Hector Avalos

Iowa View contributor

In his guest column this month, Todd Blodgett asserts: “It's time to listen to those who are actually on the border.”

I am a Mexican immigrant. I was born and lived in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. I went to my first two years of school there. My parents bought a home on the American side. I go back occasionally.

Blodgett quotes Raul Ortiz, the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol for the Rio Grande Valley sector: “Come walk in my shoes.” That hardly counts as compelling evidence for “the wall.”

Indeed, Blodgett never defines “the wall” because President Donald Trump does not have a stable definition in the first place.

On June 15, 2015, Trump said: “I will build a great wall ― and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me ― and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

On Aug. 11, 2016, he told a crowd that the wall would be made of “concrete plank ... Precast. Precast, right? Boom. Bing. Done. Keep going.”

Today, the wall could be “artistically designed steel slats” according to Trump’s tweet from Dec. 18, 2018.

Would “artistically designed steel slats” stop illegal drugs? Some calculate that the gaps between the slats are about nine inches. One could pump a lot of drugs through such gaps. Furthermore, most drugs come through legal ports of entry.

The trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, is taking place in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

According to The New York Times, one witness said “cartel operatives first created front companies that appeared to be selling legal items like cooking oil. After shipping a few real loads of oil from Mexico to various American cities to make it seem as if the company was legitimate, Mr. Guzmán’s workers then packed cocaine into secret compartments in the tankers and sent them over the border.”

Did Ortiz explain how “artistically designed steel slats” would stop those incursions?

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, the number of people “apprehended or turned away” in 2016, during the administration of Barack Obama, was about half a million.

By 2017, those numbers were far less than the approximately 1.2 million apprehended or turned away in 2005. So, there is a decreasing “crisis” of immigrants pouring over our borders.

Perhaps Mr. Blodgett should also heed the report on terrorism released by Trump’s own Department of State in 2017 for the year 2016: “There are no known international terrorist organizations operating in Mexico, no evidence that any terrorist group has targeted U.S. citizens in Mexican territory, and no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”

Based on numbers provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, one estimate had five people on the suspected terrorist watchlist stopped between ports of entry in the first half of fiscal year 2018. At least twice as many were stopped at the Canadian border in a comparable period.

Canada has many more miles of open border (5,525 miles) than Mexico (1,954 miles). But I don’t hear Mr. Blodgett calling for a border wall with Canada.

We don’t possess enough precise data to calculate the cost and benefit of undocumented immigrants. Blodgett cites one estimate from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) “that illegal immigrants cost taxpayers $116 billion annually.”

Trump’s own tweet from Dec. 18, 2018 says: “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year.”

Blodgett also does not explain how lower prices for food and services generated by cheap and exploited labor factor into the cost of the wall for Americans.

Trump’s initial boast that Mexico would pay for the wall is not heard much anymore.

Right now, the ones paying the price are unpaid Americans, many of whom are tasked with ensuring our security on land, air and sea.

Hector Avalos is professor of religious studies and a former director of the U.S. Latino/a Studies Program at Iowa State University.



