason for this is because the annual flood of foreign labor cuts salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. This increases profits for businesses of all sizes, including the big multinationals, and leads to ever-higher stock prices, which benefits the big Wall Street investment firms.

That is why most moderate and liberal Republicans, and nearly half of the party’s conservative members, support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, according to a poll released on Sept. 12 by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

Unfortunately, they either don’t understand the devastating effects these policies are having on the personal, national and economic security of the middle class, or they want to keep their cronies happy and keep the donation money flowing in to their re-election campaigns.

Hillary Clinton received more votes than any unsuccessful presidential candidate in U.S. history. In the 2016 election, she received 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump. Her popular vote tally was 65,844,954 (48.2 percent) to his 62,979,879 (46.1 percent). Back on Nov. 27, 2016, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College [304 to 227, which is considered a landslide], I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

That’s most likely to be true when you factor in how many of Hillary’s ballots were cast illegitimately. Although the actual figure is unknown, it can be reasonably deduced.

Just Facts, a New Jersey research organization and conservative/libertarian think tank, believes that millions of illegals vote in U.S. elections. Its analysis of 2008 data from a Harvard/You Gov survey indicates that 7.9 million non-citizens were illegally registered to vote, and up to 5.7 million voted.

This dilution of the people’s voice in elections is not a problem for Democrats because there’s a mutually beneficial relationship between progressives and illegals who vote. Current U.S. social welfare programs for illegals ― direct welfare and/or indirect free public school education ― allows them a better standard of living than the countries they’re immigrating from.

Some 53 percent of Democrats want illegal aliens to have the ability the vote, according to a new poll. That is the real reason Democratic Party leaders are calling for a borderless U.S. They know that millions of illegal immigrants will vote for their party because the illegals will directly benefit from the Democratic Party’s big entitlement and welfare programs.

The Democrats’ lust for power is so great that they constantly encourage and defend the unending influx of illegal immigrants. They place the rights of illegals over the personal and economic security of their own citizens because their policies promote unchecked migration and lax law enforcement.

This is also hurting the national security of our legal citizens because terrorists have promised to infiltrate the U.S. by coming across the border along with the other illegal immigrants.

Rep. Ron DeSantis found the terrorists have stayed true to their promise because members of other terrorist groups besides ISIS have already been caught trying to sneak across the border from Mexico. On March 23, 2016, he said, “Recent reports state that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has apprehended several members of known Islamist terrorist organizations crossing the southern border in recent years.”

Illegal immigration also drives up real estate prices, widens the wealth gap, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts children’s schools and colleges and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families.

The only logical reason for the Democratic Party’s betrayal of legal American citizens by allowing the illegals to reap the rewards of entitlement programs using taxpayer money, stifling the wages of American blue- and white-collar workers, jeopardizing U.S. legal citizens’ personal and national security and ruining the sovereignty of the U.S. by eliminating borders is the personal payoffs for the elite ruling class. Without borders, the Democratic leaders will have enough illegal voters to keep liberals in office perpetually.

The Washington insiders don’t experience the general chaos of street violence in Democrat-run sanctuary cities. They obviously don’t care about exploding deficit spending because they never mention the high cost to the U.S. taxpayer of their social welfare programs, drawing individuals like a magnet from impoverished southern countries. They also need low-wage workers to do the menial jobs in their gated, palatial estates.

To summarize, neither Democrat nor Republican politicians have any reason to change the current immigration system. The Washington insiders don’t want a wall because it would slow their needed supply of illegals to keep wages down for their cronies and would hamper the Democrats’ ability to win future mayoral, congressional and presidential elections.

Both the Democrat and Republican politicians also realize that if President Trump fails to deliver the wall to his base, he will be a one-term president, and Washington, DC, will quickly return back to normal, to the benefit of our ruling elites.

Robert Steven Ingebo is president of FRI Corporation.