Everyone’s heard of the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China and many other examples of border walls. Now take that idea of a wall and imagine it in the United States. Imagine a huge wall stretching along the border of the United States and Mexico trying to prevent illegal immigrants entering the U.S. from Mexico. There has been a lot of argument over whether it would actually work or not. I think a border wall would not be effective in stopping illegal immigrants, because any wall could be penetrated, and it would be far to complicated to build.
My first claim is that it would be way too expensive to build. This idea has been explored before and even a little bit of wall was put up, but only for 653 miles out of the 2,000-mile border. The problem is that over 7 billion was spent to build that wall. Now think of the expense to put up the other 1,347 leftover miles. The costs could rise substantially if extensive new fencing was built, since it would be in increasingly remote regions without roads and in mountainous terrain. The wall would be very very expensive being on such a long stretch of land. With the country already in debt . That money could instead have been spent on better causes or helping us out of debt.
My second claim is that the wall would be far too complicated to build. The border between Mexico and the United States is very long. In fact it’s 2,000 miles long. While some of that are cities there are also bodies of water and very rough terrain that will make it hard to build over.
“Walls have lined national borders for thousands of years,” argues Don Melvin (CNN reporter). “The costs could rise substantially if extensive new fencing was built, since it would be in increasingly remote regions without roads and in mountainous terrain.”
The article “An Engineer Explains Why Trump’s Wall Is So Implausible” by Ali F. Rhuzkan of The National Memo states, “The hot, dry climate in the border regions would complicate cast-in-place construction because high heat tends to screw up the chemical reactions that cause concrete to harden.” Of course it might not be built with concrete but there is always the possibility.
Some would argue that there are multiple examples all over the world of border walls that have worked. While that is true that there were and are border walls, The Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China come to mind, it doesn’t mean those walls are right. These walls were built a long time ago and times have changed. Even if the walls are built justifiably, no wall is completely impassable. Presidential hopeful Donald Trump says building a U.S.-Mexico wall is ‘easy,’ but is it really? Jerry Markon of The Washington Post noted, “officials agreed that making it impenetrable would be virtually impossible.”
In conclusion, a border wall would not be effective in stopping illegal immigrants because it is too expensive and too complicated to build even though there are multiple examples of border walls from all over the world.