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The media has kept national coverage of the border wall deceptively superficial. If we think about the border wall in limited terms, we will only see limited benefits. Some intentionally blind themselves to the benefits in order to downplay the need for border infrastructure. While a wall is a clear deterrent to illegal immigration, it will also protect and improve the lives of millions of Americans in less than obvious ways.

A towering border wall the scale of President Trump's proposal, spanning the entire southern border, is an enormous undertaking. The cost will also be immense, not only for construction and maintenance, but also affecting business transaction costs around the border. The question remains whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

Using the left's two-dimensional caricature, the project looks too expensive and ineffective. Media and Democrats cite huge cost estimates and derisively mention tunnels and ladders. The problem is that their costs are not contextualized with positive externalities, and they mischaracterize the wall's purpose by joking about ladders.

For reasons totally outside of national sovereignty, and truly unrelated to ethic or national identity, the border wall is a net benefit. In addition to the federal government taking a strong stance to reassert the rule of law, a southern border wall would save untold lives, reduce the flow of people and drugs, and protect private property.

1. A Border Wall Will Save Lives

Immigration is caused by pull factors. The relative prosperity of two nations will affect whether people stay or leave. It is clear why people want to come to the freest, most diverse, and most prosperous nation in history. In the United States, individuals are not bound by class systems, and opportunities of all kinds abound.

It is a crime to enter the United States without proper documentation. But as with any crime, the law itself is not the end of the story. An effective deterrent balances the repercussion of violating the law with the probability of getting caught.

With no border infrastructure, the detection rate for illegal crossings would be low. A wall would be a strong deterrent, because many would not be able to get through, and it would give Border Patrol personnel time to locate violators if they did overcome the wall.

By creating an effective deterrent, a border wall minimizes the pull factor of illegal immigration. A child or family is less likely to take a perilous journey just to end up staring up at a 30-foot wall or being turned around by security personnel.

Reversing the incentive for the dangerous attempt at illegal crossing is essential. Great numbers of vulnerable women, children, and families travel thousands of miles every year, through deserts, cartel territories, and the material deprivation of food and shelter for a chance to cross the southern border. As many as 80 percent are reportedly raped during their journey. Families pay smugglers great sums to bring them across Central America and Mexico to the United States. These smugglers may be careless about their customers' security, reducing them to the status of packages.

Many die or fall ill on the journey. These devastating outcomes don't happen if people did not attempt the journey in the first place, because they knew there was no chance of crossing the border. If we think only about U.S. citizens, we miss the broader picture. A border wall saves lives by discouraging dangerous migration before it starts.

Importantly, a wall can save lives another way. Those genuinely fleeing violence and oppression may have a valid claim for asylum. Under current law, even legitimate asylum seekers who illegally cross the border are prosecuted for a misdemeanor of illegal entry and temporarily separated from any children they may have during proceedings.

A wall would prevent these people from being able to enter illegally, sparing them the prosecution and separation, while funneling them to ports of entry and U.S. embassies in their home countries, where asylum claims are correctly processed. In this way, a wall works with our laws to promote safety for those who need asylum, while maintaining order.

2. Reduce Illegal Immigration, Smuggling, And Trafficking

Of course, many will be undeterred by a border wall and attempt the journey anyway. When they arrive, they will have to face the 30-foot barrier. If we were only concerned with illegal aliens entering the country and residing among us, the wall would not be fully effective. Tunnels have been documented beneath the border and ladders rise over it.

This is a critical topic about which the media does a disservice to its audience, because we are not only concerned with individual illegal aliens. This persistent rhetoric serves the narrative that the wall is motivated by xenophobia and racism. Instead, the motivation is reducing infiltration by cartels, gangs, drugs, and human trafficking.

Individuals can climb ladders, but it slows them down and limits what they can carry. Vehicles cannot breach the wall, so any truck loaded with weapons, drugs, sex slaves, or worse has to stop, and the smugglers have to climb ladders with only what they can carry. There are two clear benefits of the wall in this instance alone.

First, slowing down violators allows Border Patrol time to arrive at the scene and increases the chance of an apprehension, while limiting the cargo that can be illegally imported. Even if they manage to get past the border, violators will have fewer supplies and less dangerous material. They will also be on foot, giving Border Patrol the advantage in speed and timing.

Second, by preventing vehicles from driving over the border, the environment is spared. The southern border is vulnerable. Federal law protects around 20.7 million acres of land just inside the border as national parks and wilderness area. When smugglers and traffickers enter the country, they do not think about environmental protection. They drive all-terrain vehicles that tear up plant life, disturb drainage, and harm animals. They are also likely to litter and pollute as they go.

Writing off a wall because people can still cross it ignores how people are forced to interact with a barrier. Without considering vehicles and cargo, the media misses critical aspects of border activity. A border wall saves lives by reducing weaponry, drugs, and human trafficking, while protecting the environment from devastating impacts.

