Make Them Legal [warning: projectilogenic]

Thousands of Mexicans watched and cheered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last week as runners arrived with a torch bearing a flame that had come unextinguished from Mexico City, as part of the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The flame, as Tamar Jacoby reported in our columns, was brought to New York City as “a seamless blend of devotion and protest designed to draw the White House’s attention to the plight of illegal immigrants.” Hard as it may be to imagine, here’s a constituency that actually is aching for the chance to pay more taxes. Right now, the city provides services to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants — teaching them in schools, treating them in hospital emergency rooms, putting out fires in their apartments. But the illegal immigrants don’t repay the city — or the state or federal government, for that matter — for the services. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s just that the government won’t issue a Social Security number to someone who snuck into the country without permission. And it’s hard to pay either payroll taxes or income taxes without a Social Security number.

President Bush has been talking with President Fox of Mexico about ways to normalize the status of the millions of illegal immigrants living within American borders. Those efforts stalled following the September 11 terrorist attacks, which gave an unwarranted boost to those who want to pull up the drawbridge to America.

None of the September 11 hijackers was Mexican. It seems ridiculous to punish them. The best argument against normalizing illegal immigrants in America is that it rewards the lawbreakers and punishes those who have obeyed our immigration rules and who have been waiting patiently outside our borders for entry visas. But if the status of those already here were adjusted hand-in-hand with reforms dramatically raising the quotas of those allowed into America legally from abroad, then the injustice would be less. It might even be worth it to require those in America illegally to exit and then reenter under the newly relaxed entry rules, under which they’d be treated the same as those who have been obeying the laws and waiting outside.

The other argument made against increased levels of legal immigration is that it costs the taxpayers more in welfare to support such immigrants than the immigrants pay in taxes. If such claims were correct, they’d be an argument for welfare reform, not for less immigration.

New York is a city of immigrants, and New York’s mayor has often been a national leader in the debate on immigration issues. Mayor Bloomberg and the rest of the city’s politicians are ready to deal with the city’s budget problems by raising taxes on the existing taxpayers. With a little leaning on Washington, the city could tap the hundreds of thousands of workers eager to help share the burden. Instead of raising tax rates, the city could broaden the base. We realize this doesn’t count as a budget “cut” in the traditional sense, but it’s a waste for the city, and the nation, to refuse income from perfectly eager potential taxpayers.

Advocates for immigrant rights estimate the number of illegal immigrants in New York City to be about 500,000. A more precise count was made in a March 2002 study from the Urban Institute, which found that there were about 275,000 illegal immigrants between the ages of 18 and 64 living in New York City. The study further found that 80% of these immigrants were participating in the labor force.

Figure an average of $20,000 a year in income for these immigrants — the Urban Institute study finds that most immigrants have an income in this range. At that level, New York would collect $110 million in city income tax revenue by registering labor force-active immigrants, legitimizing their status as members of American society, and making them legal wage-earners and taxpayers.

If you don't like the estimated cost of the wall, tell where you're going to save money on it.

The MX MPS program would have spent 75% of its budget on pouring concrete--in other words, on the same basic task that would be performed in building a nice high wall along the border. The Office of Technology assessment gave a total figure for the concrete needed for the planned MX MPS program, and some basic mathematics shows that your wall would need roughly 3 times as much concrete. Inflation since 1980 is calculable. I assumed that pouring 2,100 miles of concrete would pose no significant additional cost drivers.

The OTA report also gave a range of cost overrun figures from historical experience--and public works projects are, as a group, the worst offenders for going over budget.

I even gave you a break on the price tag--I simply assumed that Uncle Sam owned all of the land along the border and didn't have to exercise eminent domain. (The MX MPS program would have used government land exclusively--much of the proposed basing area for the missile is now the Great Basin National Park.)

If you have a problem with the price tag, tell me where it's wrong.

The problem I have with your numbers Poohbah is it works out to something like $70 million dollars per mile. Isn't that right? That's around $14,000 a linear foot?

I've seen some pretty substancial walls around guarded subdivisions that I don't believe cost anywhere near that much.

What do those pre-fabricated walls that you see along the highways cost per foot?

Any recent road construction projects cost that much?

Any idea how much it's costing Israel to build their wall?

That concrete doesn't have to be poured to a density capable of withstanding the launch force of a freakin', inter-continental, ballistic missile either, Poohbah. It just has to be substantial enough to be a barrier to climbers.

