The folly of Trump’s “big beautiful wall”

developer by trade, said the Chicago Tribune, but his “most creative talent is the construction and sale of myths”. And they don’t come bigger than his pledge to build a “big beautiful wall” between America and Mexico – and make Mexico pay for it. This promise was a centrepiece of his campaign,
and he has stuck to it, causing a “diplomatic dust-up” with America’s southern neighbour. By long-standing tradition, incoming US presidents meet their Mexican counterparts soon after assuming office. But a scheduled meeting last week between Trump and Enrique Peña Nieto was called off after Trump tweeted that if the Mexican president wasn’t ready to commit to pay for the wall, he might as well not come. Nieto promptly cancelled.

Hours later, the White House floated the idea of imposing a 20% tax on imports from Mexico to pay for the wall. This is an absurd bit of posturing by Trump, said Juliette Kayyem on CNN.com. “There already is a wall – 700 miles of it – along the roughly 1,900-mile US-Mexico border.” The rest is policed by border control agents, drones and surveillance technology. Creating a continuous ocean-to-gulf wall simply isn’t practical. You can’t build a wall through the Rio Grande, for instance, and would it really be worth erecting a 10ft barrier on top of a 10,000ft mountain? There are also legal
hurdles: much of the land is tribal territory, or privately owned.

The wall plan doesn’t make sense, agreed Mona Charen in National Review. Illegal crossings have actually been falling for a decade, and more Mexicans are heading south over the border today than north. Trump’s insistence that Mexico pay for a wall may play well with his supporters, and satisfy his “penchant for humiliating others”, but it’s storing up trouble. It has caused fury in Mexico, already under stress due to falling oil prices, a faltering economy and corruption. Mexico is not going to pay “for that wall”, fumed former president Vicente Fox in a tweet last week. If relations remain this bad, it will increase the odds of next year’s Mexican presidential election being won by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist rabble-rouser in the mould of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. “Good fences may make good neighbours. But this wall, and particularly the way Trump has rubbed Mexicans’ noses in it, may turn a good neighbour bad fast.”