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Found in El Paso: the border wall Biden is paying *not* to build

Unfinished wall in El Paso. Credit: Mark Krikorian

October 7, 2021 - 5:37pm

I read that more than 17,000 foreigners have crossed the Channel illegally into the UK from France in the first nine months of this year. Apparently this is a cause of some consternation.

That’s less than three days’ worth of illegal entries at the U.S.-Mexico border under Joe Biden.

Part of the reason for the disparity, of course, is that the sea serves Britain as a natural barrier. Meanwhile, the Rio Grande, which accounts for 1,200 miles of the 2,000-mile border, is not especially grand, and in places is hardly a river at all, its water entirely diverted for irrigation.

This was why Donald Trump made the construction of a border wall a central part of his 2016 campaign. And so, running as the anti-Trump, Joe Biden made halting the construction of that wall a central part of his 2020 campaign.

Biden won, and within hours of taking office ordered work on the wall to stop.

I saw the consequences of this decision on a recent visit to the border at El Paso. This city, at the farthest western tip of Texas, has long faced a significant flow of illegal immigrants. While the city itself has had real border barriers for years, in the outskirts and out in the countryside fencing was either risible or non-existent. Trump succeeded here, as elsewhere along the border, to get significant portions of the wall built, usually in the form of concrete-filled metal bollards placed a few inches apart (so the Border Patrol would be able to see what’s on the other side).

But the construction of the wall was famously never completed, and on January 20 Biden ordered builders to immediately put down their tools and walk away. In fact, he started paying contractors not to build the wall.

Wall units lying on the ground, thousands of them in stacks of 10, waiting for cranes that will never come

The result? Gaps in the wall and piles of paid-for but unused wall units.

The significance of these gaps on the border is that they funnel traffic which would otherwise have either been blocked or spread out. One rancher in a remote part of the neighbouring state of New Mexico told us the three-quarter-mile gap in the wall left on his land has focused so much illicit traffic near his home that it’s no longer safe for his children to play outside.

It doesn’t help that there are far fewer border agents on patrol to mind such gaps, since a large share are kept busy processing the illegal immigrants crossing. Thanks to Joe Biden’s policy of releasing into the interior anyone who brings a child with them, numbers are high.

Those gaps would have been filled with some of the assembled wall units I stumbled upon at an abandoned construction staging area west of El Paso. There were literally acres of wall units lying on the ground, thousands of them in stacks of 10, waiting for cranes that now will never come.

Whether or not you thought further wall construction was the best use of resources, these materials were already purchased — their neglect is a physical memorial to the Left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.


Mark Krikorian is Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

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Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago

The minds of the left are diseased. Trump was just the catalyst for the current mania, but the sickness is in THEM not him.

Matthew Powell
Matthew Powell
2 years ago

I think we all know that politicians are happy to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration in the full knowledge that once in, deportation on any significant scale is unfeasible. They will have mass migration, whether the electorate vote for it or not.

mike otter
mike otter
2 years ago

Only a handful of these migrants will be active agents of the democrats…. drug dealers, rapists, vote fraudsters, gang members etc but they will, with Biden/ dems backing, bully and coerce the many who just want to have a better, safer life and happy to pay tax to get it.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

I heard that there are payments of $4m a day ‘not to build’.

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
2 years ago

We are all so racist and white supremacist in the west that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to come here. Maybe they didn’t get the message?

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
2 years ago

The border wall is now symbolic of the failure to stem immigration. The current rate inbound ~ 2M/year with an estimate of 11-40M undocumented already in the US. Whether this influx will end the American experiment is up for debate. The culture of some 200 years is being altered by those who may not need to join the culture. Time suggests their children will adopt the culture, meanwhile much uncertainty.

Ralph Hanke
Ralph Hanke
2 years ago
Reply to  Hardee Hodges

I am a Canadian who proudly became an American citizen. It is, after all, a pretty good place to live. And I do not deal drugs, rape, or murder.
Which, I’ll bet, were probably the last characteristics you would have ascribed to me because I said I was Canadian.
And, I very much wish to help change American culture because, I think, that is what a proud, active citizen does to any culture they are a part of: change it for the better.
Are you with me so far? Because I am getting SO sick and tired of many people so very quickly thinking those illegal immigrants from south are probably thieving, drug dealing, rapists.
My bet is the vast majority of those people are ordinary average people like you and me. They are just desperate to get out of living in Mexico. And who can blame them?
And yes, they will change American culture. Mostly, I believe, for the better. Just like me, who was able to get in legally.

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
2 years ago
Reply to  Ralph Hanke

I think the issue is other, not a dichotomy between nasty criminals and worthy workers. The issue is does the government have the authority to set rules respecting who may come in and the will to enforce them. Because circumstances in their home countries are bad cannot equate to a right to immigrate. The world is full of bad circumstances; the US cannot save all, not even the millions arriving at our southern border.