Earlier this week President Trump told law enforcement officials that his proposed wall on the US-Mexican border “is getting designed right now.” Shortly afterwards Reuters reported that an internal US Department of Homeland Security document estimated the cost of constructing the wall at US$21.6 billion. The document seen by Reuters indicated that the project would start to receive Congressional funding within the next three months and would be completed, if everything went according to plan, within three-and-a-half-years.
Unlike the hasty executive order that introduced the recent travel ban, the border wall was a key part of the Trump campaign’s platform. It should be seen as one of his administration’s most significant initiatives. Earlier suggestions that the proposal was intended more as a political metaphor than a physical structure clearly misread the new President’s intentions. Neither domestic nor international resistance – Mexico has strenuously insisted that it will not pay for construction – seem to have diminished Trump’s determination to proceed. In fact, as candidate Trump often noted, the challenges associated with such a large infrastructure project could play to his perceived strengths as a property developer and allow him to establish a new benchmark for efficient government spending.
The current estimate for the wall is much higher than previous ones. Initially the Trump campaign suggested it would cost less than $5 billion. This quickly doubled and then tripled when political analysts started to calculate the likely numbers. Since 2016, the estimates have gone up by a further $6 billion. Bernstein Research, an investment research group that specializes in estimating material costs, places the likely price tag closer to $25 billion.
Maintenance costs will be similarly daunting. The US government already spends more than $270 million annually to maintain its existing 670 miles border fence with Mexico. The new structure would require nearly three times as much to maintain. Finally, as the British comedian John Oliver noted in a rant last year, America’s current border fence required the former secretary of homeland security to authorize a waiver for “36 laws … including the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.” The expanded fence will, inevitably, cause far greater disruptions.
It is hard for the public to make sense of such large numbers and complex schemes. Even before the wall became a serious prospect, Americans were wary of ambitious government spending, especially when it involved international assistance. In 2014, the Kaiser Foundation found that only one in twenty Americans could correctly guess that their government spends less than one per cent of its federal budget on foreign aid.
The projected costs of President Trump’s wall are nearly three quarters of the entire annual US budget for global aid. This money could underwrite seven years of US spending on HIV/AIDS relief, or three years of what the country spends worldwide on “peace and security” according to its official statistics. Within the US it could build more than 20 state of the art hospitals, or cover the cost of schooling two million children in public schools.
But even if the current estimates are accurate and the new administration can proceed with its plans there is the simpler question of whether it will work as a deterrent. A 2006 factsheet from the Pew Hispanic Center notes that between 38 and 50 per cent of America’s unauthorized migrants “entered the country legally through a port of entry such as an airport or a border crossing point where they were subject to inspection by immigration officials.” The wall will do nothing to deter such migrants. In fact, as critics have remarked there has been a net outflow to Mexico during the last few years. A wall will prevent this exodus and exacerbate the problem of unauthorized migration.
Dozens of other countries have constructed walls with similar purposes – among them Hungary, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. If their experience is any indication, President Trump’s wall will prove a colossal folly. Physical borders are not the answer to political crises, nor is the squandering of vast sums of public money on pointless infrastructure. Regrettably, the first weeks of the new US administration suggest that it is barely listening to constructive criticism and that it has more often mistaken public alarm and outrage as a sign that it needs to double down on its original errors.
