Exorbitant cost is just one reason to oppose Trump’s wall

Monday, Aug. 28, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Anyone who’s cheering President Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the federal government if Congress doesn’t approve funding for his border wall would be well-served to read a new analysis of the wall by the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown.

Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at Brookings who traveled extensively in Mexico and U.S. border communities for her research, takes a brick-by-brick approach in dismantling the arguments in favor of the proposal, showing how it would likely cost far more than Trump’s estimate, would not stop the flow of drugs across the border, would hurt the U.S. economy, would cause an increase in crime north of the border and would harm the environment.

“In multiple and very significant ways that have not been acknowledged or understood it will ... affect communities all across the United States as well as Mexico,” and not for the better, Felbab-Brown wrote.

Other than that, it’s a terrific reason to spend tens of billions of dollars.

Sarcasm aside, Felbab-Brown’s analysis is a must-read for members of Congress, who shouldn’t approve so much as a dime for Trump’s lunatic idea. Instead, the money should be spent on beefing up existing electronic detection and monitoring systems, and building up the U.S. Border Patrol’s workforce, while the nation’s leaders work toward crafting better immigration policy.

As Felbab-Brown shows, a border wall is good for revving up Trump’s base but not much else. Her takeaways:

• Cost: Trump’s estimate of $12 billion is a low-ball. The Department of Homeland Security estimated the cost at $21.6 billion, and the actual price tag could be much higher because of the costs associated with acquiring land or resolving lawsuits that would inevitably arise if the government seized land through eminent domain.

“More than 90 such lawsuits in southern Texas alone are still open from the 2008 effort to build a fence there,” Felbab-Brown wrote. In addition, Trump’s suggestion that the wall could be funded by seizing “remittances” — money sent to Mexico from families in the U.S. — would only give struggling Mexican families more reason to immigrate illegally.

• Smuggling: Why would a wall buried 6 feet into the earth stop drug cartels from tunneling under it? Why would it stop drugs from being flown over in aircraft or drones? Why would it stop drugs from being shipped in?

• Crime: “The vast majority of violent crimes, including murders, are committed by native-born Americans,” Felbab-Brown wrote. “Multiple criminological studies show that foreign–born individuals commit much lower levels of crime than do the native-born. In California, for example, where there is a large immigrant population, including of undocumented migrants, U.S.-born men were incarcerated at a rate 2.5 times higher than foreign-born men.”

• The economy: The U.S. native-born population is declining and growing older, meaning immigrant labor is needed to fill the void as aging American workers retire and begin drawing Social Security. And except for “the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do,” there’s little evidence that immigrants are stealing Americans’ jobs and suppressing wages here.

• The environment: The wall would cut through environmentally sensitive areas, and building it could prompt Mexico to drop joint agreements on water sharing and flood management.

This is nothing to cheer. Rather, if Trump chooses to play chicken on the wall through his threat of a shutdown, he should be denounced.