3. A Border Wall Will Protect Private Property

Not every aspect of a border wall has to do with immigration. By only addressing immigration and to some extent covering smuggling, the media misses one of the most critical aspects of a wall: Many communities are ravaged by theft and burglary.

It is only rational to construct a barrier between dangerous places and safe ones.

In some locations, enterprising criminals run across the border only to grab what they can, including vehicles, and retreat to Mexico. These individuals have no plans to immigrate or even smuggle things into the country. Repeat burglaries affect small towns and vulnerable residents. Texas sheriffs have also reported home burglaries by criminals heading back south.

While typical analysis struggles to conjure crime statistics for immigrants relative to the natural-born population years after entering the country, attention should be paid directly to illegal criminal activity happening instantly upon entry. The wall is useful in both directions for these cases. It severely limits criminal mobility into the United States, and means they have to carry their stolen loot over a ladder on their way back, preventing automotive theft.

One Mexican state bordering the United States is subject to the strictest travel warnings the State Department issues, due to criminal activity and violence. Two Mexican border cities were ranked among the top most dangerous in the world. It is only rational to construct a barrier between dangerous places and safe ones. The wall would reduce the spillover of violence, drugs, and burglary that plague so many along the border.

The Left has made its opposition to the border wall clear, not only through direct commentary, but by what they leave out. Clear benefits of a border wall are being ignored. If these voices prevail and border infrastructure is not adequately addressed, the cost will be human lives, environmental damage, and loss of personal property.

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3 Benefits Of A Border Wall That No One Is Talking About

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The media has kept national coverage of the border wall deceptively superficial. If we think about the border wall in limited terms, we will only see limited benefits. Some intentionally blind themselves to the benefits in order to downplay the need for border infrastructure.

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The United States-Mexico relationship is stronger than ever, and it reflects a mutual commitment to partnerships that benefit both countries, including efforts to improve border security.

"Our dialogue is as strong as ever with our operational partners (in Mexico)," U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told attendees of the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute and the Border Trade Alliance during its fifth annual Building a Competitive U.S.-Mexico Border conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C. The one-day gathering brought together several hundred people from government and private industry to talk about improving border management to strengthen the competitiveness of both the U.S. and Mexico.

CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan speaks
to attendees of the Wilson Center's Mexico
Institute and the Border Trade Alliance during
its fifth annual Building a Competitive
U.S.-Mexico Border conference Wednesday in
Washington, D.C.

One of the first points of that cooperation is the shared efforts by the U.S. and Mexico to stop the deadly scourge of opioids and methamphetamines flowing into the U.S.

"Most of those hard narcotics are coming in through our land border ports of entry," the commissioner said. "The profits from these sales are feeding the cycle, which all of you know well, the transnational criminal organizations that are so violent that are threatening our neighbors and Mexican citizens. We need to continue to do more in this area."

Commissioner McAleenan said the use of non-intrusive inspection technology - basically, big X-ray machines that can scan an entire semitrailer in a matter of just a few minutes as opposed to the hours it might take to search that same vehicle - is one way to search for dangerous contraband, such as illicit drugs, without slowing the wheels of legitimate commerce.

"We have multiple pilot [projects with this equipment] we are exploring this year that I'm very excited about," he said, pointing to the possibility of a "trusted truck" system that makes the process go even quicker. "That is an exciting and tremendous development."

Commissioner McAleenan said the U.S. and Mexico also want to stop surges in illegal immigration from Central America, including identifying ways to shore up Mexico's southern border.

"A secure and competitive border not only depends on our efforts to facilitate lawful trade and travel, it also depends on our shared efforts to address human smuggling," he said. Loopholes in current laws incentivize too many of the most vulnerable people in the region to work with some of the most violent criminal organizations to try to make a perilous journey, too many times for nothing. "Hundreds of migrants die each year on both sides of the border, including women and children, victims of both criminals and the elements. The costs are too high."

Commissioner McAleenan said a change in the laws to close these loopholes and cooperation with Mexico are keys to stopping human trafficking in North America. "We can solve these problems."

Mexico is the United States' third-largest trading partner in goods and services, with $616 billion in total, two-way commerce in 2017. Commissioner McAleenan pointed to three arrangements between the U.S. and Mexico he signed in March to improve bilateral cooperation in customs processing through trade, agriculture, and cargo inspections.

The first was a memorandum outlining the implementation of unified cargo processing, or UCP, programs, which benefits both countries. It mitigates the need for separate inspections, reducing wait times at the border. That, in turn, lowers costs for the producers, the trade community and consumers while increasing economic and national security for both countries. UCP streamlines the supply chain, cutting border wait times by as much as half, and generating 99 percent trade compliance rate for UCP participants. Users also report a significant reduction in transit inventory cost.

UCP was a pilot project last year, and now, under the March agreement, Commissioner McAleenan said it's been formalized. "Whether we're going north or south, are in the truck mode or the air environment, we can work together to partner to facilitate that cargo by doing that inspection together."

