Forum: Should Mexico Pay For The Wall? Will They?

Every week on Monday, the WoW! Staff, our community and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:Should Mexico Pay For The Wall? Will They?

 The Razor : The purpose of the wall is to keep out illegals, I get that. My county is full of them and everyone suffers including the illegals themselves (from crime, exploitation, poor living conditions).
In my view there’s nothing morally wrong for a country to secure it’s own border and requiring immigrants to wait their turn.

Mexico is a failed state we share a very long border with. I don’t see how making it pay for a wall is going to make it any less a failure. I’d rather see the Trump administration take a two pronged approach:
1. Build the wall with US government funds.
2. Work with Mexico NGOs and non-corrupt government agencies (if any are left) to help the state rebuild itself.

The worse Mexico becomes the worse it’s going to be with us. It’s in our own best interest for Mexico to clean itself up and the aid we provide now will be worth the lives of our own soldiers who will have to be sent 5-10 years down the road to clean the place up like Somalia except on a huge scale.


Stately McDaniel Manor: It really comes down to whether we’re wiling to have and enforce immigration laws for Americans. If not, there’s no sense in pretending.

A necessary prerequisite is this: is the new normal unrestrained illegal immigration--and illegal drug importation--fueled and aided by the Mexican government? And if so, is America’s response to be to abandon any pretense of the sovereignty Mexico zealously enforces? Is America to follow the Obama doctrine of token enforcement of a few immigration laws in an obvious, in-your-face attempt to import enough illegals beholden to the Democrat party to eventually build a permanent Democrat voting bloc? Are Democrat-controlled cities to be allowed to flaunt federal immigration law, ignoring the rule of law and substituting instead, social justice?

If so, no wall is necessary, nor is a Border Patrol large and effective enough to have any hope of controlling the borders.

As with so much in the realm of security, we would be wise indeed to listen to the Israelis and to follow their lead. A wall, by itself, is of little use and is a waste of money, but properly manned, patrolled, and supplemented with the proper electronics and air assets, can funnel illegal immigration from a wide open fire hose deluge, to a trickle. This is not a short term project, and the political will to maintain an America-first policy over the long term depends on improved national economics credibly linked, at least in part, to enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Otherwise, when the next Democrat takes over Washington, the wall will be abandoned and easily breached, literally and figuratively.

Necessary too is a far more serious relationship with Mexico, one that does not require America to pour billions into a corrupt state that sees advantage in encouraging its poor to flood America, passing off its social welfare problems on American taxpayers. Necessary too is the choking off of the avalanche of remittances--more than $20 billion a year--that keeps Mexico’s political corruption and stagnation afloat. Taxing that money stream for awhile could easily pay for a wall and force the Mexican government and its upper class to deal with the many problems it now avoids by taking advantage of America.

There is no right for anyone to breach American borders and illegally take up residence. States--nations--that encourage the wholesale violation of American law should be treated, if not as outright enemies, at least as hostile states, and treated accordingly. At present, many Mexicans that fled the poverty and class stratification of their native country maintain an emotional attachment to Mexico, which often grows stronger the longer they are absent. Enjoying the relative bounty even the poor experience in America, they forget the misery that impelled them to risk their lives fleeing to America, and refuse to assimilate, expressing instead Mexican nationalism, often aggressively. Americans, particularly working Americans that wish no one ill, are not generally amused by such behavior.

They are particularly not amused by racist organizations like La Raza--“The Race”--that demand much, asserting those illegally in America have rights that override the rights of the native-born, and asserting a sort of virtue possessed by the ungrateful, illegal by their very presence in a nation they did not ask permission to enter, and which they call racist and hateful. They are, of course, utterly unable or unwilling to understand the inherent hypocrisy and irony in their demands of and hatred toward the nation that makes a pleasant life possible for them, and expect all the rights of citizenship, but none of the responsibilities, such as living under the rule of law.

To be sure, no man or woman of conscience can fail to pity those that illegally come here and remain, abandoning a country that cynically and willingly refuses to make the political reforms necessary to allow them to make a living. Who can hate those struggling to provide for their families? Who can begrudge the honest and hard working a chance to find a little comfort and security for those they love?

