Trump’s Wall
Trump’s wall is just the latest attempt to protect civilization from an imagined doomsday. The Chinese built their Great Wall. Hadrian had a wall constructed across England and Europe. The Communists built a wall separating East Germany from the rest of us.
South Vietnam was supposed to be the wall that prevented the Communists from taking over the world. The Anti-Ballistic Missile system (ABM) was going to protect America from an onslaught of Russian ICBMs. You can read about those things in history books.
Candidate Donald Trump loudly proclaimed that he would build a beautiful wall along our southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs (tinyurl.com/TheWall-Trump-Promised). He also said Mexico would pay for it. Anyone with any sense immediately realized that Mexico wasn’t going to pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out of our country. Illegal immigration into the United States is our problem. If we want a wall we will have to pay for it ourselves.
You have to dig a little deeper to find out that the proposed wall won’t help much. Most of the drugs entering this country come in through ports of entry rather than across our border with Mexico (tinyurl.com/US-bound-drug-flows). Many illegal immigrants come into this country legally – they have passports and visas. They just stay and make themselves at home after the permit expires. Closing our southern border will not keep people like that out.
Terrain is another big problem. Our border with Mexico runs for 2000 miles along the Rio Grande River, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, the Colorado River Delta and the Baja Peninsula. The terrain is often mountainous. Soil in some stretches is not suitable for construction. If the proposed wall is ever built, it will become a maintenance nightmare. It would always need another expensive repair.
A border fence begun in 2006 under President Bush was canceled in 2010 because of costs. Six hundred miles of fence and vehicle barriers had been constructed at $2.8 million per mile – about $1.68 billion. (tinyurl.com/Mexico-US-Border-SecureFenceAc)
There isn’t going to be an actual wall. The current concept looks more like a picket fence. The pickets will be steel instead of wood and they will be too tall to jump over but there will still be spaces between the slats. Putting up a picket fence will be easier and cheaper than building a wall. Maintenance costs will be more reasonable. And it will probably be just as effective as an overpriced wall.
It is possible that Trump will be willing to settle for concertina wire by the end of next year. (tinyurl.com/Concertina-wire-along-border)
Walls don’t seem to work. I can’t say anything about the Great Wall of China because I don’t know its history. Hadrian’s Wall seems to have been built to keep the Romans safe from the barbarians. The Berlin Wall was not entirely successful in keeping East Berliners imprisoned on their side of the border. And the success it did achieve came at a high price. The barrier was 15 feet tall and topped with barbed wire. It had watchtowers manned by armed guards with shoot to kill orders. Over 200 East German citizens were killed in their attempt to escape the brutal communist regime.
East Germany used 50,000 handpicked troops to guard the 100 miles of concrete walls, fencing and barbed wire. Thousands of these guards turned traitor and attempted to escape. About one-third succeeded. So the East Germans employed a secret service to keep tabs on the guards and their families.
The border to be protected by Trump’s Wall is 20 times as long as the border protected by the Berlin Wall. It is currently guarded by 20,000 agents. President Trump has requested an additional 15,000 but hiring them has proven difficult. The standards are high, the training difficult and most Americans don’t want to live and work in a remote wilderness area.
I was drafted at the start of my senior year of college in 1966. A year later, I joined more than a million other young American males serving in South Vietnam to hold the line against a Communist takeover. We did our best but we were fighting history (tinyurl.com/VietnamWar-timeline). The Japanese drove the French out of Vietnam (Indo-China) at the beginning of WWII. President Truman supported a French attempt to reestablish its colonial hold on the territory in 1948. Six years later, Ho Chi Minh and his followers defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.
The country was divided into North and South by the Geneva peace agreement. North Vietnam was led by the charismatic Ho Chi Minh. He was a communist. Ngo Dinh Diem, a provincial anti-communist leader, won control of South Vietnam. President Eisenhower established the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) to provide training and other assistance to the South Vietnamese army (ARVN).
Eisenhower had served as Supreme Allied Commander in WWII. He knew war, armies and leaders. He certainly recognized that Diem was not capable of ruling South Vietnam let alone defeating Ho Chi Minh and reuniting the country. Ike advised President-Elect John Kennedy in 1960 that more troops would be needed in South Vietnam. Kennedy increased the troop levels and tried several strategies like the Hamlet program to secure the country.
President Lyndon Johnson took over after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 23, 1963. He attempted to break Ho Chi Minh by a gradual build-up of pressure using bombing raids. The North Vietnamese and their allies in the south, the Viet Cong, mounted a counter-offensive. LBJ was forced to commit ground troops to defend South Vietnam
After five years of futile fighting, Johnson gave up. He dropped his bid for reelection in 1968. Richard Nixon won that election and took over. He scaled back the American commitment. A cease-fire was negotiated on January 28, 1973. Only a small contingent of American troops stationed near Saigon was left to support for the South Vietnamese government.
Fifteen months later, Saigon fell. Americans raced to evacuate the city as North Vietnamese troops charged in to take over.
The Wall had collapsed but nothing really happened. The Vietnamese got their country back. Ugly hostility gradually gave way to civility. Today, Vietnam is thriving.
Communism did not take over the world or even Southeast Asia. If anything, capitalism is sucking in all other competitors and digesting them.
The Berlin Wall was torn down in November 1989. Again there were no catastrophic consequences. The failed experiment in Communism had been abandoned. Germany was able to reunite its parts and heal.
Trump’s Wall is a political symbol. Building a wall or even a picket fence will slow the pace of intrusions from the south but it will not prevent them. More importantly, the proposed barrier will not solve the problems that cause the intrusions.
His wall will not keep out drugs. They come into this country because there is a market. Americans buy and use all kinds of drugs. We find ways to get our hands on them because we want them. Drug trafficking is driven by demand. No wall will address that problem.
Immigrants supplement our workforce. That is a benefit. Making immigration more difficult will make getting the workers needed for certain jobs more difficult. Other jobs will be filled by temporary workers with green cards or H-1B visas that give them a legal right to work in the United States. Many of these temporary workers are brought here to compete with American citizens and drive down wages. Trump’s wall will not address those issues.
Sometime down the road, in perhaps ten years or maybe fifty, that wall will be torn down because it is more trouble than it is worth. Nothing catastrophic will happen. Lives will change but not in big ways. Someday it might be as easy to travel to Acapulco or Machu Picchu as it is to travel from Boston to San Diego.