The second arrangement signed during the March visit to Mexico looks to ensure fair and competitive trade by enhancing information and intelligence sharing during coordinated enforcement operations. CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Mexican customs will be able to share information, best practices and expertise regarding issues dealing with illegal transshipments, falsified country of origin declarations, and evasion of anti-dumping and countervailing duties. The agreement also covers intellectual property rights and consumer safety laws and regulations.

The last memo signed was a letter of intent to address agricultural issues.

"Mexico is our No. 1 agriculture trading partner, so it's only natural to partner with Mexico's national health service, safety and agri-food agency," Commissioner McAleenan said. Under the 21st Century Border Management Initiative, CBP and the United States Department of Agriculture work with Mexico's federal agriculture department to exchange electronically health certificates for agriculture exports.

More agreements with CBP's Mexican counterparts look to enhance security and enforcement opportunities, facilitate trade, and improve border infrastructure. Commissioner McAleenan said the success of any effort with the U.S.'s neighbor to the south comes down to border security, done in a proactive way.

Commissioner McAleenan concluded by telling those gathered that the U.S. and Mexico enjoy a profound connection - so much more than a common border - with deep economic and cultural ties, as well as a shared commitment to democratic principles.

"I'm very excited about the potential for these efforts," he said.

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Building a competitive and secure border

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The United States-Mexico relationship is stronger than ever, and it reflects a mutual commitment to partnerships that benefit both countries, including efforts to improve border security. "Our dialogue is as strong as ever with our operational partners (in Mexico)," U.S.

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Social scientist Bent Flyvbjerg described the selection of government-funded infrastructure projects as " survival of the unfittest " because proponents of those projects systematically exaggerate the benefits and underestimate the costs. President Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico provides a striking example of this: A wall along the border with Mexico will likely cost about $59.8 billion to construct.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently sent a letter to Congress where it argued that $5.7 billion would pay for approximately 234 miles of a new physical steel barrier along the border. That new estimate comes to about $24.4 million per mile. This new OMB estimate is 41 percent more costly than the approximately $17.3 million per mile construction costs that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated just a few years ago, 2.7 times as expensive as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan estimated, and 5 times as expensive as Trump's lowest estimate.

Even worse, the $24.4 million per mile estimate does not include the large cost overruns for government construction projects. Applying a conservative 50 percent cost overrun estimate to building the border fence brings the total price tag to approximately $36.6 million per mile. Building a steel fence along the remaining 1,637 miles of Mexican border not covered by pedestrian fencing would cost approximately $59.8 billion, excluding any maintenance costs.

There are a few caveats about the above estimate.

First, the 50 percent cost overrun estimate is conservative. A small sample of large construction projects selected by my colleague Chris Edwards shows that cost overruns boost total project costs by an average of 3.3 fold. The cost of the border fence is thus very likely to be more than double what I estimate above.

Second, this estimate is for the steel bollard barrier and not a concrete wall. In other words, the currently proposed steel border fence is far cheaper than the concrete and steel wall originally proposed by President Trump. Making it out of concrete could more than double the price.

Third, our cost estimate does not include the low-ball $864,353 annual per mile cost of maintaining the current border fence - which is likely a lot less expensive than repairing the barrier that has been proposed by Trump.

Fourth, the OMB's cost estimate per wall is more in line with previous Trump administration requests than estimates made by organizations that are ideologically committed to building a wall regardless of the cost to taxpayers.

Since 2017, administration officials at the OMB have been relatively consistent in estimating that the government cost of building a border wall is around $24 million per mile. However, the incentives for and history of government agencies systematically underestimating the costs of government construction projects makes this the lowest possible estimate. If it is built for about $24.3 million per mile than it would be the first time that a large government construction project has come in at or below cost in a very long time.

The cost of the border wall keeps getting higher, the border wall keeps becoming less of a wall, and the administration keeps promising that it will cover less and less of the border. At this rate, President Trump might end his administration with less fencing than he began it.

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The Cost of the Border Wall Keeps Climbing and It's Becoming Less of a Wall

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If the proposed border wall is built for about the estimated $24.3 million per mile than it would be the first time that a large government construction project has come in at or below cost in a very long time.

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What the wall's price tag would be

The wall comes with many costs, some obvious though hard to estimate, some unforeseen. The most obvious is the large financial outlay required to build it, in whatever form it eventually takes. Although during the election campaign candidate Trump claimed that the wall would cost only $12 billion, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) internal report in February put the cost at $21.6 billion, but that may be a major underestimate.

The estimates vary so widely because of the lack of clarity about what the wall will actually consist of beyond the first meager Homeland Security specifications that it be either a solid concrete wall or a see-through structure, "physically imposing in height," ideally 30 feet high but no less than 18 feet, sunk at least six feet into the ground to prevent tunneling under it; that it should not be scalable with even sophisticated climbing aids; and that it should withstand prolonged attacks with impact tools, cutting tools, and torches. But that description doesn't begin to cover questions about the details of its physical structure. Then there are the legal fees required to seize land on which to build the wall. The Trump administration can use eminent domain to acquire the land but will still have to negotiate compensation and often face lawsuits. More than 90 such lawsuits in southern Texas alone are still open from the 2008 effort to build a fence there.

