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A lot of talk about building a wall on our Southern border. I can clearly see that many that believe this, have never seen our Southern border. What I would like to tell my Northern Brethren is this: A wall was already attempted by George Bush Jr., it cost 2 million per mile, it only covers roughly 1/3 of our border with Mexico. We are still paying 50 million dollars a year for its upkeep, as building and maintaining walls are not cheap.
Flying welders and other construction workers and their tools, earth-moving equipment, temporary housing, food and water, the materials themselves all to remote regions far from roads or civilization is a very expensive undertaking and a logistical nightmare.
The first thing you do when you're working in rough country, unless it's extremely remote like certain mining properties in southwest Alaska, is build a road. Any mining company in the world with rough country experience could build a wide, stable road in short order.
It is not a logistical nightmare once you have a road.
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Anyone ever looked at a map of the state of Texas? Look at its jagged, meandering southern border. That is the Rio Grande river my friends. It is not a straight line. Water follows the path of least resistance, not the path that would be easiest to build a wall on. The wall would have to be built in a straight line for various reasons.
You're going to have to explain that one. Humans have known how to build walls with corners in them for a long time. Even with tricky non-90 degree corners!
Also, think outside the box a bit regarding the Rio Grande. We don't need to build the wall absolutely directly 100% on the border. For fuck's sake, who cares if there's 30 meters of open ground between the wall and the border in some spots? Build the wall in the best place, don't slavishly try to follow a wiggly border.
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I don't have a way of calculating, for it is impossible, all the private property that abuts the Rio Grande, that would have to be bought through eminent domain by the US taxpayer.
This alone would probably outstrip the cost of the actual wall itself.
Fine. This is a use of eminent domain that I actually agree with. Securing the nation is one of the damn few federal functions that they should have.
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Other parts of the border cross through uninhabitable terrain like deserts, and rocky mountanious regions. The wall that exists now can just be walked around as it starts and stops arbitrarily. Neither is it uniform, it has several different designs and dimensions and it is routinely gone over, under and through. Only by illegal immigrants and drugs though, not the species whos habitat previously existed on both sides.
How they fucked up in the past isn't evidence that we can't do it right this time.
I'm sick of hearing about how it's some enormous technical challenge to build a fucking wall, even if it is in rough country. It just tells me the people making the claim don't know anything about what Americans have already actually done in the past, let alone any ability to make firm statements about current American abilities.
Humans have been making road cuts and building structures in mountains since before the advent of gunpowder. With relatively safe blasting explosives available, it is not an enormous challenge to work in mountains. There are many roads through the various mountain ranges in the US. The transcontinental railroad, which crossed gorges and mountains all across the continent, was completed almost 150 years ago. The engineering of such things is well understood. I was learning about road cuts in my freshman year, for God's sake. We know how to do it.
If you can build a big-ass road, you can build a wall. Period. I'm sure in some places the geology is tricky, but if we can build a safe pipeline across the very geologically active state of Alaska or tunnels like the Channel Tunnel or the Seikan Tunnel I'm pretty sure we can figure this out.
As far as cost, the cost of building a proper wall on the southern border is honestly trivial compared to how we blow money in other areas. It will cost much less than a single year of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. It will cost much less than going back to the moon. It would cost less than building a square mile of the average city. The Second Avenue subway is running 2.7 billion dollars per mile. Need I go on?
Whether people think it's a good idea or not, you can go ahead and put to bed the idea that we can't do it or that it would even be particularly hard or expensive in relative terms.
I think the wall would be much more effective than some here think. They're just gonna tunnel under it, huh. Good thing we have things like seismic sensors! It would take serious tunneling in any case, if we sink a deep wall footing. And if they do, so what? What's better, having the entire border exposed, or a couple hundred yards combined of tunnels that concentrate movements so they're much easier to detect with UAVs?