Up Against the Wall …:

Over at The New Republic, Peter Beinart has published an article about the stupidity of "the wall with Mexico" idea. There are, of course, already "walls" along the border, and Beinart points out some of the results. The walls haven't even slowed the flow of illegal immagrants, they've simply sent them through different routes:

As it happens, the United States has already experimented with border walls. In the 1990s, it built them in two of the places that were experiencing the most illegal immigration, San Diego and El Paso--and succeeded in diverting illegal immigrants into the countryside, particularly in Arizona, which is now seized by the same immigration panic that convulsed California a decade ago. The walls went up; the Immigration and Naturalization Service saw its budget triple between 1993 and 2002; the Border Patrol doubled in size. And, according to the best estimates, the number of people illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States remained roughly the same.

* * *

By sending illegal immigrants across deserts and over mountains, the United States made their journey much more brutal. Border-crossing deaths are up eightfold over the last decade; far more people now die trying to cross into the United States than died trying to traverse the Berlin Wall. To survive their arduous journey, illegal immigrants pay large sums to human smugglers--many of them connected to gangs that have used their newfound wealth to launch a crime wave, particularly around Phoenix.

* * *

[T]he border crackdown has also convinced many illegal immigrants to stay in the United States--for fear that, if they return to Mexico, they'll never make it back. Since the '90s, according to one study, the average illegal immigrant's stay in the United States has doubled. And, when illegal immigrants lay down roots, they place a greater burden on America's social service system. In Massey's words, that means "increased costs to society for schools, housing, and medical care. We've accomplished the very thing we set out to avoid."

The conservatives who are proposing the wall, naturally, have no desire to "correct the problem" of illegal immigration from Mexico. They are practicing simple demagoguery. Their base has a strong racist stream running through it, and they are paddling down it. They are simply exploiting the bigotry of willing fools.