Expert Analysis Proves Trump Was Right About Border Wall: It Would Pay for Itself
There’s a whole list of reasons why leftists do not want a border wall.
Mind you, they’re all terrible reasons, given how important national border security is to a sovereign nation, but leftists still cling dearly to their opposition of a wall.
As most things leftists tend to believe, most of their reasons are based on things like feelings or youthful ignorance.
One big thing leftists have fixated on is the $5 billion price tag that has played a big role in the ongoing partial government shutdown. They feel as if that’s too hefty a price tag and a money sink.
You know what works great in the face of feelings? Facts.
And according to analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, the facts back up President Donald Trump. If you’re a leftist, you may want to avert your eyes. There are some cold, hard numbers headed straight your way.
“When asking whether a border wall can pay for itself, the key questions are the cost of each illegal immigrant, and the number of illegal crossers, vs. the cost of a wall,” CIS Director of Research Steven A. Camarota writes in his analysis.
“Making reasonable estimates of these factors allows us to calculate what share of future illegal border-crossers the wall would have to stop or deter from trying to enter in order for the wall to be cost-effective.”
Citing on a February 2017 CIS analysis that used methods of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) Camarota begins diving into the numbers — and they are jarring.
“(Based on the 2017 analysis) we estimate that each crosser creates a net cost of $74,722 (taxes paid minus costs) during his or her lifetime, excluding costs for their U.S.-born children. The figures from the NAS study are in 2012 dollars; converting them to 2018 dollars would raise them to $82,191. This estimate means that for every 100,000 illegal immigrants prevented from crossing illegally, it would save taxpayers $8.2 billion over the illegal immigrants’ lifetimes,” Camarota writes.
That figure, $8.2 billion, seems a lot more costly than $5 billion.
But surely, there can’t possible be 100,000 illegal immigrants crossing, right?
“(Border Patrol data) implies that the number of successful crossers in 2018 was between 173,731 and 203,476, which we round to 170,000 and 200,000 in this report for convenience,” Camarota adds.
Based on those numbers, that $5 billion wall would only have to stop about 3 to 4 percent of illegal immigrants in the next decade to pay for itself.
Those are some big numbers, however. So Camarota halved those figures to still prove his point.
“If we assume that the number of successful illegal crossings in the next decade without a wall will be half (850,000 to one million) the 2018 level, and we further assume that the cost of each illegal crosser is half ($41,096) of what we have estimated, then the wall would have to stop or deter 12 to 14 percent of expected crossers in the next decade rather than the 3 to 4 percent” to pay for itself, Camarota writes.
Again, even with the most conservative of figures, Trump’s border wall would only have to stop 12 to 14 percent of illegal immigrants to pay for itself. That’s approximately just 1 in every 8 illegal immigrants.
So, would a wall be able to stop that relatively small percentage?
Just last week, veteran Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told “Fox & Friends” that barriers installed in one area of the Border Patrol’s coverage had changed what had been “one of the busiest areas in the country” in terms of illegal alien crossings into an area that now accounts for only 4 percent of the illegal crossings the Border Patrol sees.
And that was just fencing and other technology. It’s a safe bet that an actual wall would have an even greater impact — and that might be the one, very real reason liberals are so opposed to the idea.
So that $5.6 billion price tag? It could double and it’d still have a very good chance of paying for itself before too many years have passed.
Trump was right about the border wall during his presidential campaign — it’s one of the reasons he won the election. And he’s right now.
Those are the cold, hard facts, whether leftists want to listen or not.
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