The document discusses Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. It notes that the border is nearly 2,000 miles long and already has about 650 miles of fencing and barriers. Building a full wall is estimated to cost between $15-25 billion, or up to $16 million per mile, and would require over 12 million cubic yards of concrete. It would also cost $750 million annually to maintain. Experts argue that a full wall may not be effective or necessary along the entire remote border terrain.

2. THE TRUMP WALL
• Donald Trump wants to build an "impenetrable, physical,
tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall" between
the US and México.
• But how tall? How powerful? How beautiful? The
Republican candidate's big ideas can be small on detail,
and the wall is no exception.
• The US-Mexico border is about 1,900 miles (3100 km)
long and traverses all sorts of terrain from empty, dusty
desert to the lush and rugged surroundings of the Rio
Grande.

3. THE TRUMP WALL
• Some 650 miles of the border is covered already by a
confused and non-continuous series of fences, concrete
slabs and other structures.
• Mr Trump says his wall will cover 1,000 miles and natural
obstacles will take care of the rest.
• This is a wall we are talking about, not a fence - on that
Mr Trump has been clear ("a wall is better than fencing
and it's much more powerful").

4. THE TRUMP WALL
• That rules out relatively cheap options like tall iron fence
posts or wire mesh.
• Concrete is the obvious choice. Ali F. Rhuzkan, a New
York-based structural engineer, estimated in an article for
National Memo that a 1,900-mile wall - seemingly Mr
Trump's original plan - would require about 339 million
cubic feet (12.5 million cubic yards) of concrete - three
times more than the Hoover Dam.
• http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37243269

5. THE TRUMP WALL

6. THE TRUMP WALL
• If Donald Trump were to build a wall along the United
States' southern border, it would cost billions.
• The U.S. border with Mexico is roughly 2,000 miles long
and underlines four states from California to Texas. It is a
massive stretch of land — the Berlin Wall spanned just 96
miles comparatively, and it cost about $25 million to build
in 1961, or around $200 million with inflation.

7. THE TRUMP WALL
• Building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants is not a
novel plan. About 670 miles of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico
border was completed in accordance with the Bush
administration's Secure Fence Act of 2006. That alone
cost about $2.4 billion, for roughly one-third of the entire
border and, according to migration experts, some of the
easier and less costly areas to fence.
• The Secure Fence Act called for 700 miles of fencing, with
a double layer throughout, but much of the barrier isn't
reinforced this way. Even before the fence reached its
first stage of completion, some argued it was not being
constructed properly.

8. THE TRUMP WALL
• "It's a lot more expensive than we expected when we started,
and it was much more difficult," said Ronald Vitiello,
deputy chief of border patrol for the U.S. Customs and
Border Protection, at a Senate Committee hearing in May.
• Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House
Committee on Homeland Security, said in a January 2015
statement to right-leaning publication Daily Caller
(founded by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and
former Dick Cheney advisor Neil Patel) that "In our
conversations with outside groups, experts and
stakeholders, we learned that it would be an inefficient
use of taxpayer money to complete the fence. … We are
using that money to utilize other technology to create a
secure border."

9. THE TRUMP WALL
• Now it's become a presidential election cycle issue,
courtesy of Donald Trump's bold words.
• "I would 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 have Mexico pay for that wall.
Mark my words," Trump said in his presidential
announcement speech.

10. THE TRUMP WALL
• On his campaign website, Trump's immigration reform
plan calls for impounding remittance payments derived
from illegal wages and imposing increased visa and entry
fees to the U.S. from Mexico unless the latter agrees to
finance the wall.
• Mexico picking up the tab is unlikely, and so is doing it
cheaply.
• "The cost of it is extraordinary; the terrain makes it
impossible — it's a great sound bite, but it's not
defensible in terms of a practical policy," said GOP
presidential candidate Jeb Bush at a town hall meeting in
Denver.

11. THE TRUMP WALL
• According to a Government Accountability Office 2009 report, the
cost to build 1 mile of fencing at the border averaged between $2.8
million and $3.9 million. But that figure may be low relative to costs
for future sections of the wall. It's based only on the first 220 miles
fenced and does not include other factors, such as topography,
transportation logistics in harder-to-reach areas (i.e. road-building
and earth and drainage work), labor costs, land acquisition costs
and surveillance equipment.
• "The first miles of fencing were in the easiest" places, said Marc
Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program
at the Migration Policy Institute. These were fencing areas in or
close to cities and accessible transportation, rather than deep in
deserts or mountains. Additionally, the first miles were on public
lands, while completing a border wall would require the government
to acquire land from private holders. The GAO estimate for one
difficult section of fencing near San Diego was $16 million.

