D Donald Trump has “carried himself in a big way”[3] throughout his presidential campaign and he has talked a big game. But in terms of big ideas, there’s only one that his presidential campaign is predicated upon, one that has separated him from his Republican counterparts: building a wall.

The Great Wall of Trump, as specified in the official 2016 GOP platform, would extend across the entirety of the United States’s southern border, such that it is “sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.” What that means has continuously shifted; the wall’s size seems to depend most on Trump’s mood on a given day. Trump, for instance, decided that the wall would be 10 feet taller after hearing that the last two presidents of Mexico each vowed that Mexico would never pay for a border wall[4].

The idea underlying the construction of a great (“impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful”) border wall is that the most dire problem 2016 America faces is illegal immigration. Specifically, illegal Mexican immigration — also Islamic refugees, but that’s separate, sort of. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said in his presidential announcement speech last summer. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

The issue, for Trump, is not just that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” but that they are taking hard-working Americans’ jobs. Securing the United States’s southern border is part of Trump’s grander strategy of American isolationism — a strategy, it should be noted, that would effectively make America smaller. He also wants to “bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America,” as he said in his RNC nomination speech, without “let[ting] companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.” When framed as the source of drugs, crime, and American job loss, illegal Mexican immigration into the United States can seem like a big problem. But is it?

Before delving into whether illegal Mexican immigrants are actually taking jobs and committing crimes, let’s focus on the frequency with which Mexican people, today, are illegally crossing the US border. There are obvious obstacles to obtaining perfect data on illegal immigration. However, the numbers that are available indicate that to whatever extent undocumented Mexican migration into the United States is a problem, it is a waning one. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the population of undocumented peoples peaked at approximately 12 million in 2008, then fell by a million in 2009, and has since remained at roughly 11 million people. The number of apprehensions at the border is at its lowest point since 1974, and 2014 marked the first time that a majority of those caught were Central Americans, not Mexicans.

Current US-Mexico border wall, near El-Paso, Texas — Wikipedia

Now, if fewer Mexican people were migrating to the United States illegally, but those who were coming were the Mexican Government’s “most unwanted people,” if they were the “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” who Trump describes, there might be reason for concern. But again, the numbers are lacking. And again, what numbers we do have indicate that undocumented Mexican immigrants, like all other immigrant groups, are less likely to commit crimes than naturalized American citizens. A 2007 report from the Immigration Policy Center found that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants.” And a more recent IPC paper noted that “FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48% [among immigrants from 1990 to 2013] — which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.” The crimes that illegal immigrants most often are convicted of are related to, simply, being in the United States illegally.

As far as the United States economy is concerned, undocumented immigrants are playing a significant role. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “about half of the hired workers employed in U.S. crop agriculture were unauthorized, with the overwhelming majority of these workers coming from Mexico[5].” The idea, though, that illegal Mexican immigrants are taking hardworking Americans’ jobs is misguided. In 2007, agricultural labor economist James S. Holt appeared before Congress and said, “The reality, however, is that if we deported a substantial number of undocumented farm workers, there would be a tremendous labor shortage.” In thinking about how such a labor shortage might impact the economy, consider that in 2009 the National Milk Producers Federation’s projected that retail milk prices would increase by 61 percent without the United States’s immigrant workforce.

Undocumented immigrants, too, are paying into America’s social service funds, and doing so without much return. In 2013, Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, told the New York Times that undocumented workers contribute about $15 billion a year to Social Security through payroll taxes but only take out $1 billion because very few undocumented workers are eligible to receive benefits. At that moment, undocumented workers had contributed as much as $300 billion, or nearly 10 percent, of the $2.7 trillion Social Security Trust Fund. And the point Goss was making was supported by an earlier report by the Congressional Budget Office, which said “over the past two decades, most efforts to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration in the United States have concluded that, in aggregate and over the long term, tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — exceed the cost of the services they use.”

