This might have made more sense if Mr. Buskirk's favorite President didn't ad-lib under the State of the Union that he wants "the most legal immigration ever". If that's how he's going to roll, Mr. Buskirk is going to be very disappointed in Trump.
3
Thanks for this contribution to the Times’ search for diversity of opinions. The southern border wall is definitely the most important non-issue currently facing us. Immigration on foot through the desert has dropped precipitously over the past 15 years or so (assuming the border agents have been patrolling and not sleeping on the job). Most illegal immigration involves people who came through the gates legally but overstayed their visas. And the drugs are coming through the gates as well, not carried on the backs of poor Latinos hiking through the intense heat (and nighttime cold) of the desert. What we actually need is better technology and personnel at the gates. Oh, and canines.
Joe McGuire
16
Yeah, permanently firing furloughed workers — that’s gonna get Trump and his republican colleagues lots of support. Particularly in rural areas dependent on federal paychecks; which, last I looked, makes up a large chunk of the Republican base.
What planet does this person live on? Setting aside the idiocy of the wall idea to begin with, is this what passes for Republican political strategy these days? Bullying and brinksmanship?
23
Why is the NY Times publishing an opinion piece clearly loaded to the gills with "alternative facts", ie, demonstrably false statements.
On top of that the author is angry that the President (when it's someone HE supports) is forced to accede to Constitutional limits on his power. When Congress specifically refuses to authorize, or specifically forbids an action, and a President does it anyway, it's not legal.
I'll bet the author was one of those raging that Obama was committing impeachable offenses for HIS use of executive authority.
There is no way we can have bi-partisanship in this nation as long as fact-free "pundits" like Mr. Buskirk and the President refuse to face reality and INSIST their fantasies are non-debatable absolutes.
13
Wow. Hot take. Trump should have crashed the government to do something wildly impractical and unpopular.
11
maybe trump is smarter than the author gives him credit for- try this one; no money for the wall triggers a declaration of a national emergency; house votes no forcing the senate to vote; trump loses; then has split his party; and if he stupidly goes ahead he truly risks impeachment- that is why he has not issued the declaration and won't.
1
You know the president is going down in flames when even his most sheeplike followers are found favorably quoting the claim that Trump's strongest negotiating move is "seeming crazy."
8
I'm confused. I thought Trump said there would be no peace if the investigations didn't stop. Oh, that's right, he said that too.
This article assumes facts not in evidence, such as the president either being capable of rational thought or having concern for anyone other than himself.
All bullies are cowards, and this president is no exception. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, and Elisha Cummings will provide him with an overdue lesson in civics.
11
The shocking thing is this column completely ignored the threat to our great nation posed by space aliens. Mr. Buskirk knows full well, or is wilfully ignorant of, the grave danger these creatures pose to our innocent women and children - not to mention livestock and crops. This threat is well known and discussed every day on multiple websites, emails, and fax/twitter messages.
Perhaps Mr. Buskirk and his Conservative friends would care to explain their inattention to a very real threat as they blather on about border crossings and political imaginings. Mr. President, Do Your Duty! Protect America from Space Aliens!
24
I'm trying to find any value at all in Mr. Buskirk's contribution. He recycles Mr. Trump's (racist) lies and (racist) fear about immigration and border security, and their connection to the economy. Buskirk knows that he is not telling the truth. He pushes Trump to declare the southern border a national emergency, which is not the case. He goads Trump to do something truly abhorrent such as laying off all of the furloughed employees. Even his figurative language is gratuitously violent, e.g., Trump has the "whip hand."
11
More trumped up, fear mongering hogwash from yet another trump-whisperer. When leadership is reduced to the "win" the entire nation loses.
3
Educate the American people about the issue? The available facts prove there is no crisis; there is no danger to the American people. The border poses far less of a threat than right wing terrorists. It seems the writer doesn't read the newspaper that is publishing his lies.
We need more constraints on executive power, and this looming threat of calling a national emergency to satisfy the hatred and fear of the base is dangerous proof of how low powerful people can go. Something worse will be next.
6
Yes, the wall will be highly effective! It will even match France's Maginot Line and China's Great Wall. Both the Maginot and the Great Wall were 100% effective against marauders, barbarians, and unwanted intruders. The Maginot effectively left France unscathed and unaffected by WWII. China was never conquered by the Mongols nor the Manchus because of the Great Wall. To argue otherwise is just fake news, historical untruth, political gamesmanship and Chinese conspiracy.
If group-think says a wall is a good thing and Climate Change is a Chinese Conspiracy, well then it must be so. Then whatever the facts and truths, the wall must be built and Climate Change must be a hoax.
It is like if group-think says heroin is good, well then everyone must support heroin use regardless of facts and truths.
The rats and the Pied Piper deserve each other but please let the rest of us veer off before the cliff.
5
This is utter nonsense. He bemoans loss of economic security and jobs at the same time as he bragged of there being more employed people ever in the United States. If we were to deport, as Buskirk undoubtedly dreams, every illegal alien in the country, the unemployment rate would drop into negative numbers, as it is already at a paltry 4%.
Look, he made a promise, “Mexico is going to pay for the wall.” Make that so, and we have no argument.
5
The non-crisis problem at the border HAS NOT "precipitated a political, economic and moral crisis".
The GOP has done that.
Indeed, the "border crisis" is an example of Republican lies that are precipitating America's greatest crises in the modern era - that of a government sold out to the rich.
It was progressive taxation that built America's enviable middle class. Republican regressive taxation is destroying the middle class.
90% of Americans are struggling, while 75,000 of our richest families are having a ball. Guillotine them, not the poor peasants from Central America.
1
Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way.
Nixon's MAD (mutually assured destruction) tactic required him to appear irrational, even rabid at times in order to dissuade the Russians (called Ruskies) from testing the limits of their power. Now it's the Americans, not the Russians, who need convincing their leader is, from time to time, out of his gourd. Different container, same lousy flavour.
2
“Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way. "
In other words, acting like a terrorist.
3
The Constitution’s “Take Care Clause” task presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Immigration and Nationality Act and the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act tasks the president to arrest, prosecute and remove or deport illegal border crossers and illegal aliens residing without authorization in the United States. Rather than criticizing the president for enforcing laws against illegal immigration, people who think illegal illegal immigrants should not be inconvenienced should ask their congressmen to make illegal immigration legal.