Mountainous terrain along the U.S.-Mexico border is an obstacle to building a wall. Depicted here: a stretch of border about 100 miles east of San Diego. Google Earth

The Trump administration cannot simply seize remittances to Mexico to pay for the wall; doing so may increase flows of undocumented workers to the United States. Remittances provide many Mexicans with amenities they could never afford otherwise. But for Mexicans living in poverty-some 46.2 percent in 2015 according to the Mexican social research agency CONEVAL-the remittances are a veritable lifeline which can represent as much as 80 percent of their income. These families count on that money for the basics of life-food, clothing, health care, and education for their children.

The remittances enable human and economic development throughout the country, and this in turn reduces the incentives for further migration to the United States - precisely what Trump is aiming to do.

I met the matron of one of those families in a lush but desperately poor mountain village in Guerrero. Rosa, a forceful woman who was initially suspicious, decided to confide in me. Her son had crossed into the United States eight years ago, she said. The remittances he sent allowed Rosa's grandchildren to get medical treatment at the nearest clinic, some thirty miles away. Like Rosa, many people in the village had male relatives working illegally in the United States in order to help their families make ends meet. Sierra de Atoyac may be paradise for a birdwatcher (which I am), but Guerrero is one of Mexico's poorest, most neglected, and crime and violence-ridden states. "Here you have few chances," Rosa explained to me. "If you're smart, like my son, you make it across the border to the U.S. If you're not so smart, you join the narcos. If you're stupid, but lucky, you join the [municipal] police. Otherwise, you're stuck here farming or logging and starving."

Construction cost estimates*

*The above figures show the upper estimate when a range was suggested. Costs do not include annual maintenance.

Any attempt to seize the remittances from such families would be devastating. Fluctuating between $20 billion and $25 billion annually during the past decade, remittances from the United States have amounted to about 3 percent of Mexico's GDP, representing the third-largest source of foreign revenue after oil and tourism. The remittances enable human and economic development throughout the country, and this in turn reduces the incentives for further migration to the United States-precisely what Trump is aiming to do.

Why the wall wouldn't stop smuggling

Why the DHS believes that a 30-foot tall wall cannot be scaled and a tunnel cannot be built deeper than six feet below ground is not clear.

Drug smugglers have been using tunnels to get drugs into the United States ever since Mexico's most famous drug trafficker, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán of the Sinaloa Cartel, pioneered the method in 1989. And the sophistication of these tunnels has only grown over time. In April 2016, U.S. law enforcement officials discovered a drug tunnel that ran more than half a mile from Tijuana to San Diego and was equipped with ventilation vents, rails, and electricity. It is the longest such tunnel to be found so far, but one of 13 of great length and technological expertise discovered since 2006. Altogether, between 1990 and 2016, 224 tunnels have been unearthed at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Other smuggling methods increasingly include the use of drones and catapults as well as joint drainage systems between border towns that have wide tunnels or tubes through which people can crawl and drugs can be pulled. But even if the land border were to become much more secure, that would only intensify the trend toward smuggling goods as well as people via boats that sail far to the north, where they land on the California coast.

224 The number of tunnels unearthed at the U.S.-Mexico border, 1990-2016

Another thing to consider is that a barrier in the form of a wall is increasingly irrelevant to the drug trade as it is now practiced because most of the drugs smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico no longer arrive on the backs of those who cross illegally. Instead, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, most of the smuggled marijuana as well as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines comes through the 52 legal ports of entry on the border. These ports have to process literally millions of people, cars, trucks, and trains every week. Traffickers hide their illicit cargo in secret, state-of-the art compartments designed for cars, or under legal goods in trailer trucks. And they have learned many techniques for fooling the border patrol. Mike, a grizzled U.S. border official whom I interviewed in El Paso in 2013, shrugged: "The narcos sometimes tip us off, letting us find a car full of drugs while they send six other cars elsewhere. Such write-offs are part of their business expense. Other times the tipoffs are false. We search cars and cars, snarl up the traffic for hours on, and find nothing."

Beyond the Sinaloa Cartel, 44 other significant criminal groups operate today in Mexico. The infighting within and among them has made Mexico one of the world's most violent countries. In 2016 alone this violence claimed between 21,000 and 23,000 lives. Between 2007 and 2017, a staggering 177,000 people were murdered in Mexico, a number that could actually be much higher, as many bodies are buried in mass graves that are hidden and never found. Those Mexican border cities that are principal entry points of drugs into the Unites States have been particularly badly affected by the violence.

Take Ciudad Juárez, for example. Directly across the border from peaceful El Paso. Ciudad Juárez was likely the world's most violent city when I was there in 2011 and it epitomizes what can happen during these drug wars. In 2011 the Sinaloa Cartel was battling the local Juárez Cartel, trying to take over the city's smuggling routes to the United States, and causing a veritable bloodbath. Walking around the contested colonías at the time was like touring a cemetery: Residents would point out places where people were killed the day before, three days before, five weeks ago.

