A lot of people are doing their cost/benefit analysis on the wall wrong. Here is what I generally hear. 1. Illegal immigrants cost this country $100B a year 2. The wall will cost $25B to build Therefore their business case is that the wall will pay for itself in 3 months. However, that math is flawed. The wall will not deport anyone. Ideally it would simply stop the flow of illegal immigrants between countries. So what is the flow of immigrants? It's actually negative. More Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than entering. This is presumably due to the positive effects of trade. More and more plants have been built in Northern Mexico, and that has made it more appealing to live in that area of Mexico, particularly for people who are from Mexico. So to recap, the Wall will not reduce the cost of people who have already immigrated to the U.S. Instead it will trap people within the country who want to leave. So we actually have to add the costs of taking care of them/deporting them to the net cost of the wall. In other words the wall will cost $25B plus the costs of all of the illegal immigrants it traps in. In order to reduce the $100B annual costs, you must physically remove the millions of illegal immigrants. The wall does not do that. So when it comes to the wall, the costs of the current illegal immigrants are irrelevant. Now, what will increase illegal immigration is a tariff.
I suppose that there's another issue here. The wall won't stop illegal immigration entirely, becuase people will go around it, over it or under it, or bribe their way past it.
I find it amusing that since Trump was elected, the "estimated" costs for this has gone from $8 billion to $25 billion, with all these "specialists" not even having any idea on how it is to be built or how many miles, etc. Just tossing numbers to try and impress the media.