Wow.
Hard to fathom the chasm between my understanding of reality and Mr. Buskirk's.
11
If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he’ll deserve his fate.
How do you betray the uneducated?
Tell them you love them.
He’ll deserve his fate after SDNY legal team gets through with what’s left after the Mueller investigations and all the other law suits against his family, his inaugural monies, his connections with “Rusher” (as he pronounces it) his family foundations...
3
The Constitution’s “Take Care Clause” task presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Immigration and Nationality Act and the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act tasks the president to arrest, prosecute and remove or deport illegal border crossers and illegal aliens residing without authorization in the United States. Rather than criticizing the president for enforcing laws against illegal immigration, people who think illegal illegal immigrants should not be inconvenienced should ask their congressmen to make illegal immigration legal.
1
Mr. Buskirk. You seem to be living in fantasy land.
I have never been in Texas. Or California. Or anywhere else close to the Mexican border.
I have read accounts from people--including border patrol people--who DO live in those places.
My takeaway impression from all those people is:
(1) a WALL is bound to be extremely expensive
(2) a WALL is not likely to work.
I have read, sir, that the DRUGS (of which you paint so harrowing a picture) are for the most part carried into this country on TRUCKS. And if we desire to HALT these drugs at the border, DOGS would be nice. Plus PERSONNEL to check those trucks and ferret out the illegal contraband.
I have read, sir, that most of the illegal immigrants in this country are persons who have entered it LEGALLY--and then overstayed their visas.
I am not altogether disparaging the notion of a physical boundary, here and there, separating our two countries. Such boundaries already exist. Of course.
But--as Ms. Pelosi pointed out not long ago--your ever-ballyhooed WALL is simply "a campaign line."
A sort of "never land WALL"--floating in the fevered imagination of millions--
--many of whom never came any closer to the US-Mexican border than I have--
--but who hate and detest Mexicans.
And so, Mr. Buskirk, like Colonel Travis at the Alamo--
--you have drawn a line in the dust with your sword--
--and DARED the rest of us to step OVER that line.
I think, sir, that we CAN.
I think, sir, that we WILL.
8
I am not sure why you wrote this long opinion about trump and his desire for a wall to fulfill an election buss comment. The answer is at the end of the comment that was said every time trump called for a wall, MEXICO will pay for it "mark my words" he can't make that happen. Just another trump con and a lie on it's face. Now he wants taxpayers to pay. We say NO.
3
This is a deeply offensive column. There is NO authority by which the president can fire furloughed workers. It would never survive court challenges. I am an attorney and a federal employee.
Buskirk wants not only for the president to harm his innocent hostages (the hardworking fed employees), but to threaten to kill the hostage. It's not enough for him that hardworking Americans serving their gov't have to go without food or medicine or worry about paying the rent. To suggest permanently firing them is to show a complete lack of morality -- it is immoral.
W hy stop there, Buskirk?? Why not have the president threaten to have the Air Force bomb Pelosi's home in
S.F.? He has more authority to do that than to fire furloughed workers for no reason.
10
Trump promised (1) a wall and (2) Mexico would pay for it. So he has no mandate whatsoever to come shake his tin can at Congress, begging for a handout from the American taxpayer.
Get on a plane to Mexico City and ask AMLO for the money.
1
I understand NYT wants a "diversity of opinion," but why does that mean reprinting outright lies? Other commenters have correctly pointed out that this "competition for jobs" is a myth, many Americans balk at taking certain kinds of labor jobs—and, in part because of GOP efforts, those aren't middle class jobs anyway, they're "scraping by on double shifts" jobs.
and the numbers: per the DEA, most drugs come through legal points of entry. Testimony at the El Chapo trial bears this out, albeit anecdotally. When it comes to the opioid crisis, we can look in the mirror at the rapacious devotion to profits by drug companies (shoutout to the Sackler family) and broken health care system.
there are too many repeated falsehoods to list, but honestly, publishing lies is a dereliction of duty on the part of the paper of record.
6
The effect on people of Fox-TV and right-wing propaganda is not only disillusioning and worrisome for the future of our country, but outright pathological. Or something.
3
Mr. Buskirk equates border security with "the wall". This has been so thoroughly debunked, even by conservatives (see https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-wall-wont-work for example), that I need not belabor the point. The wall is a foolish, idiotic and utterly unrealistic proposal. But I am puzzled by Mr. Buskirk's argument that Trump has to move forward with the wall, "using executive authority". There is no such authority. The Constitution clearly gives the power of the purse to Congress, and you can't build the wall for free. The idea that Trump can declare a national emergency and then simply proceed is just wrong. There has to actually be an emergency. Given that illegal immigration has been declining for most of the last decade, it would be hard to justify that claim.
In any case, this approach is impractical. If the President proceeds with such a declaration, it will immediately be challenged in court. The resulting case could outlast the current presidential term and quite possibly the next one, particularly if you also consider the many eminent domain cases that will have to be adjudicated.
Why President Trump is allowing his presidency to be hamstrung by this boondoggle escapes me, but let's face it: this wall is not going to happen.
I appreciate the NYT for these occasional glimpses into the alternate reality. I'm a bit too much of a liberal snowflake to dive into the cesspits myself.
I can't get enough of this relatively new Republican argument that elite liberals use illegal immigrants as pawns in class warfare against the (white) working class. This was originally one of the arguments that led up to the Civil War: that cheap slavery of black people hurt free white laborers. Except this time, the argument is a lie spread in bad faith by conservative media. We've come full circle. Republicanism has lived long enough to become the villain.
1
Why not just make it nearly impossible to hire the undocumented? Then they won't come unless we set up a visa for them making their work legal. Then we would not need to waste so much money on a wall.
Oh yea, you Republicans would have to pay them an American wage. Sorry. Answered my own question
This is the evil spawn of Trump: the assured and urgent assertion of authority on behalf of nonsense.
As others have noted, it should be considered a public service by The NYTimes to illustrate the delusional and dishonest rationality of Trump's amen choir by featuring it in an Op-Ed article.