Juan, a skinny 19-year-old whom I met there that year, told me that he was trying to get out of a local gang (the name of which he wouldn't reveal). He had started working for the gang as a halcone (a lookout) when he was 15, he said. But now as the drug war raged in the city and the local gangs were pulled into the infighting between the big cartels, his friends in the gang were being asked to do much more than he wanted to do-to kill. Without any training, they were given assault weapons. Having no shooting skills, they just sprayed bullets in the vicinity of their assigned targets, hoping that at least some of the people they killed would be the ones they were supposed to kill, because if they didn't succeed, they themselves might be murdered by those who had contracted them to do the job.

I met Juan through Valeria, whose NGO was trying to help gang members like Juan get on the straight and narrow. But it was tough going for her and her staff to make the case. As Juan had explained to me, a member who refused to do the bidding of the gangs could be killed for his failure to cooperate.

"And America does nothing to stop the weapons coming here!" Valeria exclaimed to me.

While President Trump accuses Mexico of exporting violent crime and drugs to the United States, many Mexican officials as well as people like Valeria, who are on the ground in the fight against the drug wars, complain of a tide of violence and corruption that flows in the opposite direction. Some 70 percent of the firearms seized in Mexico between 2009 and 2014 originated in the United States. Although amounting to over 73,000 guns, these seizures still likely represented only a fraction of the weapons smuggled from the United States. Moreover, billions of dollars per year are made in the illegal retail drug market in the United States and smuggled back to Mexico, where the cartels depend on this money for their basic operations. Sometimes, sophisticated money-laundering schemes, such as trade-based deals, are used; but large parts of the proceeds are smuggled as bulk cash hidden in secret compartments and among goods in the cars and trains daily crossing the border south to Mexico.

Some 70 percent of the firearms seized in Mexico between 2009 and 2014 originated in the United States.

And of course it is the U.S. demand for drugs that fuels Mexican drug smuggling in the first place. Take, for example, the current heroin epidemic in the United States. It originated in the over-prescription of medical opiates to treat pain. The subsequent efforts to reduce the over-prescription of painkillers led those Americans who became dependent on them to resort to illegal heroin. That in turn stimulated a vast expansion of poppy cultivation in Mexico, particularly in Guerrero. In 2015, Mexico's opium poppy cultivation reached perhaps 28,000 hectares, enough to distill about 70 tons of heroin (which is even more than the 24-50 tons estimated to be necessary to meet the U.S. demand).

Heroin brand name stamps. DEA

Mexico's large drug cartels, including El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel, which is estimated to supply between 40 and 60 percent of the cocaine and heroin sold on the streets in the United States, are the dominant wholesale suppliers of illegal drugs in the United States. For the retail trade, however, they usually recruit business partners among U.S. crime gangs. And thanks to the deterrence capacity of U.S. law enforcement, insofar as Mexican drug-trafficking groups do have in-country operations in the U.S., such as in wholesale supply, they have behaved strikingly peacefully and have not resorted to the vicious aggression and infighting that characterizes their business in Mexico. So the U.S. has been spared the drug-traffic-related explosions of violence that have ravaged so many of the drug-producing or smuggling areas of Mexico.

Both the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration recognized the joint responsibility for drug trafficking between the United States and Mexico, an attitude that allowed for unprecedented collaborative efforts to fight crime and secure borders. This collaboration allowed U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agents to operate in Mexico and help their Mexican counterparts in intelligence development, training, vetting, establishment of police procedures and protocols, and interdiction operations. The collaboration also led to Mexico being far more willing than it ever had been before to patrol both its northern border with the United States and its southern border with Central America, as part of the effort to help apprehend undocumented workers trying to cross into the United States.

The Trump administration's hostility to Mexico could jeopardize this progress. In retaliation for building the wall, for any efforts the U.S. might make to force Mexico to pay for the wall, or for the collapse of NAFTA, the Mexican government could, for example, give up on its efforts to secure its southern border or stop sharing counterterrorism intelligence with the United States. Yet Mexico's cooperation is far more important for U.S. security than any wall.

How the wall would hurt the U.S. economy

If immigrants are not responsible for any significant amount of crime in the United States and in fact are considerably less likely than native-born citizens to commit crime, then what about the other justification for President Trump's vilification of immigrants, legal and illegal, and his determination to wall them out: Do immigrants steal U.S. jobs and suppress U.S. wages?