Merry Christmas guys!

The problem I have with your numbers Poohbah is it works out to something like $70 million dollars per mile. Isn't that right? That's around $14,000 a linear foot?

It's a straight scale-up from the MX MPS figure, based on how much concrete you're pouring--about three times as much. I made sure that I excluded all of the weapons-related costs A lot of the expense will be in simply getting the construction equipment to the construction sites--in most places, there's not enough of a road net leading up to the border to support construction on this scale. Every drop of water for the concrete is going to have to be imported from elsewhere.

The costs incurred in building the wall--ALL of the costs--get incurred no matter what corner of the budget you hide them in.

I've seen some pretty substancial walls around guarded subdivisions that I don't believe cost anywhere near that much.

First, how many of these subdivisions are built literally a hundred miles from anywhere, in a place where the roads would have to be extended to, and in places that have no water available or all the available water has already been appropriated for beneficial use?

People on foot don't need much in the way of roads, but heavy construction gear does. Your gated community usually doesn't need to build the roads leading out to it, or bring in every drop of water for the wall.

What do those pre-fabricated walls that you see along the highways cost per foot?

A lot less. Notice that they are a LOT lower than your proposed wall and would not stop illegal aliens from crossing them.

Any recent road construction projects cost that much?

It's much easier to lay a flat ribbon of concrete onto the ground than to stand it on edge for 2,100 miles. And the Interstate Highway System was completed long before the array of studies now required before breaking ground on any federally-funded construction project. (MX MPS was the first--and so far, only--large-scale construction project to be attempted under these restrictions.)

The MX MPS building program--the part that was not directly related to buying ICBMs, the vehicles to carry them, et cetera, merely the concrete-pouring part--was realistically estimated at $131 billion in 2001 dollars, and that had about a third of the total concrete pour (just pure cubic footage of concrete) this wall involves.

The simplicity of a wall relative to the typical MX MPS shelter is offset by the fact that MX MPS was to be built on flat terrain that was relatively accessible to a major road net. This wall's got to go through whatever terrain is actually present on the border strip--and it ain't flat, and there ain't a lot of roads.

Any idea how much it's costing Israel to build their wall?

Probably a lot less, because they don't have to go 2,100 miles worth of distance through mostly trackless waste, and the region in question is a lot flatter.

That concrete doesn't have to be poured to a density capable of withstanding the launch force of a freakin', inter-continental, ballistic missile either, Poohbah.

Actually, it didn't have to withstand a launch--the concrete shelter was not the launcher. It wasn't expected to withstand a close impact by a Soviet warhead, either. The idea behind MX MPS was to turn the MIRV fractionation issue on its head--instead of one 10-warhead missile being able to reliably kill 5 missiles in their silos, you needed 23 RVs to kill one MX missile (if the Soviets didn't know EXACTLY which shelter had the missile, they'd have to barrage an entire shelter complex--23 shelters--to assure themselves of killing the one missile in that complex). The shelter only had to withstand the shock from a missile killing an adjacent shelter--over a mile away--under this philosophy. Had they tried to make the shelters hard enough to withstand a close strike, the price tag for the entire MX MPS program would have probably been closer to a trillion or so 2001 dollars.

It just has to be substantial enough to be a barrier to climbers.

Yup. But it has to be 2,100 miles long. You ain't getting cheap on that scale.

Pre-fabricated walls poured in sections someplace else and brought to the borders would be closer to $40 billion dollars than $400 billion.

Prefab walls will not provide ramparts for the Border Patrol. Heck, you won't get more than a couple feet thickness, max--and I can build a breaching charge to get through that wall out of ordinary household chemcials.

All they have to do is put it out to bid. The construction companies will not come back with your kind of numbers.

I'm sure they will. After all, it's no skin off their nose if the government has to keep buying new sections of wall to replace damaged ones.

But when it doesn't work, because your specification $70 million dollars a mile or $14,000 a linear foot is way out of line.

When you're talking about ramparts for Border Patrol agents to cap off pepper spray or stingball rounds at illegals climbing the wall, you're talking about putting them in place on site, no prefab work is going to accomodate those. Pour all concrete on site, heavy construction required, lots of new roads required, lots of imported water required.

There's no way those highway barriers cost that much even trucked down to the borders.

Fine, go ahead and use them. The highway barriers I've seen won't stop any illegal aliens unless they're in wheelchairs.

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