An easy tone of banal certainty flows through every paragraph depicting Trump's wall as the same thing as border security when every credible expert has indicated otherwise.
Mr. Buskirk blithely utilizes nearly every rhetorical and logical trick in the book: The Ad Hominem, Voice of Authority, Straw Man, False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Done Deal and Begging the Question. He stirs them until well blended into a thick fog and then adds a dollop of Trump's special brand of surreal for that extra kick of cynical and crazy.
For all Trump acolytes in states that have yet to decriminalize cannabis this Op-Ed furnishes a comparable euphoria and ample white noise to dampen doubt.
Public Health experts report the incidence of Delirium Tremens to be relatively rare so we should be truly grateful to both The Times and Mr. Buskirk for allowing us a glimpse of this beast so infrequently seen around these parts.
“Power unused is power lost. It’s a political truth that Democrats understand and Republicans pretend doesn’t exist.”
Is this a joke? Who is this guy?
Does the author of this piece realise that Trumps own businesses have been hiring illegal workers for decades? Hey here is an idea instead of a costly absurd wall (you do know that 1,000 miles of border is a river) how about putting the employers of illegal workers in prison for a nice round 20 years. Why not try that one first it’s even a simple chant just like build the wall for Trump supporters to shout at rallies “lock him up”.
1
Hilarious opening to this article. Yes, he will deserve what happens to him, because of his utter incompetence, hypocrisy, greed and inhumanity. He hasn’t declared the border situation a national emergency because it isnt one, he won’t be believed by those who matter. Did you see the grim Pentagon contingent at the SOTUS? Or the looks on John Robertson’s Eleanor Kagan’s Faces when he spoke of legislation against late-term abortion? Did you watch Grassley and Cruz and McConnell taking atrump’s measure? Your man is already toast, unless he takes the country over via extra-Constitutional force, god forbid.
Power unused is power lost? This is appallingly shallow reasoning, and beneath an opinion writer in the NYT. Does that mean we should have dropped nuclear weapons in Vietnam? On Moscow? We had the power to do so, but not using it contributed materially to the survival of humankind on this planet since 1945. I actually have some sympathy with the underlying point. Now that Trump has raised the issue of the wall to that of an, as yet, undeclared national emergency, he will have too go through with it. And he will, whether it's needed or not. Surely, the NYT can do better than this.
Mr. Trump should forget the wall and move on. This issue is a complete and utter waste of time.
Emergency Order or another shut-down, which will it be? Should be a fun nine days.....
For the billionth time, Democrats want border security (or border integrity, whatever it's called)! This ridiculous and continuing lie that Democrats actually WANT open borders, human trafficking, illegal drugs and smuggling, etc. is vile and sick.
The only thing in question here is what is the best means of security: a single unified wall, or some combination of wall, fences, drones, sensors, and other technology that takes into account the enormous range of geography our southern border encompasses. The latter kind of border security is similar to what Israel has.
One of many great ironies is that Republicans constantly decry overreach by Washington. They want to give individuals and localities more control. Well, in this case, they won't listen to local experts from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. No, a man who spent his entire life in New York City and knows nothing about our southern border has decreed that the only way to protect it is via a physical wall. The President and his supporters are blindly fixated on a wall; nothing else matters. No other possible solution to border security will be considered.
It is utter madness.
3
When Trump was appointed president his party controlled both the House and the Senate.
The old draft dodging coward could have got funding for the wall on day one but cutting taxes for billionaires was far more important.
Now the republics are trying to blame Democrats for something they couldn't do in two full years and and trump's less than, adult base is cool with that.
That, right there, is why we continue to fly over their sad, insolvent kindergartens.
2
The President could have permanently fired workers in areas completely unassociated with border security to punish the nation for failing to agree with him that he needs a wall?
Well, gee, Mr. Buskirk, why not just line them up and kill every tenth person? That has been an effective means of coercion since Roman times - even the Nazis used it - and inspired the term "decimate."
The point of the resistance - total and non-negotiable - on the shutdown - was the Trump was using extortion, and brooked no compromise. Digging deeper on an autocratic perversion of democracy is not the way to go.
So let's just get this out in the open, clearly. Not. Everyone. Thinks. We. Need. To. Waste. Billions. On. A. Wall. Many of us feel that a border which will still need to be patrolled after a wall goes up could be patrolled without the wall. And many of us believe that some places merit a border fence more than others - those places a likely to need more security than just a wall.
And those of us who think that the hunger for a wall is nuts, voted the GOP out of Congress. We tried to avoid the Trump Presidency altogether, a but a Michigan
vote counts more than one from a mere New Yorker.
You want a wall? Build it the way churches fund capital plans. Let anyone who wants that wall to donate to it, and they can get a tasteful plaque put on it somewhere in Arizona, once the landowners agree to have it erected on their acres.
1
Could not get through this. So silly. You say he could have won because of some political theory involving December 2018 and and January 2019. Well that is nonsense. He of course could have easily done the wall by pressuring his own party when they controlled both houses. He did not because the wall is just a means to whip up voters and he was willing to have his party spend no political capital. To now claim you are an orphan is chutzpah.
In regard to the justification for The Wall, this opinion piece is full of more tired propaganda for the weak minded and the Loyal Minority. As far as its political analysis, I'm frankly not interested in what happens to Trump if he doesn't build The Wall. Either way, the Disloyal Majority will be disposing of Trump in 2020.
I don’t believe this author cares about the “general welfare” of the public. Just as second amendment supporters don’t believe in “a well regulated militia”.
Let's cash the check full of pesos first, as Trump promised many times. Then we can talk about a wall.
"Power unused is power lost."
Indeed how true it is.
Take Mr. Trump's much admired hero, another president, President Putin. Did any one notice how his opponents come to and end? Imprisoned, Dead, Exiled - Exiled and Dead, Exiled and Injured.
That's why Trump's power is not as great as Putin's who uses his power much more often and much more effectively.
No Wall, No Peace. Indeed, shut down the government again, lay off all Federal employees and replace them with someone having the last name Trump. Declare not emergency but martial law - remember power unused is power lost. After all President Ferdinand Marcos did that in the Philippines.
Build the Wall. Build the Trump Tower Moscow.
Finally, yes, it is good to have different views but for The Times to publish such a piece of garbage?