Life of a typical migrant farm worker

Profile 75% born in Mexico
53% undocumented

Schedule 14 hours a day
6 days a week

Pay $11k per year
No overtime pay
No benefits

RisksHeat stress, infections, poison, respiratory illness

There is little evidence to support such claims. According to a comprehensive National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine analysis, immigration does not significantly impact the overall employment levels of most native-born workers. The impact of immigrant labor on the wages of native-born workers is also low. Immigrant labor does have some negative effects on the employment and wages of native-born high school dropouts, however, and also on prior immigrants, because all three groups compete for low-skilled jobs and the newest immigrants are often willing to work for less than their competition. To a large extent, however, undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do. Sectors with large numbers of undocumented workers include agriculture, construction, manufacturing, hospitality services, and seafood processing. The fish-cutting industry, for example, is unable to recruit a sufficient number of legal workers and therefore is overwhelmingly dependent on an undocumented workforce. Skinning, deboning, and cutting fish is a smelly, slimy, grimy, chilly, monotonous, and exacting job. Many workers rapidly develop carpal tunnel syndrome. It can be a dangerous job, with machinery for cutting off fish heads and deboning knives everywhere frequently leading to amputated fingers. The risk of infections from cuts and the bloody water used to wash fish is also substantial. Over the past ten years, multiple exposés have revealed that both in the United States and abroad, workers in the fishing and seafood processing industries, often undocumented in other countries also, are subjected to forced labor conditions, and sometimes treated like slaves.

While paying more than jobs she could obtain in Honduras, the fish cutting job was hard for 38-year-old Marta Escoto, profiled by Robin Shulman in a 2007 article in The Washington Post. But she put up with it for the sake of her two young children, one of them a four-year-old daughter who couldn't walk and suffered from a gastrointestinal illness that prevented her from absorbing enough nutrition. Yet the fear of raids to which the Massachusetts fish-cutting industry was subjected a decade ago, in an earlier wave of anti-immigrant fervor, drove her to seek a job as a seamstress in a Massachusetts factory producing uniforms for U.S. soldiers. But misfortune struck there, too. Like the seafood processing plants, the New Bedford factory was raided by U.S. immigration officers; and although Marta had no criminal record, she was arrested and rapidly flown to a detention facility in Texas while her children were left alone in a day care center. Unlike many other immigrants swept up in those raids, Marta was ultimately lucky: She had a sister living in Massachusetts who could retrieve her children. And as a result of large political outcry in Massachusetts following those raids, with Senators John F. Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy strongly speaking out against them, Marta was released and could reunite with her two small children. But she remained without documents authorizing her to work and stay in the United States and would again be subject to deportation in the future.

Estimated undocumented immigrant population

by state, 2014

10,000 or less

25,000 - 95,000

100,000 - 130,000

180,000 - 450,000

500,000 - 2,350,000

Source: Pew Research Center

2016 U.S.-Mexico goods & services trade:$580bn

Immigrant workers are actually having a net positive effect on the economy. Because of a native-born population that is both declining in numbers and increasing in age, the U.S. needs its immigrant workers. The portion of foreign-born now accounts for about 16 percent of the labor force, with immigrants and their children accounting for the vast majority of current and future workforce growth in the United States, If the number of immigrants to the United States was reduced-by deportation or barriers to further immigration-so that foreign-born represented only about 10 percent of the population, the number of working-age Americans in the coming decades would remain essentially static at the current number of 175 million. If, however, the proportion of foreign-born remains at the current level, then the number of working-age residents in the U.S. will increase by about 30 million in the next 50 years. We need these workers not just to fill jobs but to increase productivity, which has diminished sharply. We also need them because the number of the elderly drawing expensive benefits like Medicare and Social Security-the costs of which are paid for by workers' taxes-is growing substantially. Nearly 44 million people aged 65 or older currently draw Social Security; in 2050 that number is estimated to rise to 86 million. Even undocumented workers support Social Security: Since at least 1.8 million were working with fake Social Security cards in 2010 in order to get employment but were mostly unable to draw the benefits, they contributed $13 billion that year into the retirement trust fund, and took out only $1 billion.

If immigrants are not stealing U.S. jobs and suppressing wages to any significant extent, is NAFTA doing so? Sal Moceri, a 61-year-old Ford worker in Michigan, fervently believes so. He has not lost his job himself, but he saw his co-workers and neighbors lose jobs and sees new workers accepting lower wages for which he would not settle. Although he calls himself a "lifelong Democrat," he voted for Trump in 2016 because of Trump's promise to renegotiate or end NAFTA. In a CNNMoney interview with Heather Long, he blamed NAFTA for the job losses and decreases in wages around him, disbelieving the claims of economists that automation, not NAFTA, is the source of the job losses in U.S. manufacturing. He loves automation and hates NAFTA.

But contrary to Trump's claim and Moceri's passionate belief, NAFTA has not siphoned off a large number of U.S. jobs. It did force some U.S. workers to find other kinds of work, but the net number of jobs that was lost is relatively small, with estimates varying between 116,400 and 851,700, out of 146,135,000 jobs in the U.S. economy. Countering these losses is the fact that the bilateral trade fostered by NAFTA has had far-reaching positive effects on the economy.

The trade agreement eliminated tariffs on half of the industrial goods exported to Mexico from the United States (tariffs which before NAFTA averaged 10 percent), and eliminated other Mexican protectionist measures as well, allowing, for example, the export of corn from the United States to Mexico.

