With Republicans in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives all promising (to one degree or another) that border wall funding will be part of any deal to “save” President Obama’s Dreamers from deportation, it is encouraging to see that we now have a few early prototypes on display, showing us what the finished product might eventually look like.
The designs were revealed this week in San Diego – eight towering monuments to border security, some of which stand 30 feet tall. While there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will choose one of these designs for the wall, they do give us a glimpse of what might be in the border’s future.
“Our current infrastructure is well over two decades old,” U.S. Border Patrol agent Roy Villareal said Monday. “Is there need for improvement? Absolutely.”
Only some 600 miles of the 1,900 mile border is currently fenced, though some of the most targeted areas are protected with double and triple layers of fencing. Even so, Villareal told reporters that in the San Diego area, where we already have a second layer of 18-foot high fencing, illegal immigrants have breached the border nearly 2,000 times since 2014. That shows you just how important it is that we do something serious, historic, and permanent to keep our borders sovereign and secure. A few “upgrades” here and there aren’t going to cut it. And that’s not what the American public voted for in November.
Will we get the grand, big, beautiful border wall that Trump talked about on the campaign trail? Well, we’ll have to wait and find out. We’re not holding our breath, quite frankly. But even if Trump and the GOP can manage to do ONE FIFTH of what was imagined last year, it would be an astounding improvement on what we have now. It would show Mexico and the rest of Central America that the United States is dead serious about keeping undesirables out of the country. It would, at the very least, put a stop to a lot of the “professional” human smuggling that has made such a mess of things in that part of the world.
From Reuters:
Six contractors from across the country were selected to build the eight prototypes, all of which will be completed this week.
The builders paid attention to aesthetics in their bid to win lucrative contracts. One wall segment features deep-blue steel and another has a brick facade, standing in sharp contrast to the area’s existing border fence, a ramshackle structure of corrugated steel left over from the Vietnam War.
In late November, a private company, which border patrol officials declined to name, will begin a 30- to 60-day process of testing the wall prototypes to determine how easy they would be to climb over or dig beneath.
We don’t know how long it will be before we actually see some serious money budgeted for this project, but the mere fact that there are prototypes on the ground has to have every Democrat and illegal-immigrant activist in the country shaking in their loafers.
And let’s face it, that knowledge is its own reward.
