Border Wall to Cost at Least $3 Million Per Mile

Newsmax ^ | 5-19-2006 | Jim Meyers

[ovrtaxt]

The federal government will have to reach deep into taxpayers' pockets if it goes ahead with plans to build a security wall along the U.S.-Mexican border – it could cost at least $3 million per mile.

That's $568.18 per foot.

President Bush this week sent Congress a $1.9 billion request to increase border security. But that money would go not only for new fencing, but also for 1,000 new Border Patrol agents, the temporary deployment of up to 6,000 National Guard troops, two new surveillance aircraft and five helicopters.

In December the House voted to build a security barrier – with a double set of steel walls, floodlights, surveillance cameras and motion detectors – along 700 miles of the 1,952-mile border.

The Senate this week voted to build 370 miles of barrier.

After the House vote, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., estimated that the 700-mile barrier would cost $2.2 billion, or about $3 million mile.

But that estimate could be way off the mark.

NewsMax looked toward Israel as an example and found that the 425-mile complex of fences, concrete walls, trenches and razor wire it is building along its border with the West Bank will cost $1.56 billion, or $3.67 million per mile – in an area where labor costs are far lower than in the United States.

The San Diego experience points to even higher costs.

A 14-mile, 15-foot-high double fence is now under construction near San Diego. Roughly $39 million has been spent on the project so far, and Homeland Security plans to spend $35 million more.

"If that $74 million is enough to finish the job [Border Patrol says the cost could keep rising] and the price is multiplied over the proposed 700 miles, the new fence could run $3.7 billion," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

"Even that estimate doesn't take into account the expense of purchasing or condemning many miles of privately owned land abutting the border or of potential legal challenges."

At $3.7 billion, the 700-mile fence would cost $5.28 million per mile – or an astounding $1,000 per foot.

The fence near San Diego has slowed the flood of illegal aliens traveling through the border city of Imperial Beach, Calif., from about 2,000 a day to just a few a day on average.

That has driven aliens and drug smugglers to more remote and treacherous migration routes, and migrants increasingly hire smugglers to help them make the three-day hike through parched terrain – a tactic they could use to circumvent the new 700-mile fence.

So building the fence could turn out to be an expensive boondoggle, according to Mike Allen, director of the McAllen, Texas, Economic Development Corp.

"We want people to support our immigration laws because we live here," said Allen, whose home is half a mile from the border.

"But this will be a tremendous waste of money, and it will not stop immigration. People will just go around it."

The only solution that will work, according to a number of anti-immigration activist groups, is to build the fence along the entire 1,952-mile border.

[sweetliberty]

"Border Wall to Cost at Least $3 Million Per Mile"

Not if they make the illegals build it. When they're picked up, make them work on the wall to cover fines for entering the country illegally, to make restitution for tax-payer funded services they obtained this country and to earn their tickets home.

[kabar]

That is baloney, another ruse being used by people who favor giving in to this invasion.

40% of the people live below their poverty line. There is a wide disparity between the US and Mexico in terms of wealth and opportunity. That is a fact, not a ruse.

Mexico has many businesses just in the tourist industry alone. Have you ever been there?

Yes, many times on the border. I have lived in San Diego and have a home in Arizona. I have visited Mexico City twice. The slums and pollution are terrible.

They also have outstandingly great resources, including a large mining industry (gold, coal, oil, etc) and they have a burdgeoning business/industrial base thanks to NAFTA.

The government is corrupt and the wealth is controlled by small number of families. Income distribution remains highly unequal. The oil industry, the biggest source of foreign revenues next to money being sent back by Mexicans in the US, is nationalized>

The problem in Mexico seems to be cultural, in that the governing class is reluctant to let the lower class prosper too much. It is harder for them, but not impossible. Given human nature, and what they see on American TV, they would rather take their chances in the US where no one starves or is homeless, unless by their own choice.

Easy for you to say. The millions who are coming here do so at great personal risk and expense. They are riding on the tops of trains and buses braving robbers and corrupt cops to get to the border. They cram themselves into trucks and trek across the desert to get here. If caught and returned, they try again. Also, Mexico is being used as a transit point for Central America, where conditions are even worse.

The very fact that the Bush administration crows about sending back 6 million illegals in five years gives you an idea as to the enormity of the problem. 500,000 to 850,000 make it through. We are being invaded.

[Condor51]

$3 Million a mile is a bargain.

To replace an existing road, highway, expressway in the Chi Metro area, its $1 Million a mile - at least that's what it was about four years ago.

[hinckley buzzard]

I've noticed some of the static here has quieted as people realize that, indeed, the President IS giving us some of what we want.

Why not. But you need to acknowledge that without that "static," on a national level, nothing would have been done. No House bill, no Presidential speech, no Senate agreement to build at least some barriers, nada.

[hinckley buzzard]

its either a wall at the border or a wall around your local neighborhood like they have in south america.

Provocative point. I'm sure even the pro-illegal enthusiasts are not eager to have a favella up the road from their houses.

[Kozak]

A bargain at any cost.

[reformedliberal]

What happens when there aren't enough taxpayers to fund the bond issues? What happens when there are fewer students and therefore, fewer incentives? They used to bully us by having our kids come home w/propaganda. Then they tried cutting art, music and PE, along with sports. Still, there are fewer students and fewer taxpayers.

