Instead of a wall, imagine a force-field. Imagine a force-field that we could install at the southern border that would infallibly keep everyone out that we wanted kept out (and infallibly keep everyone in that we wanted kept in). Assuming that it's expensive, but not entirely prohibitively so--say, $50 billion, a little more than 1% of the annual federal budget--would you want that force-field? We wouldn't have to protect it with the military or a police presence, except at established legal crossings. We wouldn't have to worry about wild teens accidentally walking across the border on the hunt for Pokemon (http://goo.gl/2oqz36). We could just set it, forget it, and live forever without the threat of unauthorized border crossings.
I bring up the silly hypothetical to be as up-front as possible about my thoughts on a significantly less secure border wall, like the one Donald Trump and so many others want to build. I would not want the infallible force-field.
Easy for me to say! I don't live there, after all. I don't have to deal with the following:
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Ranchers will say they saw people with backpacks trekking across their property last week, last night, early this morning. Some will say they have grudging agreements of access with drug cartels, as long as trespassers stay far from their homes. Dogs bark, motion lights flicker, things go missing.
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That said, I think that it's antithetical to every founding principal of this nation to erect an impenetrable force-field around us. That lots of people think it's antithetical to the notion of *having a country* to not absolutely secure the border is not lost on me, but a nation of rational laws that are effectively and justly enforced would not fear lawbreakers, but simply prosecute them.
So it's not just that the wall won't work in any number of amusing ways as expressed by any number of amusing people (https://youtu.be/vU8dCYocuyI?t=13m17s), it's that it betrays the very idea of America, as understood by me, anyway. And all we have is the idea, and the ideals, to try to live up to, given how frequently and completely we have failed to do so at every point in our past, the rose-colored nonsense of "Making America Great Again" being an absurd fiction that attempts to gloss over those failures with the absurd lie that at some point in a hazily-remembered past we were, collectively, better off. I certainly don't recall any great, beautiful walls even in this mythical *Again*-land, either.
Let's say we build that wall after all, though. The ranchers and other folks discussed in this piece don't believe it would be effective in achieving its stated goal of securing the border, not because of backpacking aspiring fruit-pickers, but because of multi-billion-dollar illegal drug operations that have the resources and the incentive to overcome even really very beautiful and large walls.
To the teeny, tiny point that led me to write this blog, then--we should legalize all drugs, and commit to treating drug abusers not as criminals but as people who need help, one way or another. We should disincentivize the violent behavior of the cartels that make up the overwhelming majority of violence at and on either side of the border by doing everything in our power to close their marketplace.
Further, we should not, actually, tax the shit out of those drugs, as so many of the "legalize it" crowd insist, like some bizarre free teaspoon of somebody else's sugar. Moral hazard aside, drugs should not be a profit center for the government, if only because allowing politicians free reign to continually raise taxes on a universally derided "sinful" consumption item will only lead to a thriving black market for those very items, as taxes inevitably go up. (Report claims 60% of cigarettes sold in NY are smuggled http://goo.gl/WPVdAz.) Instead, drugs should be cheap, legal, and regulated for safety and consistency like milk or eggs or ground beef. And booze. And penis pills.
Unsurprisingly, I think we could solve a great deal of our other problems by legalizing drugs, including doing a great deal to ease the combative relationship between police forces and the people they are tasked with protecting and serving--but that's a blog for another day.
Anyway, we don't need a force-field, and we certainly don't need an inefficacious Great Wall. We need rational laws that don't purposefully criminalize everyday human behavior, which would at least allow for an enforcement arm that begins from a just place, and could proceed with the great and ongoing project of equal justice for all under the law.
