The Wall

When he ordered work to begin immediately on the wall between the United States and Mexico, Donald Trump set a lot of things in motion. But, unintentionally I think, he also created a mirror.

A lot of politics is like that. Take something - real or imagined or just proposed - and people look at it and see what they want to see, a reflection of something within themselves they project onto the thing in question.

To many liberals, the wall is a betrayal of everything written on the base of the Statue of Liberty. To many conservatives, it's a  badly needed line in the sand to show that our country really means what it says about immigration and Law and Order.

The politicians seem to have missed the point on this one. But, I think, the media seems to have missed it, too. And yet, it keeps coming up again and again, like dandelions in an otherwise beautiful suburban lawn.

So, let's do something really radical. Let's take a look at what a wall really is, and what starting work on it immediately really means.

It's not pretty. Or, it might be. No one knows just what it would look like, although President Trump has given some pretty glowing descriptions. I haven’t heard anything from the architects or engineers, so I’m holding off on an aesthetic judgment.

It's likely to be very solid and very expensive. President-elect Trump said it would be big, and beautiful, with wonderful doors in it, and that it would be 30 or 40 or 50 feet high.

But, to build something that big, you need to move heavy equipment all along the route of the proposed wall, equipment that you can’t just bring up a rutted dirt trail or up a sharp mountain incline. Not to mention shoring up some of those slopes where water runs down from the hills and creates erosion problems.

So, first, we have to build a one lane road the whole width of the proposed wall. Or a two lane road, since some equipment will be really wide, and trucks will have to pass each other sooner or later. And that won’t be big enough. Since you have to do work on both sides of the wall as you build it, you are now building a four-lane highway the whole length of the border between the United States and Mexico.  That’s a whole new interstate that almost no one will ever drive on.

Then there’s the annoying question of just where to put it.You can’t build it until you survey it - you know the guys on the side of any road project who stand behind a tripod waving at another worker holding a marker 50 or 60 feet away. And, their survey requires a complete plan.  A complete route for the wall. 

Which, at this point doesn’t exist. Yes, the border between the United States and Mexico is pretty well defined - let's say it's the Rio Grande in part - but you aren’t building the wall right on the bank of that river, or right across a whole lot of other obstacles unless you want to spend a lot more than the billion dollars or so that people are estimating to be the construction cost.

Another President, Teddy Roosevelt, used to go for a walk with members of the press corps following him. He would point somewhere and then just walk straight down the line, going over or under anything in his way. But, we build things on the flattest ground we can find, which means planning a whole route.

So, build the wall really means hire the architects and engineers and landscapers and surveyors to figure out just where it will go. But, that’s wrong too. There is another step that comes first.

You have to own the land that you are building the wall on. And, right now, we don’t. If you think it can be done, just try building a fence on your neighbor’s property. Not a 50-foot high one, just a little six-foot chain link fence to keep in your pet dog.

The government can acquire the land it needs by condemnation,  but they can’t start without knowing precisely what is being condemned. So, along with the engineers and architects, we have to hire a lot of lawyers. Funny how you always end up hiring lawyers. 

And remember that If the wall cuts a cattleman’s range or a farmer’s property, the property they can no longer get to must be paid for as well. You just can’t buy the 20 or 40 or 60-foot wide strip for the wall itself. Or, we will have to build a whole lot of doors in the wall so those landowners can drive cattle and tractors through.  And the farmers have to get the keys to the doors, or we have to hire more government workers with master keys to all those locks who are on call every sunrise.

Now for the big, beautiful design. If I put up a chain link fence around my house, there is no problem with wind or rain falling on it, and the posts can be anchored in some concrete a few feet below the surface of the ground.

But look at any of the sound barriers along interstate highways, and you can see they are pretty massive things. And they aren’t 50 feet high. No, for that kind of wall you need footings that go deep into the ground to support its weight and to deal with the wind.

That’s one reason the Great Wall of China is not just a fence, but something wide enough to stand up to wind pressure and, by the way, wide enough to have a small road on the top of it.

All of this could change, of course, if we don’t build a traditional wall but a real high-tech one with drones and sensors and real people on patrol, or with new materials that are super strong and which will have enough holes to let water and the wind get through. But, that isn’t happening if you start work on it in 100 days. And, now that we have a two-lane road on both sides of the wall, any gaps will pose a real big problem.

So, as I see it, about the only thing that will be happening during the first few years of the “start work immediately” order is that we will be building a great wall of paperwork - actually a lot of it will be on computer hard drives, but agencies still require printed copies of things - and hiring a lot of lawyers.

Funny how you always need lawyers.