Even though vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions undocumented immigrants make to the United States economy than are adversely affected, and even though undocumented immigrants do not pose a serious crime threat, coming into the United States without proper documentation is illegal. As such, there are legitimate reasons that the United States government should discourage foreign peoples from migrating to the United States without documentation. It is, for instance, unfair to the people attempting to get into the United States through legitimate channels.

And yet for Donald Trump, or any other politician who wants to cease the inflow of Mexican migrants, though it might be intuitive to just build a big ‘ol wall, there is evidence that that is one of the very worst ways to accomplish the stated goal. In 1993 and 1994, U.S. Border Patrol erected literal walls of enforcement in El Paso, Texas and in San Diego, California, at the two busiest U.S.-Mexico border crossings. Simultaneously, Border Patrol diverted migratory flows through the Sonoran Desert, into Arizona, making the journey riskier and costlier. The result was not that Mexican migrants in those areas stopped coming into the United States; rather, migrants came into the United States and didn’t leave. The risks were too great to chance traveling back and forth as many have typically done. From their study of the Cold War border between East and West Germany (“the most heavily fortified in modern history”), the Cato Institute concluded that “there is simply no way for a large, open and democratic country like the United States to construct and maintain perfect border defenses.” Migrants will always find ways to enter the United States, and the more dangerous America makes it, the less likely they are to leave.

So, here’s the skinny on Trump’s one big idea: The motivation for building a wall is misguided; it is part of a vision of a smaller, less inclusive America; it would be incredibly costly; and it probably would backfire. But alas, it is a “big” idea. And herein lies the problem with the generous view of Trump’s appeal. He has demonstrated time and again where the American dream breaks down. Whether Trump is dreaming up a football league, casino, or political personage, the result is always the same: a supersized gold-bedazzled Macy’s Day Parade balloon of his likeness, decadent on the outside, and ultimately full of nothing but hot air (or measly throwbacks to 1950s tax policy). That there is rarely substance beneath the bigness is missed because — Can’t you see that’s BIG?!

Donald Trump has left a long line of people dazzled by his big dreams, and then ultimately disappointed by the lack of quality in the results. Sure, Trump is right that anyone can think big. But the most important thing is not the size of your thinking, as Trump would have you believe. The majority of Americans were not born into tremendous wealth and cannot afford to dream big for bigness sake. Thinking big — as well as acting big and being big — does not somehow entitle Americans to ‘success’ or ‘greatness.’ America’s greatest achievements were not accomplished by simply dreaming big; they took time and hard work, granular, unsexy problem-solving.

[1] “We may live in houses in the suburbs but our minds and emotions are still only a short step out of the jungle. In primitive times women clung to the strongest males for protection. They did not take any chances with a nobody, low-status male who did not have the means to house them, protect them, and feed them and their offspring. High-status males displayed their prowess through their kick-ass attitudes. They were not afraid to think for themselves and make their own decisions. They did not give a crap about what other people in the tribe thought. That kind of attitude was and still is associated with the kind of men women find attractive. It may not be politically correct to say but who cares. It is common sense and it’s true — and always will be” — Donald Trump, from his 2007 book “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life.”

[2] Because damages in anti-trust cases are tripled, the award grew to $3. And because the USFL appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which allowed the award to stand, four years later, with inflation the award would grow to $3.76.

[3] A phrase from “Think Big and Kick Ass.”

[4] According to the Washington Post’s tracking, the wall has gone from an original projection of 35 ft tall to, now, at least 65 ft tall. By the publishing of the magazine, it could very well be bigger.

[5] The Department of Labor reports that over half of the 2.5 million farm workers in the U.S. (53 percent) are illegal immigrants. In 2014, The Hill reported that growers and labor unions put this figure at 70 percent.

Story: Max Cea

Illustrations: Emma Caster-Dudzick and Charles Caster-Dudzick

Pink Monkey Issue 2 will be available online and in select New York locations on October 9. Preorder a copy here.