1
Fire the furloughed workers, really? In what universe is this a good idea. Based on what rationale. That the furloughed are non-essential? To whom? Mr. Buskirk appears to be another hater of government who apparently sees the civil service as simply the "administrative state" run amok. A straw man from the get-go, the issue immigration as somehow a crisis on a par with Global Climate Change, inequality and the visibly crumbling national infrastructure in plain site nationwide, isn't just laughable. It's a page out of the authoritarian primer. Distract the plebs with phony problems so you can rob them blind while whipping up to a frenzy of anger and hate misdirected at poor people from Central America seeking asylum.
I'd never heard of this author (maybe I don't get out of my liberal echo-chamber enough) but as soon as I saw he was the editor and publisher of a journal called "American Greatness" I figured that would tell me a lot about the kind of article I was about to read. I wasn't wrong.
1
If walls worked there would be NO undocumented workers at trump resorts but alas, trump resorts teem with undocumented workers.
Donnie, first show us you can keep undocumented workers out of your own golf courses before you try it in a larger scale.
What do you say old man?
I don't mind reading conservative opinions in the Times but in no way does this article live up to any standard of factuality, thus it makes so sense to read it, and it is disservice to publish it. Send this guy back to the dark corners of the internet and find someone who can argue the conservative case with integrity.
1
Mr. Buskirk...For a more realistic take on things, please re read Mr.Trump's favorite full length tome, "Humpty Dumpty"
Many many times over.
Please.
"He must educate and persuade the American people..."
Educate? Trump?
This has to bei either sarcasm or delusion
I understand that the New York Times needs to provide a balance on their opinion pages, but shouldn't they insist on a certain level of intellectual rigor, like that provided by David Brooks or Ross Douthat? Christopher Buskirk is a propagandist and blogger who repeats rightwing talking points and writes for a far-right web site. There's nothing to chew on in this mishmash of nonsense.
The gist of his argument appears to be that Trump should ignore the Constitution and demand the right to appropriate money for something he couldn't get Congress to pass, even when it was controlled by Republicans. He also argues that Trump should have fired hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers (presumably including border patrol agents) in an effort to extort the country.
Buskirk figures that if he goes hardline, Trump--who is terrified of his base--will do as he demands. But what he's advocating is just another version of political suicide for Trump. If he had fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers, or if he starts another shutdown, he'll lose in the swing states he needs; the shutdown was unpopular even with his base. Buskirk represents a declining number of hardcore immigration extremists like Coulter.
1
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more."
I don't read the news to confirm my own beliefs. There is often value in hearing opinions from outside of my own bubble. But c'mon, NYT! How could anyone other than Ebenezer Scrooge at his most malevolent worst suggest that hundreds of thousands of pawns of the recent "shutdown" who were maliciously and arbitrarily deprived of the paychecks upon which they depend should have permanently lost their jobs through no fault of their own? The fact of being a federal employee does not carry the risk of being callously used by an unbalanced and clownish conniver.
What do we get from this piece other than confirmation that some people who know how to write are also incomprehensibly mean spirited? Fair and balanced journalism does not require that you give a voice to such drivel.
4
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan:
Me. Trump, Tear down this Wall!
I looked at the American Greatness site and saw it publishes work by protofascist immigrant Sebastian Gorka. That's all I need to know about Mr. Buskirk and his organization.
1
This column is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The writer believes many impossible things, and all before breakfast.
The gargantuan statistics he cites about border crime conveniently ignores that almost all of it takes place at staffed crossings...
It ignores the monumental stupidity and incompetence of Donald Trump. The wall would be a fantasy solution to a real problem.
Of course there is a far easier way to end illegal immigration. Pass a law making the top management and Board of Directors responsible for the employment of illegals, with mandatory jail sentences for serial offenders. Trump can announce his support for the policy and ask the law to be passed immediately by both Houses of Congress. It will happen instantaneously. He can sign it. He can request that the Department of Justice investigate him. He can be indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. Then President Pence can pardon him.
Dan Kravitz
“Economic crisis?”
Trump claims about the economy at the SOTU would seem to be at odds with your opinion on this matter.
So who’s lying- you, Trump or both?
“But the real answer is that big-business Republicans like Paul Ryan blocked action in the last Congress....Cheap labor undercuts the economic security of the American working class and is bad for the country. Border security is part of a solution.”
1) Trump isn’t a big-business (big money) Republican?
Let’s see....(this is the tip of the iceberg really), but Trump has ENDORSED, SUPPORTED, SPONSORED, ENCOURAGED, etc.
-massive deregulation favoring large wealthy industries (especially highly polluting industries like energy, etc. financial services industries including banks & payday loan services that disproportionately harm the poor )
-tax cuts for corporations
-Trump has also RENEGED on campaign promises to TRULY target BIG pharmaceutical companies & has done nothing to rein in one of the worst loopholes on taxes on income - that of hedge-fund managers
2) If Trump cares about the effects of cheap labor on the working class, then..
-why have numerous illegal immigrants recently been fired from 5 Trump owned golf clubs in recent weeks following an expose that began with the NYT?
-why did those Trump properties allegedly decline to use e-check in states that didn’t mandate it?
-why did Trump also hire illegal immigrants to build Trump DC Hotel despite claiming ALL workers had passed e-check? (allegedly per WaPost investigation)
-why did Trump also allegedly hire illegal Polish immigrants to construct one of his famous NYC buildings decades ago?
Christopher Buskirk asks "Does that mean that “it’s all over for Trump,” as headlines have regularly blared?"
I searched Google for the phrase "it's all over for Trump". I found a tweet from 8 December 2018, I found a reddit entry from 27 April 2016, but I did not find any headlines whatsoever, much less a regularly repeated headline.
So Burskirk's second sentence is a complete fabrication! He can't write even two sentences without a preposterous lie.
With illegal immigration at a forty year low and places like McAllen, TX enjoying their lowest crime rate in thirty years, the president will have a hard time rationalizing his emergency declaration in our courts. Fortunately, in a legal challenge facts matter.
With two hundred tunnels found since 1990, 9,200 recorded breaches of existing walls, and all eight of the president’s prototypes failing DHS requisitioned penetration tests... the facts show quite clearly that walls don’t work.
