Border securityU.S.-Mexico border wall design competition announced
Donald Trump has made the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border a centerpiece of his campaign – and a recent poll found that slightly over half of Americans support the idea. Such a wall will cost much more than the $8 billion Trumps quotes, with engineering experts estimate the cost to range between $15 billion and $42 billion, depending on configuration – not including maintenance. A group of architects and designers has announced the Building the Border Wall competition, the goal of which is “To bring creativity and innovation to bear on the idea of a border barrier, and in so doing, expand the boundaries and re-conceptualize the current debate beyond soundbites, statistics, and unrealistic monetary figures.” The competition organizers stress that they are politically neutral on the subject, neither for, nor against, building a border wall.
Donald Trump has repeatedly said that if elected president, he would build a wall along the border with Mexico with “one very big, very beautiful door” for those who want to enter the United States. This is not a novel idea. The Third Mind Foundation notes that rumblings about a border wall began in the Clinton administration and were concretized by George W. Bush in 2006, when he signed of the Secure Fence Act, which appropriated $1.2 billion to build 700 miles of double fencing. It also called for more checkpoints, vehicle, barriers, and advanced technology such as cameras, drones, and satellites.
By 2009, 670 miles of pedestrian fence had been erected at a cost of $2.4 billion. But efforts to revive the bill languished and, despite the patchwork of steel and concrete fences that now stands, approximately 500,000 people annually continue to enter the United States illegally.
In 2014, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that 5,990,369 undocumented Mexicans lived in this country. This is in spite of the presence of the U.S. Border Patrol, an agency established after the First World War and currently “the largest arms-bearing branch of the U.S. government save the military itself,” according to Harvard Magazine. Its 2016 budget of $13.56 billion includes about $1.4 billion to pay the over 21,370 agents that prowl the Mexican and Canadian borders.
The Third Mind Foundation notes that regardless of which poll one consults, there does appear to be some support for the idea of a border barrier. A recent Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 51 percent of all likely voters favored a wall, while 37 percent did not (12 percent were undecided). Among millennials, a Harvard University Institute of Politics survey found 43 percent in favor and 53 percent opposed. No matter what side of the political fence we find ourselves on, and whether or not Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States, the concept of a wall at the U.S. southern border is not likely to go away, in fact it already exists, as do over 20,000 border patrol agents.
The challenge
The Third Mind Foundation says that by any estimate, the current fencing along America’s southern border is ineffective at best, a dismal failure at worst. Along its span, it is made variously of sheets of corrugated metal, chain-link and other fencing, and concrete. For the most part, this patchwork is exceedingly ugly, covered
