Do We Really Need a Border Wall?

The US-Mexico border is the most militarized border in the world and it comes at an immense cost: each year American taxpayers spend over 4.8 billion dollars on Border Patrol and another 8.4 billion on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Is this southern border really worth all of the taxes we pour into it? Absolutely not. America’s fetishization of border security has never worked throughout history, and the pinnacle of its waste, Trump’s border wall, accomplishes nothing. Dr. Doug Massey explains. 

Citations:

1. Doug Massey, “Understanding America's Immigration ‘Crisis’,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, September 2007. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4599074?seq=1
2. Doug Massey, “The Mexico-U.S. Border in the American Imagination,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, June 2016. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26159208?seq=1 
3. “The Cost of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security,” American Immigration Council, July 2020. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security 
4. “U.S. Border Patrol Southwest Border Sectors Total Illegal Apprehensions by Fiscal Year,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, FY 1960–FY 2018. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2019-Mar/bp-southwest-border-sector-apps-fy1960-fy2018.pdf 
5. Jens Krogstad, Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn, “5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, June 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/ 
6. Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn, “Mexicans decline to less than half the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population for the first time,” Pew Research Center, June 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthorized-immigrant-population-2017/ 
7. Robert Warren, “US Undocumented Population Continued to Fall from 2016 to 2017, and Visa Overstays Significantly Exceeded Illegal Crossings for the Seventh Consecutive Year,” Center for Migration Studies, January 2019. https://cmsny.org/publications/essay-2017-undocumented-and-overstays/