But let’s keep our priorities straight. It is Mexico--and other nations--that owes these people the opportunities and political stability their presence here damages. They are not our responsibility, and if we are to be a nation of laws, they can’t be allowed to remain.

Either we have immigration laws that benefit America and Americans, and enforce them, or we end the corrupting pretense and throw open the borders. If it is to be the former, an effective wall, with all the supporting personnel and mechanisms it requires, is a necessary beginning. If not, well, I’d rather not think about that future.

JoshuaPundit:Ah, Mexico! Just the name gives me some wonderful memories. Sad how things have changed.

To answer the question directly, yes, Mexico should pay and yes, Mexico could be made to pay, simply because they encouraged and have profitted by illegal migration. A fairer solution would be 50-50, and I think that's how it will end up. Nieto is seriously unpopular, the peso is crashing, and the Mexican economy could not handle taxes on remittances from expatriates or tariffs on its exports to the U.S. The current contest in machismo ended properly,with both Trump and Nieto agreeing not to talk about wall payment in public anymore.They'll work a deal, in part because Mexico can benefit as well, at least to a degree. And because Nieto really has no choice. Lo siento, pobrecito. Así es como es..

The wall won't be 100% effective. No wall is. But it will significantly cut down the amount of drugs, human trafficking and illegal migration coming across the border, and that needs to happen because te lawlessness Mexicans have to live with every day is coming across the border, and that's not even mentioning the folks our Border Patrol agents refer to as OTM's - 'other than Mexicans.' Those people are coming over for entirely different reasons than jobs, and their guidebook is the Qur'an, not those easy to read comic books the Mexican government passes out by the truckload telling potential illegal migrants how to cross over easily.

The wall is a necessary evil. The United States, a wealthy First World nation finds itself with what amounts to a quasi-failed state with very little law and order just across the border, and the only way it will change is through the efforts of the Mexican people themselves. It won't happen at all if the U.S. continues to be an easy safety valve that allows the status quo to continue. The kind of change Mexico needs is going to be extremely difficult if it's even possible. But such changes only happen when things get to the point that the people themselves demand it and are willing to act. Until then, a certain level of quarantine is necessary.There are a number of other things America can do after the wall is built to help Mexico, but I will explore that in a separate article.


Don Surber: Mexico should pay for the wall, and if those costs are passed along to Americans who purchase Mexican products, so be it. Mexico has flooded the United States with cheap marijuana, cheap meth, and now cheap heroin -- as well as 5 million illegal aliens.

Foreign nations have played us for patsies. The promises of NAFTA go unfilled. Instead of reducing illegal migration from Mexico, it accelerated it.

As far as this weekend's Fake News about a Muslim ban, it strengthens support for Trump. I believe most Americans will be able to screen out the disinformation, see another weekend of freaks protesting and see that maybe Trump is not all that bad.


The Glittering Eye : Whoever pays for it, it's an ineffective policy but it's a campaign promise that formed the core of Donald Trump's campaign so he's obligated to follow through with it. If we really wanted to end illegal immigration from Mexico there's one way to do it: tough workplace enforcement.

There's no such thing as a non-porous border and the wall will only be as strong as its weakest border control agent.



Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason :While a lot of Americans supported and voted for President Trump because he promised to build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it, this issue was not why I supported him. I voted for him because he promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, he is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, and, well…#NeverHillary.

I’m not even sure building a wall is necessary. If the Trump Administration’s policies are going to prioritize enforcing existing laws and increase border patrol personnel, we will be doing a lot more than has been done the past few decades to curtail illegal immigration, human trafficking and the massive amount of drugs coming across our southern border. We should fund state of the art technology such as surveillance drones to watch the border and put more personnel at the heaviest trafficked areas. There may be areas where a fence or wall would be beneficial to stopping people and drugs from coming across the border and drones would help pinpoint such areas.

This should be done immediately and we should not wait for Mexico to pay for it as that might never happen. Mexico benefits too much from our porous border and really has no incentive to cooperate in this endeavor. This is a complex issue and whatever we do we need to be sure there are no negative unintended consequences as a result of our actions.



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