"And you brought up the need for administrative expenses, etc. How big do you think those figures would be compared to the major ones she has covered (the wall, the stations, the guards, their training and equipment, etc.)?"
Based on what I've seen in the federal government, a lot. She low-balled her manpower requirements by a very large margin, and then low-balled the cost per man by 50%. She also low-balled the construction costs (Israel did not have to pay Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage" rates). The wall is likely to cost about 10 times the amount she estimated to build and maintain.
"You also say that she has only covered 2,000 miles of our borders "at great expense" and not the remaining 17,000."
Exactly.
"That was not her purpose (the remaining 17,000)."
Considering that, honestly, the illegal aliens and their smugglers are far more likely to be intelligent, creative, and clever than the people who low-ball construction and manpower costs to get their pet ideas to work, she'd BETTER get the other 17,000 miles under control.
"First things first."
Something half begun is not done.
"And anyway she showed that her proposal was subject to tuning, but still only involved 15% of the annual cost of supporting the illegal immigrants here already."
After low-balling her estimates by a generous margin. And when the illegals still get in rather easily by going around or under her undermanned wall, we'd still get stuck with the welfare costs as well.
"Don't you suppose the northern and sea borders could be taken care of with the remaining 85%?"
No. First, most Americans will not support building a wall all the way around this country. (People who live near the coast would LIKE to go to the beach every now and then.) Second, the cost for full coverage is likely to be astronomically high. Third, we'd have to restart the draft, and draft both sexes. (We'd have to draft the men to man the far-more-than-four-per-mile posts on 19,000 miles of wall; and then we'd have to draft the women to whelp the next generation of border guards. Unauthorized inferitility will become a court-martial offense.)
I see. So the Normandy invasion shouldn't have occurred until we had the plans in place for all that happened afterwards until the very end of the war? You're being ludicrous!
When dealing with a problem as huge as this you take first things first. Most illegal aliens are flooding across our southern border (several million a year), so we deal with that first.
As for your contention that her estimates are all low-ball, I haven't seen any research or reasonable estimates of your own to prove that. And even if you did provide them, they probably wouldn't amount to the $25 billion total that she was working with. And I know THAT to be a pretty accurate estimate, if not too conservative.
Your closed-mindedness is obvious in so much of what you say, and your inability to think "outside the box" is obvious in your ridiculous comment that we couldn't build a wall in the shore areas because people like to go to the beach.
No one here (especially Joanie) would suggest walls being built to monitor our seacoast. Talk about ludicrous! That monitoring would obviously require a different strategy. But, as I said before, blocking the land routes from south to north has to come first.