'Permanently lay off federal workers'? That's your plan? Gee, wonder how people would react to every airport in America being shut down.
"The question is why Mr. Trump has not already done so [declare an emergency]?" Maybe because there isn't a real emergency? And maybe because the wall wouldn't stop the vast majority of 'problems' trump has cited to justify building a wall? No one, including you, Mr. Buskirk, have provided one iota of a rational argument buttressed by facts for spending $25 billion on a stupid wall. Your argument boils down to: we need a wall because we want a wall. That's not a reason to do anything, except for a child.
So incoherent in Buskirk's own words... If it was Ryan stopping the wall, then the blame on Democrats is totally a bit fat politicial lie. Also, no mention of the GOP and Trump's intransigence in refusing to accept previous immigration compromises, and always moving the goalposts for the ultra hard line anti-immigrant position. Buskirk' greatness is limited to his willful ignorance and selective view of facts and history.
Lot of nonsense!
A wall would not end America's immigration problems. The real problem is mismanagement of the border entry points, the essential doors through which asylum seekers and hundreds of millions of dollars of commerce pass each year.
Immigrants are necessary to the American way of life. They do the dirty, hard work while native-born Americans loll about air-conditioned offices doing meaningless jobs, or stay home wallowing in addictions.
The President should seek also to promote the general welfare and insure domestic tranquility. That's part of his oath of office. Gun homicides, opioid and alcohol addiction, poverty, lack of health care, and declining life spans are some of the national emergencies that warrant Executive action.
Trump's wall is an ignorant "solution" to a problem that Trump does not understand. It's nothing more than a campaign slogan
Make America great again: dump Trump!
1
There are about 16 Million migrants in the USA from Mexico and South/Central America - about 5% of our 326M.
Of course there are more citizens considered Latinos/Hispanic in the USA; about 17% of USA identifies as Latino/Hispanic. This is the way of the USA.
My people (Italians) once CONSIDERED INFERIOR migrants by I suspect people like you only number 0.4M migrants today. But citizens with Italian origins are about 6% of the population - BTW that number includes Pelosi, Alito, and did Scalia if you get my drift.
Based on your name I'll assume you have Dutch origins - about 5M of our citizens claim such - a very small percent of us today but around 1776 the Dutch percent was formidable indeed.
We are a nation of immigrants. Why shouldn't people want to come here and why shouldn't we in a controlled BUT fair and unbiased way welcome them.
With 25% of the World's wealth and only 6% of its population we have enough pie to share.
We have land/resources - about 93 people/sq. mile luxuriously roomy - example UK very comfortable at 713/sq. mile.
We need hard workers/all levels of skills and a sustaining population. Indeed Latinos/Hispanics are saving our butts.
It's disingenuous to say the Ds do not want immigration control and security. Their offers exceed Trump's original requests pre-wall hysteria.
Their offers are technically and morally cogent. They just do NOT cater to lower instincts nor fanatically bite a hand that is and will feed our strength as a Nation.
I wonder the view of the writer on trump selling the country to Russia. What fate would he deserve for that one?
Why in the world does the NY Times feel that the same distortions that come out of Trump can be parroted back in a Times column in the name of providing different viewpoints? Distortion is distortion, lies are lies. The Times needs to debunk voices like these, not give them legitimacy.
2
Why would Democrats support a "wall" if Trump supporters will dump the guy when (it's not if) he fails to deliver one?
30,000 people a year in the US killed by gun violence due to an unfettered NRA and I am supposed to worry about Honduran women in flip flops with babies on their hip?
here's an idea: I could care less about Trumps "loyal" supporters and what they think .
How much are trump's " loyal supporters" getting back in taxes this year? What do they pay for healthcare?
Where is the " cheaper better healthcare " he promised?
Didn't he say Mexico was paying for his wall?
ps: the planet is dying in case you hadn't noticed.
I think that takes precedence over Mexican vegetable pickers coming here.
1
"and so forth." Nice touch.
This completely dishonest article starts with the lie that Speaker Pelosi made a "demand" of Donald Trump. The truth is the exact opposite: It was Trump who made the demand (border wall funding) of Pelosi. If The Times insists on giving us the views of Trumpoids, would you please find some who can argue honestly, or at a minimum at least not lie so obviously.
If Trump and the Republicans wanted The Wall so badly they should have passed their one-party tax cut bill or any of their one-party budgets with wall money in them. But they don't want it. They only need its spectre now that Democrats control the House. In essence, they seek to punish Democrats for getting elected. Speaker Pelosi needs to hold fast to her NO WALL position and let Trump and his bigoted, backwards minions hang themselves from their idiotic, worthless, waste-of-taxpayer-money wall.
For Republicans to stake their political futures on a campaign slogan meant to revive Trump's memory on the trail would be the height of stupidity. Republicans are hypocritical but they aren't suicidal. See how they desert the sinking Trump ship of state, like the rats they are, when he starts making noises about shutting the government down again. He has lost, his ignorant followers have lost, and the GOP has lost by following him this far. You've lost, Mr Buskirk. Lost Democracy may yet be regained when Trump and the GOP are swept from office in 2020.
2
Blame the immigrant. Divisive victimology that deserves a fate on the ash heap of history. Unfortunately, it's the zombie that keeps coming back, even after generations of immigration have built the country.
You'd think we'd learn?
88
Funny how people prefer lies to truth.
What part of "The Mexicans are going to pay for it." doesn't the author get?
I never heard, "The taxpayers are going to pay for it." Anybody?
1
Republicans have had years of control of both House and Senate if they wanted to appropriate money to build a wall. But now, as illegal border crossings are dramatically down, it is a national emergency! Go peddle your fantasies elsewhere, Mr. Buskirk.
1
“If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he'll deserve his fate."
Only someone who has paid absolutely no attention to Trump’s actual track record would think that Trump cares a whit about anyone but himself. Christopher Buskirk, you have avidly bought a bill of goods from a known liar and con man.
2
Dear Author,
I believe you missed your turn. You've overshot the Fox zone. Unfortunately for you, most Times readers are aware of your many factual lapses (existence of a crisis, effectiveness of a wall). We noticed that you think Trump should be more viciously insane. And we're repulsed by your inhumanity to federal workers and migrants. Next time you get lost, do it somewhere else.
