President Trump is invoking his emergency powers to build a wall.
First of all, a wall will not work. The people who bring in drugs and people will find other ways around the wall. They always have and always will.
Drugs come in through our open legal entrances – people can come in through tunnels, small planes (China already has landed some people in the U.S. that way) and also by submarine. Slate says it is possible to buy your own personal sub with prices ranging from as little as $600,000 for an entry-level, winged submersible submarine to as much as $80 million for a 5,000 square-foot submarine with a living and dining room.
El Chapo is worth at least $1 billion dollars. If human traffickers or drug traffickers pooled their money, they could easily purchase a submarine to transport human beings and drugs. Then what would we do? A wall will not fix that.
If they did not want to purchase a submarine, they could also transport people to Canada, where in the middle of the night people can just walk over the border.
I am as concerned as anyone about illegal drugs. The goal for the cartels is to make money; the goal for countries like China is to see the U.S. populace addicted. An addicted country can't innovate or even go to war, making it easy for China to take over as the world's leader.
This week, El Chapo Guzman was convicted on all counts. He will be sentenced at the end of June. That is a long time for him to escape from local custody before he will most likely be sentenced to the maximum-security federal prison in Colorado. As head of the Sinaola cartel, he still has a lot of influence and money.
Then there are those who come to the U.S. legally but overstay their visas. According to the website Immigration Impact, "there were more than 50.4 million nonimmigrant admissions into the United States by sea and air ports of entry in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016. DHS estimates that 1.47 percent of these individuals overstayed their visas, or around 739,000 people." That is a lot of people on whom the wall will have no effect. A wall cannot protect people staying over a legal visa.
The Chinese site Alibaba (similar to Amazon, although Amazon does not advertise this kind of equipment) has lots of tunneling equipment – all you need to do is go to the site and put in "tunneling equipment" and all kinds of equipment for purchase appears. With some expertise in tunneling and a few pay-offs at the border, it does not matter how high is the wall or what the wall is made of. Immigrants are going to get into this country.
President Trump has focused much of his political capital on building a wall and it is wrong-headed. Calling a national emergency has both sides of the legal aisle talking about what a national emergency means. The courts, perhaps even the Supreme Court, must decide if the president has a right to declare a national emergency over the issue of building a wall. Only time and the courts will decide if he has/had the right; but by the time he builds the wall, the cartels will have figured out a way to get drugs and people into the U.S. Then what?
It's no secret I believe in open borders. One reason is because borders are useless in this day and age. What we need to do is to monitor our postal service for drugs that are sent via the mail, as well as be more aggressive getting drugs off the streets. People are going to use drugs if they are available. If the people who testified at the El Chapo trial are correct, drugs (and people) will continue to come into the U.S. It is just too profitable for the cartels not to bring both people and drugs into the country.
It doesn't matter how much China protests that it does not want Americans addicted. It doesn't matter if President Trump meets one-on-one with President Xi of China. It is in the interest of China to addict Americans and make sure we are busy rounding up people at the border, while they bring drugs in through our postal service and legally though our borders.
Walls will never stop it.