The Israelis would like a word with you. The main way to stop illegal migration is to catch the illegal immigrants (we're often doing this) and deport them immediately (we aren't doing this). From the studies I've seen, the wall has been moderately effective along the border at deterring crossings. It's not a fix on its own, just as hiring another 5000 border guards won't fix the issue. It's a matter of incrementally raising costs and decreasing the number of successful illegal migrants.

You can build a whatever you like and employ whoever you like. As long as the choice of a Central/South American is live in abject poverty and possibly be murdered, or take a chance at coming to the United States.

Nothing will change. What does Israel have to do with anything?

This post was edited by Prox1m1ty on Jan 22 2024 12:15pm

The parallel is not difficult follow. They have walls and they work. Many other countries have some form of walls and they work.

Walls are part of the solution but no alone they wouldn't solve this but it's a step that should be viewed as necessary step in a serious of subsequent steps. In 2024 we have a lot of technology that simply having walls and things like UAV's to direct agents to breaches or what ever would actually work. Large part of this includes things like deportation enforcement/sanctuary cities policies, etc.

Pretty sure he obviously recognizes the parallels of a wall being a wall. It's just absurd to compare a very small boarder to a 3,100KM one.

If you want to actually make a point you need to compare to one of similar size and show how they manage it. Not saying it cant be done, but Israel is not the comparison.

This post was edited by SBD on Jan 22 2024 12:35pm

The comparison is totally irrational. Israel has around 600miles of borders concentrated within 290 mile long and 80 mile wide strip, and one side is only water.
The southern US border is 1900 miles.
Its not practical, good value for money or even effective.

Like I said it can be part of a solution, but statements like build a bigger wall or hire more border guards is just a sticking plaster to a problem.
I actually think the US will need to take some form of kinetic action against the cartels, as crazy as that sounds.

Throwing 50 billion dollars at border defence might sound huge, and would definitely have an effect. But the cartels probably make that in a single year.

How do you fix the root causes without imperial control?

This logic only adds up as long as there's a decent chance for migrants to stay in the US once they've made it there. If there's no realistic chance at coming AND staying in the US, it doesn't matter how bad the conditions in their home country are.



Do you know who already made a similar proposal years ago? Trump.

It's not irrational, we are a country or 350 million vs 10 million in Israel. Walls, in concert with other things work. They obviously wouldn't prevent 100% of it but they would have an impact. The cartels are facilitators. As long as there's demand there will be facilitators to fill that demand and make money. The point of the wall is not to completely disrupt cartels but to significantly slow migrants crossings.

The real use of the wall is to have it be enough of a barrier that if people are trying to cut into it or pull up a latter, by the time that happens border guards would be notified and dispatched. In 2024 having drones equipped with some AI video processing features that can capture a 100 frames per second patrolling the length of this wall and having agents notified within minutes is really not that unrealistic.

I would agree. An actual deterrent is necessary. A wall is not a deterrent however, its merely an obstacle.





It is entirely an irrational comparison. You just can't argue a point in a vacuum where geography doesn't exist and expect to be taken seriously.

Some of what your saying I agree with. I genuinely believe building any sort of effective "wall" across 1900 miles of terrain including hundreds of miles of desert is an attempt at a one dimensional solution to a multi dimensional problem.
A wall might make you feel safer. But people are getting over a wall dude. Thousands of people have crossed the DMZ in Korea, the Berlin wall and since your so adamant on brining up Israel, you do realise not long ago a bunch of goons on mopeds got through the Israeli border.

Focus on the points you otherwise raised, ploughing money into a wall is laughable.

This post was edited by Prox1m1ty on Jan 22 2024 01:18pm

There was already a structurally similar debate within the CPSU (communist party of the soviet union) a century ago. Trotsky and Stalin squabbled back and forth about whether internationalism was a necessary tenet of communism (Trotsky's position) or if the concept of "communism within one country" would be a workable approach (Stalin's position). The idea was to acknowledge the reality that The Revolution had failed in Western Europe and that the USSR should act as the home base and launching pad for global communism. First, by consolidating and perfecting communism within its own borders, then within its own sphere of influence, later by spreading it to the rest of the world.

Similar concept in the present debate: acknowledge that we cannot possibly end poverty or achieve peace at a global scale anytime soon, therefore try to achieve peace and prosperity within our own borders, then our own sphere of influence, and then work on spreading the values, ideology and technology on which our system rests to more and more countries around the world.

Just like communism, Western capitalism and liberal democracy also struggle with the third step because there just are too many places in the world which want nothing to do with our values or system. Also, our way of living can't be exported to the whole world anyway since there are hard limits in terms of natural and ecological resources. We're already starting to feel the bite of these limits in the form of climate change/global warming.


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This whole topic is incredible extensive and deep, I could ramble on for hours if I had the time and motivation. For now, suffice to say that global peace will be impossible as long as there are sharp distributional conflicts, but distributional conflicts will not be rooted out unless humanity achieves a sufficient degree of economic justice and equality. The central problem, however, is that at the current technological state of humanity, and with current population levels, the "sustainable fair mean" in terms of living standard would be somewhere around Vietnam. That's roughly the living standard that every denizen of earth could expect in a world which is both sustainable and has global equity. Residents of the industrialized world will of course never accept such a steep decline in their personal living standard, so the only workable solution is to either accomplish dramatic technological breakthroughs or to drastically reduce the global population, perhaps to 2 billion people or so.

Issues like irregular/illegal/economically motivated migration to the Global North are just symptoms of this deeper, more structural problem. The contemporary debates about migration which are raging all across North America, Europe and Oceania are ultimately debates about a redistribution of wealth and living opportunities from the current residents of the Global North in favor of people from the Global South. Or, to look at the same issue from a different angle: debates about how the burden of an increasingly overpopulated and exhausted planet should be distributed between the global rich and the global poor.



In the context of this debate, Trump and other right-wing populists around the world are the ones who are honest and overtly say "us first, screw the other guys". Democrats and Western liberals are the ones who keep denying the scope and difficulty of the problem, basically arguing that "upholding our self-interest and our morals at the same time is still possible". Progressives and the political far-left are the ones overtly arguing in favor of stuff like "climate reparations" and "mass immigration as a human right, even if it means that we'll get poorer".

/rambling

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 22 2024 01:37pm