A Great Wall?

Politically, more fencing sounds good to an electorate that is rightfully frustrated by more than a decade of failed immigration policies. Republicans understood very well that any Democrat who voted against this measure would look soft on immigration in the November elections, so it was a clever political strategy. Bill Clinton used the same strategy to look tough on immigration back in the early 1990s, and ever since then the government has been ramping up border enforcement with little success in stopping undocumented immigration.

Indeed, the presence of over 11 million unauthorized residents in the United States is a significant indictment of our border-focused immigration-control efforts. Meanwhile, the government has essentially abandoned any real effort at immigration enforcement in the interior of the country, where the jobs are. Instead, the government has relied on self-reporting by employers, who have neither the capability nor the inclination to identify and report undocumented immigrants. So, in many ways, calling for fencing provides a political smoke screen for the government's inaction at home.

There is some debate now over whether there will actually be 700 miles of fence constructed. Rep. Duncan Hunter, who cosponsored the bill, insists there is a “mandate” from Congress to build the entire 700 miles and nothing less. Do you think this fence will ever be built at its complete length of 700 miles?

Earlier this year, Congress authorized 370 miles of additional fencing but then nixed the funds to pay for it. The same thing could easily happen again. The costs involved here are simply enormous, considering how disappointing the results have been. For the last four years, we've spent tens of billions of dollars annually on homeland security, while the flow of undocumented immigration has continued at very high levels. For the current initiative there is a provision of about $1.2 billion as part of a $21.3 billion border security package for hiring more border patrol officers and new high-tech gadgets. Depending on what estimates you read, the total cost of building the fence could be between $2.1 and $7 billion. It is a wonder why we don't cut out the bureaucrats and government contractors and simply pay migrants not to come here.

Do these types of fences decrease smuggling?

No, they actually increase smuggling. The harder you make it for undocumented immigrants to cross the border on their own accord, the more they have to rely on professional smugglers and organized criminals who can provide them with the false papers they need to enter the country. Essentially, as with drug trafficking, we've created a very profitable black market for migrant smugglers. As a result, there are fairly clear indications that we've moved from individual and "mom and pop" migrant smuggling operations to more sophisticated, costly and potentially dangerous organized-crime syndicates.