The Baseless, Trite Arguments Against Walls

From The National Review:

Of all of the flatulent memes that have been running low on gas since the late 1960s, the most aggravating — against stiff competition — are probably all variations on “Build bridges, not walls.” The bridge I must cross most often in an average year is Westminster Bridge. Since a jihadist plowed a car along the pavements of one side of the Westminster Bridge (killing and wounding dozens of locals and tourists) a couple of years ago, it has been covered in walls. Specifically, it has been covered in metal crash barriers erected to stop replays of that incident. So as I find myself reminded on a weekly basis at least, when it comes to bridges and walls, the world does not have necessarily an either/or choice. Who could have guessed? 

Well, a lot of the president’s opponents by the sound of it. There are satisfactory arguments on both sides about the utility of building a wall along the southern border of the U.S. My personal view is that since the president was partly elected on the promise of building this wall, he should probably get a chance to build it and give at least some voters what they asked for. 

But it is not the practical but the moral objections to the president’s initiative that are so unutterably tired. For instance, one objection just made by Nancy Pelosi is that building a wall is “an immorality” and “not who we are as a nation.” Walls are also, according to Pelosi, an “old way of thinking.” 

In fact, in Europe — among many other places — walls are not an old way of thinking at all. In fact, they are a much newer way of thinking than anything Nancy Pelosi is offering. Since the European migrant crisis was at its height in 2015, countries across central and eastern Europe have begun erecting walls. I have gone to see a number of them, and very smart, modern fence-like things they are, with movement-detectors, drones to fly overhead, and more. When the Hungarian government erected their first wall (having had hundreds of thousands of people pour across their previously un-walled borders in a few months), they received some criticism from their neighbors. 

Only weeks later, these critics — including the government of Austria — started to hurriedly build walls of their own. One of my favorite memories of the period is a representative of the Austrian government being asked what made the wall that the Austrians were building so different from the one that they had criticized the Hungarians for building. The answer came after a pause: The Austrian wall was different because it was not a wall but rather “a door with sides.” To the extent that there was any short-term fix to that problem, the swift building of walls was about the best one, and it was provably effective. So while Pelosi’s views have been going stale, walls have gotten a new lease of life. (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

How does it “raise credibility questions” to say these true things? And how are these true things countered by saying, as Baker does, “The majority of heroin enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through open areas of the border”? Neither Trump nor Pelosi said that they did! In the minds of many groupthinking reporters, Trump only cares about a wall. But if they would actually read the proposal he sent to Congress on January 6, they could read that he seeks the following things in addition to 234 miles of physical barrier:

• 75 additional immigration judges and support staff to reduce the immigration backlog,
• 750 additional Border Patrol agents,
• 2,000 additional law enforcement personnel and support staff to address gang violence, smuggling, trafficking, and the spread of drugs,
• 52,000 detention beds,
• $800 million to address urgent humanitarian needs,
• $675 million for “Non-Intrusive Inspection (NII) technology at inbound lanes at U.S. Southwest Border Land Ports of Entry” to “allow CBP to deter and detect more contraband, including narcotics, weapons, and other materials that pose nuclear and radiological threats” statutory changes to permit in-country processing capacities for asylum processing
• “Fact” “checking” the president by saying that “actually” the drugs are coming through legal ports of entry when that is precisely what Trump’s counter-narcotics plan says is “raising credibility questions,” but not of the president. (Read more.) 

Are the Dems putting party before country? From Explain Life:

Democrats know that the wall is what will finally break them, and no amount of Democrat and Democrat Media Industrial Complex (DMIC) agitprop will ever tear down the wall. It will be the chasm between the old guard and the burgeoning of Leninism within the party. The wall is deserving of proper name capitalization. The Democrats know that The Wall will achieve its intent of deterring and preventing mass illegal immigration, which has resulted in an illegal alien population that the federal government has no true, accurate count of. 

The Wall will be the physical affirmation of our historic, theory of black swan, glass-ceiling shattering 2016 win over Empress Clinton. Tax reform and withdrawals from bogus deals with Iran and climate change globalist welfare treaties aren’t palpable; I can’t take a selfie in front of the 2018 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. United States Supreme Court justices are a bit more tangible, but the court isn’t omnipresent 24/7. 

The Wall, though? That proposed happy marriage of steel, spikes, and concrete? Oh, it will be glorious. I know that President Trump has described The Wall as “beautiful,” but we don’t care if it’s the ugly Christmas sweater of American architecture. (Read more.) 

Also from The National Review:

Everyone with the slightest familiarity with the issue as it has arisen has seen the Democrats go from semi-zealots of border security to vapid opportunists laser-focused on the simplest aspect of unpaid federal employees. The president reminded the country of the proportions of the illegal-immigration issue — of the humanitarian tragedy, of the drug crisis, and of the crimes of an appreciable number of the illegal immigrants. The tactical problem of the Democrats is that they are so cynical they think no one will notice that they have come down steadily from $1.3 billion for border security to zero, in their conviction that they can put the unpaid federal employees’ problems ahead of what is an immense national crisis. They evidently believe that the endlessly repeated mantra of “the wall” as immoral, like 19th-century elocution students learning to spell by repeating such triumphalist expressions of literacy as “W-A-L-L spells wall,” will distract the country from the real problem. 

Their proposition to “open the government” (by Trump’s total capitulation and we will go back to interminable fruitless negotiation about the real problem) won’t fly. It is indicative of the serene complacency of the Democrats that they expect their control of the national political media to remain so airtight that no appreciable share of the public will dissent from their strategy, which is to give lip service to “border security” while portraying the president as peddling, as one of their lesser spokesmen put it last week, “a medieval fifth-century solution for a 21st-century problem.” The fact that he missed the middle ages by several hundred years is a rounding error for the Democrats, as they point to the Washington Post’s claim that the president has uttered 7,600 lies since he was inaugurated. (Read more.) 

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