I know teachers who can not get tenure. Other teachers who have moved to our area blithely assuming they will find jobs who have found that there are fewer positions because there are fewer students and fewer schools.

I am amazed to see so many private schools and homeschoolers here in my rural area. I also see retirees selling out of the counties with high property taxes and buying smaller homes in unincorporated areas.

In the 2004 elections, vote fraud approved some school bonds in this part of the state. Now, we are hearing that the money simply isn't available. Schools are closed in order to stretch the funds over fewer students.

You can vote increases forever. If there are fewer recipients, fewer teachers and administrators and fewer taxpayers, it simply can't happen as the teacher unions would prefer.

[Kozak]

Hell put a check box on the tax return like the one for presidential elections. I WOULD donate for a wall.....

[DuckFan4ever]

Fencing in high traffic areas is better than nothing. At least the illegals have to go way out of their way to try and make it into the country.

[Wolfie]

Sorry, my comment wasn't directed at you. If was for those big spending government types who never question the cost of anything else.

[thoughtomator]

$6 billion is cheap. Take it from confiscating the assets of a few major employers of illegals and leave the taxpayers alone!

[reformedliberal]

Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Passed late last year in Congress, signed by POTUS in February 2006, takes effect July, 1, 2006.

I am not clear what other entitlements are scheduled to be limited to citizens. The ability to attend public school is enforced by a SCOTUS ruling to which I do not have an exact reference. Ditto access to the ER, although Hill-Burton mandated 13% indigent care for any facility receiving Federal funds. However, I know that when ERs are overloaded, they shut down, delay seeing people with minor problems or discourage the entire clan from acccompaning the patient by removing waiting rooms. If the treatment needed is a prescription, people without Medicaid are not going to fill them or return. Even ERs run out of samples eventually.

Back in the 1990s, my mother, who lived in Las Vegas, decided she was very ill, even though her physician didn't think she needed to come into the ER. Miffed, she called an ambulance to take her to the ER, which she could afford because my father was on a Federal pension. When she got there, she was placed on a gurney and left to wait. Finally, she was able to ask an orderly why she wasn't being seen. He gestured to all those waiting, some with obvious injuries, heart attacks, etc, and said:"This is the way it is now." She got up off her gurney and called a cab and went home. She waited til morning, called her physician and made an appointment.

If she was discouraged from using the ER on a generous health insurance plan, I can only imagine what an illegal with no English must feel having to wait hours in uncomfortable surroundings if they aren't unconscious or at death's door.

If the hospitals along the border are closing down, it is difficult to understand how people with minor problems can still use them as clinics.

[mafree]

Well at least for once the $$ will be spent on something that's actually Constitutional.

[ChildOfThe60s]

Cheap at the price. And since when does ANYONE in the government, republican or dimocrat, give a hoot about cost? Misdirection as usual.

And interestingly, this would be one of few *legitimate* uses of eminent domain the government has exercised in recent years.

Be prepared for an endless list of excuses why protecting the border shouldn't be done. The foremost of which will always be "we can't stop them all, so why bother to try stopping any". Using that rationale, we should not bother enforcing any laws. Just let anarchy ensue.

[mafree]

I like your list- spread it around.

[BobL]

"Fencing in high traffic areas is better than nothing. At least the illegals have to go way out of their way to try and make it into the country."


To expand on that a bit...

Making someone go around a wall may not seem like a very difficult thing to do as we type away at our computers. But most of us have been in the back country at times and have hiked a bit. If we wall off the popular drop points and the smugglers have to go off-road 20 miles or so on the US side (and maybe the same on the Mexican side). It will be MUCH easier for us to find them and much harder for their illegals to make it to the safety of a US highway, to continue their journey north. If they have to do it on foot, they will probably be precluded from doing it during the summer, due to the heat - so they have to do it when cooler and darker (by the way, lighting them up on IR scopes). It simply makes it much harder. And remember, not all of the illegals are like Jose, who, at 5', 1", can singlehandedly carry two sheets of 1/2" plywood to the top of a 2 story house with 45 degree roof lines (as I saw). A lot of these people are pregnant women or otherwise not in the greatest of shape. They will be deterred, and that will only be good.

Do not fall for the desperate liberal argument that was used with SDI, that goes like this:

"If one person gets across with the wall and sets off a chemical weapon, then the wall has failed."

As silly as that sounds, that's what the Dems are left with when it comes to talking points.

[trubluolyguy]

it could cost at least $3 million per mile.

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Ok.

[OPS4]

Where do I sign for the job. I'll have a crew of illegal workers overnite. Ops4

[BW2221]

It's probably non only union but also something built by government contractors, who are experienced at bilking the government.

[lawdude]

"Maybe not the only solution, but certainly the best solution IMO. I don't care if the total cost is $20 Billion. I'm sure there are enough $250 million "bridges to nowhere" in the Federal budget to cover a large chunk of the cost. Regardless, the fence will pay for itself a thousand times over."

The naysayers claim this will not STOP the illegals. Peraps not but I bet the flow will drop from thousands per day to dozens.

I consider that to be a WINNER!

Stuff it McCane!