3
The fact is that if you are scared of Border Security you should be screaming about the Canadian border not the southern border.
Trump digging up National Parks, nature preserves, ceding land to Mexico and demanding imminent domain over the land of Texans is a monument to his gigantic ignorance, and the unceasing ignorance of his followers. Trump thinks San Antonio is a border town for chrissakes.
A president if president for ALL not his little Pity Party who whine and whine and whine about the border from chairs in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Just stop.
2
Mr Buskirk, thank you for being part of the NYTimes effort to provide 'fair and balanced' reporting.
The flow of humanity accross the US border would've gone down long ago had 5.7 billion dollars been spent on law enforcement agains US corporations employing illegal immigrants.
So, you think it's a good idea to threaten to fire Federal workers to get a wall? How exactly is this different from terrorism? Take an innocent hostage, threaten them to get what you want? This is despicable nonsense.
75,000 deaths last year from drug overdoses. The majority of these were the result of the abuse of proprietary, ‘prescription only’ opioid pain medications. Addiction to pain medications - domestically sourced - has cut a swath of destruction through America’s rural communities; places where most folks are more likely to win the lottery than to cross paths with an immigrant, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal.’
35,000 deaths last year from gunfire. Tens of thousands more suffer permanent injuries as a result of gunfire each and every year. Tens of billions in medical costs are incurred treating gunshot wounds in emergency rooms and trauma centers nationwide. “Mass shootings” have become commonplace. In Las Vegas, a middle-aged white guy, armed to the teeth, gunned down scores of innocent Americans from his perch on the upper floor of a luxury hotel, with weaponry and ammunition designed for maximum kill during wartime. A heavily armed white guy shot up a Texas church. Not a Latino in sight. Another shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh - and ditto.
And you want to build a wall to ‘keep us safe’? Have you completely lost your mind? You may as well burn incense to ward off evil spirits. The enemy is on this side of the southern border, bubba.
2
This piece is totally disingenuous. Surprised it was printed by the NYT. I guess you want to seem “fair” by giving the Trumpites some air time.
There is no crisis at the border other than the fact that these poor refugees are being denied their right to apply for asylum and are being treated worse than animals. Immigration from Mexico both legal and illegal is way down.
A wall is an outmoded, ineffective, expensive way to secure the border. All security experts agree on this. It is merely a symbol of Trump’s (small hands ...) manliness.
Immigrants commit less crimes than ordinary Americans.
In our system of government the President’s job is not to make laws but rather to execute laws passed by the legislature.
The suggestion that the President should have fired the furloughed employees to get his way is vile.
And make no mistake. The Republicans, as sycophantic as they have been, will have a breaking point. If Trump were to cause this much disruption they would pass a veto proof spending bill.
Who did you say you were ?
1
It's not a problem for Trump to hire undocumented workers at his golf courses. What hypocrisy!
Pelosi has brainpower. Trump does not.
You make a clear argument for disciplining those US business interests that hire illegals and corrupt our politics, but you focused on the wall. The need for a wall is created by those who hire illegals. Therefore follow your own logic. Focus on the source and punish US businesses by enforcing hiring laws. Your focus on policing the border hurts the innocent and is cruel and foolish. As you know.
Kabuki.
Bringing in the families of victims of crimes perpetrated by undocumented immigrants, some from my home town, to justify his wall was intellectually lazy at best. He could have filled the chamber with victims of the Murrah federal building bombing, or the recent Vegas massacre and used them to justify walls around Oklahoma and Nevada. But that would be stupid.
Crisis? I am much more concerned about the very real threat posed by both Russia and China, who reportedly have hacked into the US electricity grid. Could it be that all this "wall" talk is a purposeful and convenient distraction?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5126584/China-and-Russia-hack-into-US-power-grid.html
How about arresting the CEO's of businesses that hire illegals?
Oh, wait, that would include Trump.
Kudos (?) to the NYTs for airing a conservative? opinion?? (Sorry for all the ?s but really?). This guy knows that the wall was just a talking point Trump floated during the campaign that “stuck,” right? Even he (Trump) doesn’t (didn’t) believe in it.
Mr. Buskirk's OpEd is shallow and ridiculous in equal measure. Lay off furloughed workers? Well then what? Beside the fact that it would be cruel to hundreds of thousands of workers who had nothing to do with the shut down, it would have to be an incredibly stupid political stunt. Perhaps, Mr. Buskirk forgot forget about TSA, flight controllers, food inspectors, all of whom work to assure our health and safety. And so they should be fired so Donald Trump can get a wall that 60% of the country does not even want? Utterly ridiculous.
Mr. Buskirk's whole premise is seriously flawed from the start and factually weak throughout. There is no crisis at the border. Full stop. He belongs on Fox News not in the NY Times.
1
Not if. He already failed but you can pretend
What part of “NO” don’t you understand?
The author highlights the President's commitment to "preserve, protect, and the defend the Constitution". Last time I checked, that Constitution stated, in no uncertain terms, that the House of Representatives is responsible for determining how the people's money will be spent. If the House says "no" to funding the border wall, no amount of double-talk will make it constitutionally valid to build it.
706
@Eileen McCully
So true. Putting walls aside, I think we could clearly impeach or 25th Trump right now for not meeting the commitments he swore to.
ENOUGH!
16
@Eileen McCully
The man doesn’t read and hasn’t read the constitution nor does he even want to.
He loves the uneducated.
21
@Eileen McCully - outstanding comment.
8
The author fails to note two facts:
1. There is no data to show a wall is needed.
2. The vast majority of Americans don't want a wall.
If Trump was stupid enough to stick his neck out on this issue, then that is entirely his problem. The American people should not be forced to spend billions of dollars to bail him out politically.
1
Donald Trump the candidate ruined whatever chances Donald Trump the president ever had of getting a border wall through normal channels when he defamed Mexican immigrants and would-be immigrants as murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. He has no one but himself to blame for the fact that the debate over border security is now poisoned by the stench of bigotry and xenophobia. It didn't help matters when he goaded his foaming-at-the-mouth supporters into shouting ethnic slurs. He hasn't made the situation any better by continuing to insist that the migrant "caravans" are backed by sex traffickers and drug lords, rather than fleeing gang violence and economic desperation. Border security may be Trump's signature issue, but he made it a losing issue. Mr. Buskirk loses all credibility by failing to acknowledge that.