NAFTA has enabled the development of joint production lines between the United States and Mexico and allows the U.S. to more cheaply import components used for manufacturing in the United States. Without this kind of co-operation, many jobs would be lost, including jobs provided by cars imported from Mexico. In 2016, for example, the United States imported 1.6 million cars from Mexico-but about 40 percent of the value of their components was produced in the United States. Leaving NAFTA could jeopardize 31,000 jobs in the automotive industry in the United States alone. But now that it is threatened with the collapse or renegotiation of NAFTA, Mexico has already begun actively exploring new trade partnerships with Europe and China.

The big picture: Mexico is the third largest U.S. trade partner after China and Canada, and the third-largest supplier of U.S. imports. Some 79 percent of Mexico's total exports in 2013 went to the United States. Yes, the United States had a $64.3 billion deficit with Mexico in 2016, but trade with Mexico is a two-way street. The United States exports more to Mexico than to any other country except Canada, its other NAFTA partner. Moreover, the half trillion dollars in goods and services traded between Mexico and the United States each year since NAFTA was enacted over 23 years ago has resulted in millions of jobs for workers in both countries. According to a Woodrow Wilson Center study, nearly five million U.S. jobs now depend on trade with Mexico.

Trade, investment, joint production, and travel across the U.S.-Mexico border remain a way of life for border communities, including those in the United States. Disrupting them will create substantial economic costs for both countries. And a significantly weakened Mexican economy will also exacerbate Mexico's severe criminal violence and encourage violence-driven immigration to the United States.

What the wall would do to communities and the environment

If erected, Trump's wall will not be the first significant barrier to be built on the border. That distinction goes to the 700-mile fence the U.S. began to put up-over protests from those on both sides of the border-some years ago.

These people include 26 federally-recognized Native American Nations in the U.S. and eight Indigenous Peoples in Mexico. The border on which the wall is to be built cuts through their tribal homelands and separates tribal members from their relatives and their sacred sites, while also sundering them from the natural environment which is crucial not just to their livelihoods but to their cultural and religious identity. In recognition of this problem, the U.S. Congress passed an act in 1983 allowing free travel across the borders within their homelands to one of the Native American Nations tribes. But when the fence was built, by waiving statutes like the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1994, Congress compromised that freedom of travel and made it hard for indigenous people to visit their family members and sacred sites.

Trump's wall will, of course, exacerbate the damage to these Native American communities, causing great pain and anger among the inhabitants. "If someone came into your house and built a wall in your living room, tell me, how would you feel about that?" asked Verlon Jose, vice chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation, in an interview by The New York Times ' Fernanda Santos in February 2017. Stretching out his arms to embrace the saguaro desert around him, he said, "This is our home." Many in his tribe want to resist the construction of the wall. Others fear that if the border barrier is weaker on the tribal land, drug smuggling will be funneled there as happened before with the fence, harming and ensnarling the community.

As Native American communities, conservation biologists, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all have highlighted, the wall will also have significant environmental costs in areas that host some of the greatest biodiversity in North America. Deriving its name from the isolated mountain ranges whose 10,000-foot peaks thrust into the skies, the "Sky Islands" region spanning southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and northwestern Mexico, for example, features a staggering array of flora and fauna. Its precious, but fragile, biodiversity is due to the unusual convergence of four major ecoregions: the southern terminus of the temperate Rocky Mountains; the eastern extent of the low-elevation Sonoran Desert; the northern edge of the subtropical Sierra Madre Occidental; and the western terminus of the higher-elevation Chihuahuan Desert. Among the endangered species that will be affected by the wall are the jaguar, Sonoran pronghorn, Chiricahua leopard frog, lesser long-nose bat, Cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, Mexican gray wolf, black-tailed prairie dog, jaguarondi, ocelot, and American bison. Other negatively-affected species will include desert tortoise, black bear, desert mule deer, and a variety of snakes. Even species that can fly, such as Rufous hummingbirds and Swainson and Gray hawks could be harmed, and vital insect pollinators that migrate across the border could be burnt up by the lights necessary to illuminate the wall.

Altogether, more than 100 species of animals that occur along the U.S.-Mexico border, in the Sky Islands area as well as in the Big Bend National Park in Texas and in the Rio Grande Valley, are endangered or threatened. But just as the DHS waived numerous cultural protection statutes to build the fence, it also overrode many crucial environmental laws-including the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, and the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Trump administration wants to bulldoze through any remaining environmental considerations.

The administration's approach threatens years of binational environmental border cooperation that has protected not only many wild species, but also agriculture on both sides of the border. Take the boll weevil, a beetle that flies between Mexico and the United States and devastates cotton crops. In the late 1890s, the boll weevil nearly wiped out the U.S. cotton industry. Since then, the United States and Mexico have spent decades trying to eradicate the pest and almost succeeded. But the wall may so sour U.S.-Mexico environmental and security cooperation that Mexico may simply give up on eradication efforts. This will cause little damage to those in Mexico, since there is little cotton cultivation along that part of the Mexican border, but it will result in significant damage to U.S. farmers.

