Walling in America: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Vanity Project
The symbolism of a wall along the US-Mexico border would carry far greater power than the wall itself. Undocumented immigrants from Mexico are just one small piece of a much larger, nuanced conversation about immigration reform. Are thousands of Mexicans running across the US border in droves as President Trump would have many Americans believe? No. In fact, the rate of migration of Mexican citizens to the United States is actually declining. Most undocumented immigrants arrived in the United States is a less barbaric way than Trump describes: legally, through visas, which eventually expire. After this documentation loses validity, many migrants remain in the country. As this bureaucratic oversight continues, the growing shadow of Trump’s proposed wall seems to be the furthest suggestion from a viable solution.
A 2015 study originally appearing in the Journal on Migration and Human Security outlines two pathways through which individuals attain the status of “undocumented immigrant.” The first is classified as entries without inspection, or EWIs. This group is identified as “migrants who enter across the southern land border without legal documents” and is what most Americans conceptualize when they think of undocumented immigrants. The second term, overstays, “refers to foreign-born persons who enter the United States with nonimmigrant (temporary” visas and overstay their period of admission or otherwise violate the terms of their admission.” The same study also found that unauthorized immigration from Mexico decreased nearly 80% between 2000 and 2012 and that the undocumented population currently living in the United States fell by about half a million during this period.
Tuesday, January 25, 2017 Donald Trump issued two executive actions on immigration, providing insight into both his platform as well as the constitutional checks on presidential power that he is eager to overstep. Executive Order: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements is a chilling reminder of the inflammatory rhetoric that decorated Trump’s controversial candidacy in 2016. The document claims:
“The recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico has placed a significant strain on Federal resources and overwhelmed agencies charged with border security and immigration enforcement, as well as the local communities into which many of the aliens are placed.”
There are several claims within this justification that contradict statistical trends and Trump’s own actions. The aforementioned 2015 report, “Beyond DAPA and DACA: Revisiting Legislative Reform in Light of Long-Term Trends in Unauthorized Immigration to the United States,” found a decrease in the amount of undocumented immigrants that migrated to America from Mexico between the years of 2000 and 2012. The executive action further claims that this issue has placed a “significant strain on Federal resources,” while the estimated cost of building Trump’s wall would be a major infrastructure project that would cost American taxpayers billions. The project also calls into question who would build the wall considering the new administration’s recent implementation of a hiring freeze and the executive order’s language that “Contracting outside the Government to circumvent the intent of this memorandum shall not be permitted.”
In 2015 Donald Trump faced criticism on the campaign trail for racist claims against Mexican immigrants:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Though more eloquent and politically correct, the intent of this rhetoric is apparent in Trump’s executive action. In the document, the executive administration lumps Mexican migrants with “transnational criminal organizations” that are involved with both drug wars and human trafficking. After these nefarious statements, the order introduces a focus on policy and grants the Secretary of Homeland Security (John Kelly) the power to “allocate all sources of Federal funds for the planning, designing, and constructing of a physical wall along the southern border” despite Congress holding the “Power of the Purse” outlined in Article I of the US Constitution.
While the executive action about the proposed wall neglects the growing issue of undocumented immigrants who hold expired visas, Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States briefly a few unsubstantial ways to target this issue, including funding cuts to sanctuary cities. Curiously, Trump’s threats to systems of localized governments contradicts both the Republican tradition of preference of a small federal government in favor of maximizing state rights, as per the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
The two recent executive actions on immigration also raise the question: who is going to build and man this wall? In the Executive Orders the Trump administration advocates for the creation of 15,000 jobs: 5,000 border patrol agents and 10,000 new immigration officers. In a CNN interview, Trump proposes a vague reimbursement plan where American taxpayers would foot the initial cost of the wall, but will later be repaid by the Mexican government. The new President offers a reassuring response: “I’m telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form.” Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto has since responded that his country will, in fact, not foot the bill for Trump’s campaign promise.
In his 1998 ethnography, Shadowed Lives, anthropologist Leo Chavez observes that the US-Mexican border is “both a symbolic and physical separation” (49). Trump’s proposed wall would perhaps better emulate this thought--not only as a physical structure between two nations, but also as a metaphorical representation of the deteriorating relationship between Mexico and the United States. With these two Executive Orders, Trump is hastily working to fulfill a campaign promise that once united conservative crowds on the premise of nationalism, while actually building a movement founded on racism and intolerance. As much as reporters, pundits, and even your Facebook friends debate the probability of the wall actually being constructed, the political reality of the proposal is that it offers no real solution to the more pressing issue of expired visas. Trump’s border wall is nothing more than a vanity project. While the construction of a wall may temporarily satisfy the nationalist hunger for American supremacy, it does nothing to address the needs of Americans, our economy, or the undocumented population that already exists within the US.