1
If the NYTimes is truly committed to publishing articles that represent diverse opinions, the least they can do is to require some journalistic rigor, otherwise they do nothing to educate the readers as to whether or not there is something of substance that they have missed. For one thing, how about applying the fact checking the reporters did the night before. This writer reiterates some of the same lies as Trump used - "30,000 sexual crimes and 4000 killings". By emphasizing winning, this essay is nothing but another iteration of the hateful rhetoric intended to stoke tribalism and divisiveness. The only thing it has done is to list all the different ways Trump could abuse the power of the office.
2
I’m guessing this writer is used to communicating only with conservative GOP folks, who are willing to swallow “arguments” that are no more than assertions.
If he want the Times Commentariat’s attention, he’ll have to up his game!
Otherwise it’s so easy - in multiple ways - to knock down his arguments. (As is plain from the comments.)
I grew up in a border town - Cleveland Ohio. And have visited many other border towns - Detroit Michigan, Chicago Illinois, Erie Pennsylvania, Buffalo New York and others. Do you know what I didn't see in any of those cities? A wall or concertina wire or any other "powerful barrier". Why are we obsessed with our southern border and oblivious to our northern border? Could it be because the folks from the south are of a slightly darker hue? No that can't be it, because if that were true then our president's wall obsession would be blatantly racist and we all know that he is "the least racist man in America."
The law gives“the president the authority he needs to direct existing appropriations toward construction of a border security wall, once he has declared a national emergency.” The question is why Mr. Trump has not already done so.
Perhaps, the problem is that there is, in fact, NO EMERGENCY on our southern border. No wave of immigrants swamping America. The number of incomming illegal aliens per year has fallen for several years and 2018 continued that decline. No cause for panic, no threat in fact all.
He says there is, and some dupes believe him, including, I guess you.
As a journalist, I suggest you need the course in fact checking if you want to be successful. Of just keep writing for dupes.
Trump has squandered any of the credibility or gravitas inherent in his office.
He has become his own caricature, and his snake oil peddling persona was on full display for his speech.
Why doesn’t he declare an emergency at the border?
uh...because there is no emergency, other than the hot mess in his White House and at Trump Inc.
Trump claims the wall is to protect American jobs:
According to Labor Department records. Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010. Nearly 300 Americans applied or were referred for job openings as waiters, waitresses, housekeepers and cooks at Mar-a-Lago since 2010. Only 17 of the American applicants were hired,
Trump the biggest liar and con artist ever to be greased into the Oval Office.
1
Another screed from a trump fanboy that has no basis in reality.
From the content of his writing it is unassailably obvious that Mr. Buskirk doesn't want to face facts, but the reality is that complex problems require complex solutions. "Build the wall!" is utter nonsense and deep down he knows it. trump's raison d'etre is nothing but a fever dream. His situation is a self-inflicted wound and it is not up to right-thinking people to enable his insanity.
As a wise philosopher once said: "You can't fix stupid."
2
And you think it's a good thing that Trump sometimes gets "his way" by seeming "crazy" and doing something "rash." You then think it's a wonderful assertion of "power" to use a "transgressive threat" to his advantage, using furloughed federal workers as pawns.
So, in other words, you're a Republican.
You repeat the idiotic talking point that Democrats are, by way of "dereliction," encouraging gangsters.
And then this doozy: "Identity politics, while a particularly virulent ideology and one that motivates many liberal activists, is in fact a cover for class warfare . . . " Identity politics is not cover for class warfare. "Identity politics" is a snarky term that privileged white conservatives use to diminish the justified and understandable common cause of the people in our country who have been the objects of discrimination and humiliation for most of American history.
I have a new term for the kind of identity politics you apparently endorse: Classless warfare.
Shocked.
Not at the content of this piece but at the fact that the NY Times thought it newsworthy enough to actually publish.
I am actually offended enough to reconsider my subscription.
What does this Opinion actually do to further balanced debate?
The author clearly is more than willing to accept fictitious numbers spewed by Trump to cement his rhetoric. That's all well and good as it happens often on news outlets like Fox.
But when you print Buskirk's comments based on Trump's false numbers during the SOTU: “In the last two years, our brave ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of criminal aliens, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 killings” as fact, you are simply adding bass to the volume of false information already circulating. That is a crime against America NY Times.
I expect more from my subscription to the NY Times. But based on the publication of this essay, I suppose tomorrow I will spend my dollars reading an excerpt about how being African American is a dream come true by David Duke. Or perhaps an in-depth how guns kill people by the LaPierre.
I respect the freedom of the press and the NY Times is free to publish opinions from all walks of life. And I am free to not buy them. If I want this type of in-depth and well founded reporting, I would just tune in Fox.
2
Every advanced country in the world has a ID card which identifies residents as nationals or authorized. Those without have no government approval and are restricted in bank accounts, government services, owning property, getting driver's licenses, etc.
Only in America can you enter the country without permission and have access to everything without having a single document to prove you are an authorized resident. As my father always said, "You can be smart or you can be stupid, but stupid is harder."
Maybe Mr. Buskirk needs to be reminded of the great humanitarian concern shown toward immigrants expressed by Trump's followers at rallies. Right around minute 2 will be very instructive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9YPYRaeTW0
1
It's amazing how many NY Times readers support human trafficking, sexual assault of women and child abuse. By so buying into the belief that trying to prevent people from crossing the border illegally, you are also buying into horrible abuse of those who try. So, please, be mindful that you support rape, child abuse (because an adult is more likely to be released if coming with a child), and human trafficking. You consider yourselves some type of humanitarian?
When I look at the history of "progressives" I see a few good ideas but mostly I see evil.
This the wall that Mexico was paying for, right?
1
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more."
Are you insane?
1
The Donald created this crisis to gain a “win” with his rabid base. That was, and remains his only concern. All of the rhetoric about invading armies of illegals, drug trafficking, rising out of control crime, sex slaves and every other negative narrative he can conjure up promotes this “victory”. If the Democrats knuckle under and give him the money to waste on his “Wall”he will, in his mind, “win”, no matter how it hurts the nation. Either way, harsh judgement of him by future historians is assured. Unless, of course, they are Russian.