A poisoned U.S.-Mexican relationship could also prevent the renegotiation of water sharing agreements that are critical to the environment as well as to water and food security, and to farming. For example, the 1970 Boundary Treaty between the United States and Mexico specifies that officials from both the U.S. and Mexico must agree if either side wants to build any structure that could affect the flow of the Rio Grande or its flood waters, water that is vital to livestock and agriculture along the border. The fence was built despite Mexico's objections to it, and because its steel slats become clogged with debris during the rainy season, it has caused floods affecting cities and previously protected areas on both sides of the border, resulting in millions of dollars in damages.

It wasn't just Mexico that didn't want that fence. U.S. farmers and businessmen along the Texas border in the Rio Grande valley opposed it, too, since it blocks their access to the river water and also augments the severity of floods. Now the wall is to be brought to flood plain areas in Texas where water issues precisely like these had prevented the construction of the fence before.

Meanwhile, manufacturing, agriculture, hydraulic fracking, energy production, and ecosystems on both sides of the border depend on equitable and effective water sharing from the Rio Grande and the Colorado River, with both sides vulnerable to water scarcities. Over the decades there have been many challenges to the joint agreements governing water usage, and both Mexico and the U.S. have at times considered themselves the aggrieved parties. But in general, U.S.-Mexico cooperation over both the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers has been exceptional by international standards and has been hugely beneficial to both partners to the various treaties. That kind of co-operation is now at risk.

U.S.-Mexico cooperation over both the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers has been exceptional by international standards and has been hugely beneficial to both partners

If in retaliation for the Trump administration's vitriolic, anti-Mexican language and policies, Mexico decided not live up to its side of the water bargain, U.S. farmers and others along the Rio Grande would be under severe threat of losing their livelihoods. One of them is Dale Murden in Monte Alto, who on his 20,000-acre farm cultivates sugarcane, grapefruit, cotton, citrus, and grain. Named in January 2017 the Citrus King of Texas, the former Texas Farm Bureau state director has dedicated his life to agriculture in southern Texas, relying on a Latino workforce. Yet he has memories of devastating water shortages in 2011 and 2013, when because of a severe drought Mexico could not send its allocation of the Rio Conches to the United States and 30 percent of his land became unproductive, with many crops dying. At that time he hoped that the U.S. State Department could persuade Mexico to release some water, even as Mexican farmers were also facing immense water shortages and devastation. U.S. diplomacy did work, no doubt helped by the rain that replenished Mexico's tributaries of the Rio Grande. Without the rain, Mexico would not have been able to pay back its accumulated water debt. But without collaborative U.S.-Mexico diplomacy and an atmosphere of a closer-than-ever U.S.-Mexico cooperation, Mexico still could have failed to deliver the water despite the rain. That positive spirit of cooperation also produced one of the world's most enlightened, environmentally-sensitive, and water-use-savvy version of a water treaty, the so-called Minute 319 of the 1944 Colorado River U.S.-Mexico water agreement. Unique in its recognition of the Colorado River delta as a water user, the update committed the United States to sending a so-called "pulse flow" to that ecosystem, thus helping to restore those unique wetlands. The United States also agreed to pay $18 million for water conservation in Mexico. In turn, Mexico delivered 124,000 acre-feet of Mexican water to Lake Mead. It was a win-win-win: for U.S. farmers, Mexican farmers, and ecosystems. But those were the good days of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, before the Trump administration. A new update to the treaty is under negotiation-once again a vital agreement and a lifeline for some 40 million people on both sides of the border that could fall prey to the Trump administration's approach to Mexico.

Yet this is a moment when maintaining cooperation is crucial because climate-change-increased evaporation rates, invasive plant infestation, and greater demands for water around the border and deep into U.S. and Mexican territories will only put further pressure on water use and increase the likelihood of severe scarcity.

Rather than a line of separation, the border should be conceived of as a membrane, connecting the tissues of communities on both sides, enabling mutually beneficial trade, manufacturing, ecosystem improvements, and security, while enhancing inter-cultural exchanges.

In 1971, When First Lady Pat Nixon attended the inauguration of Friendship Park-that tragic place that allows separated families only the most limited amount of contact-she said, "I hope there won't be a fence here too long." She supported two-way positive exchanges between the United States and Mexico, not barriers. In fact, for her visit, she had the fence in Friendship Park torn down. Unfortunately, it's still there, bigger, taller, and harder than when she visited, and with the wall about to get much worse yet.

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, organized crime, urban violence, and illicit economies. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Morocco, Somalia, and eastern Africa. Her books include The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (Hurst, 2017) and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings Institution Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in political science from MIT and her bachelor's from Harvard University.

References

Acknowledgements

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Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author.

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The Wall: The real costs of a barrier between the United States and Mexico

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The wall comes with many costs, some obvious though hard to estimate, some unforeseen. The most obvious is the large financial outlay required to build it, in whatever form it eventually takes.