12. THE TRUMP WALL
• One aspect of the wall debate more important than the
cost is its worth. The migration expert Rosenblum said
fencing in remote areas of the U.S. isn't likely to achieve
the goal of a more secure border.
• "It's not necessary to have a pedestrian fence in places
where the infrastructure doesn't support people walking
toward the border," Vitiello said in his May Senate
testimony.

13. • Border walls work in densely populated areas — such as
Israel's wall in the West Bank — where slowing down a person
trying to illegally enter by five or 10 minutes can make a
difference to border patrol. But when the migrant trying to enter
is traveling over remote mountains and deserts for three days,
using a fence to slow them down by a few minutes doesn't have
the same effect — it borders (pun intended) on the trivial,
Rosenblum said.
• "There is a reason people don't build fences in the middle of
nowhere; it doesn't change the enforcement profile in the
middle of nowhere," the migration expert said. "The existing
fence has worked because of where it is, near populated areas.
Both Democrats and Republicans have testified that they have
the fencing they need," Rosenblum said.

14. THE TRUMP WALL

15. THE TRUMP WALL
• The actual cost for the rest of the border wall (roughly 1,300
miles) could be as high as $16 million per mile, with a total
price tag of $15 billion to $25 billion. Rosenblum said the
$15 billion low-end estimate is "probably an underestimate,"
because the parts that have yet to be fenced are the most
difficult — the most dense and arid. At $16 million per mile
and with 1,300 miles to secure, the estimated cost would be
$12 billion, and the price of private land acquisitions and
maintenance of fencing could push that total cost higher.
• The U.S. government would have to pay to maintain the wall,
which could cost as much as $750 million a year, according
to an analysis conducted by Politico. And then if it wanted to
man it with personnel, that would be an additional cost —
border patrol has an operating budget of $1.4 billion for
21,000 agents.

16. THE TRUMP WALL
• "The need to maintain, repair and replace outdated and aging
fencing will continue to be an issue," Vitiello said during his
Senate testimony given in May.
• In addition to the 2009 GAO estimate of price per mile, more
recent spending data is now available from the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS). From fiscal 2007 through fiscal 2014,
$5.9 billion in total appropriations was awarded by Congress to
the Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology
Account (BSFIT).
• "This is actually the best way to think about the real costs of
installing/maintaining fencing," Rosenblum said. "A fence is
useless without a camera to tell you when someone has
climbed over it."

17. THE TRUMP WALL
• Rosenblum said most of the BSFIT money and fence installation
occurred between fiscal 2007 and fiscal 2010. During that period,
DHS installed 507 miles of new fencing, with $4.5 billion
appropriated to the BSFIT account. If all the money went to new
fencing during this period, the price per mile would be $8.9 million.
While there is a discrepancy between the BSFIT high-end estimate
($11.5 million/mile) and earlier GAO estimate ($16.6 million/mile),
Rosenblum said that, in the least, the higher numbers from both
agencies are more relevant to the sections of border fencing still to
be built than the GAO estimate for the initial sections at between
$2.8 million and $3.9 million.
• "The cost of building a permanent border wall pales mightily in
comparison to what American taxpayers spend every single year on
dealing with the fallout of illegal immigration on their communities,
schools and unemployment offices," according to Trump's website,
though it doesn't put an actual figure on either expense.

18. THE TRUMP WALL
• There's one more aspect to Trump's plan that could make it even
costlier — he is talking about a wall, not a fence. If he really means what
he says, "the price would go up quite a bit," Rosenblum said.
• The existing border "wall" is actually fencing and, in some areas, not
even fencing but vehicular barriers.—By Kate Drew, special to
CNBC.com
• http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/09/this-is-what-trumps-border-wall-could-cost-us.html

19. THE TRUMP WALL
• Ramo, a former journalist and the co-CEO and vice
chairman of the consulting firm Kissinger Associates,
applies network theory to international affairs.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War
helped usher in unfettered globalization, he argues, but
now a backlash is underway. Globalization has gradually
produced a desire in certain parts of the world for
separation—particularly after a series of traumas,
including the 9/11 attacks and the global financial crisis,
exposed the hazards of freewheeling integration. And
separation is increasingly being achieved through
physical barriers.

20. THE TRUMP WALL
• The statistic Ramo cites about the spread of walls comes from a study
by the political scientists Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg: Of the 51
fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War
II, around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014.
• Hassner and Wittenberg found that such boundaries—structures like
the existing U.S.-Mexico border fence, the Israel-West Bank barrier, and
the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border fence—tend to be constructed by
wealthy countries seeking to keep out the citizens of poorer countries,
and that many of these fortifications have been built between states in
the Muslim world.
• http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/donald-trump-
wall-mexico/483156/