This commentary is so ill-informed and ideological that the NYT should not have published it. The NYT should publish commentary from a wide range of informed, thoughtful perspectives. This does not meet that standard.
BTW- interesting that "Bob D" advocates prison for those who hire persons who have immigrated illegally- shall we presume that he favors imprisoning Donald Trump for his long practice of hiring undocumented workers?
Somebody said something like "everybody is entitled to their own preferences but not to their own truths."
The lies in this article should have disqualified it from publication in any respectable journal.
Do conservatives really believe that identity politics are a scam to keep the middle class down?
That’s like a racist breakfast scramble.
You can still taste the racism, but it’s a little harder to see exactly where it is.
Take all of Trump's worst traits and bump them up. Christopher Buskirk for Authoritarian of the Month!
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more",........
"Our government’s failure to secure the border has precipitated a political, economic and moral crisis. The fact that we not only permit, but by our dereliction, actively encourage gangsters to traffic in human beings across our border is a disgrace. It must end."
These are the assertions of a deranged individual. I guess the NYT just wants us all to know what the "base" actually is like.
What's appalling is that Buskirk (or anyone) thinks this way at all. First of all, anyone who has heard Trump speak knows (evidently so) he couldn't explain how a light bulb works let alone the complexities of border security. More importantly though, it's insulting to humanity (and personally to me) that you think border security is the defining issue of our day. Tell that to your grandchildren when they ask why you didn't fight against climate change as they pick through the rubble from their most recent climate-related tragedy.
Your lack of common sense and your proud ignorance in displaying it in an op-ed in the NYTs is not only sad (and I don't mean Trump SAD. I mean causing grief to those of us who care about our world), but also astonishing that you present it as though no one could easily access the facts of the matter.
Wow....Mr. Buskirk....you got my attention when you stated the president should use his power to fire all the furloughed workers. I was looking for a joke.....satire....but as I read on it dawned on me that you are serious. You clearly believe in the power of a wall to solve the problems of drugs and human trafficking, despite all the evidence to the contrary. You also seem to agree with the president that we are facing an emergency.....even though illegal border crossing are down...way down....and we never had an "emergency" when they were much higher. You might even agree with the president when he cherry picks a few murders by illegal aliens and demands this must stop.....yet we sit idly by while armed Americans kill unarmed Americans over and over again with only thoughts and prayers. You probably believe in total freedom and no gun control. We are clearly two Americans at total opposite sides. I do agree with you on one thing though...disappointing his base on the wall (which is going to happen) will bring him down politically....and in my view, that can't happen soon enough.
During the shutdown innocent workers were furloughed or had to keep working without pay, not to say contractors who will never get any back pay. This guy not only doesn't mind using federal workers as innocent pawns in a presidential tantrum but now he wants them summarily fired to boot. How like his ilk on the far right. Oh, and, was this column fact checked NYT?
"Miss Nancy is not going to give him that wall".
Finally, some rational thinking on immigration in the NYT. Wanna bet this will be the last we hear of it.
One cannot editorialize in support of the Trump administration because the president is a serial liar--not one of us knows what he means when he talks because he is incapable of telling the truth. The only position, the only "truth", he adheres to is fleeting mental construct, divorced from reality, for a moment's convenience. Please, find a rack worthy of your coat.
I'm sure women are raped & sexually harassed while making the journey north through Mexico. I was raped by a man who followed me into my building before the outer door closed & sexually harassed every day on streets & subway stations right here in the USA. I was also sexually harassed in Paris & Amsterdam. So where are rape & sexual harassment absent? Please tell me, so I can advise young women to move there.
77
so... no wall, then?
The wall can wait until Mexico sends us the $5.7 billion check Don the Con said they would.
1
Many people are gullible. What Trump said during the campaign was just words that he never meant. The wall and border security are not the same thing. The wall is not his issue it is the issue for his base, not him. His issue is doing what Vlad wants and getting more money through graft. You elected a criminal and now your upset that he is such an inadequate leader and negotiator. If you had actually measured his ability in an honest way you never would have voted for him. He is clearly a fool. You voted for a fool, so what does that say?
This commentary is a joke right? Right? Tell me. C'mon. It's a joke, right?
2
Uhhhh. Well Chris, I don't what to tell you but this: You ain't gettin' yer wall.
2
Why is the writer allowed to repeat untruths uttered by Trump such as the unfounded assertion about assaults against immigrant women? The Times has already published a refutation of this claim.
3
"AND MEXICO WILL PAY FOR IT!"
2
What part of "Trump will never get his idiotic wall" don't Republicans understand?
4
I realize the NY Times Op-Ed pages want to present a variety of viewpoints, including conservative ones, but please - from what barrel's bottom was this person retrieved? This column is simply Fox News propaganda, without a trace of nuance or consideration of the implications of declaring a national emergency to fund a border wall.
8
We are defending the borders! If you think the walls, where they are located, can constantly keep out those who want to get over and under them, you are irrational and have no critical thinking abilities!
With such a demand to get into this country from the south, we need some walls, but lots of drone and other modern surveillance techniques. High Tech.
We probably also need to have ID cards for all americans that identifies you for immigration purposes. That would be a pain for all of us but with the technology, solves the problem. There are all kinds of methods for doing this. Thinking we can use walls, an ancient technique with little success for modern times, is ignorant.
"No Wall, No Peace"--assume Buskirk is talking about Israel, right?
2
First let’s deport the visa overstays. And start a wall on our Northern border
What ? ...... I thought not
3
Conservative thinkers, when they make their way over to this op-ed page, repeatedly show that they are strikingly weak thinkers without command of the facts. This gentleman is no different. At least electrons are cheaper than print - this would have been a complete waste to print.
3
"Buskirk" -- that would be Dutch? We welcome you to our shores, Sir, and rest assured that there's no need to change your name to "ChurchInTheWoods" because the vast majority of your new compatriots will be perfectly accepting of you and whatever thoughts, opinions, or convictions you might harbor. Pay no heed whatsoever should you hear the phrase "talk Dutch" used by some in this land to mean nonsense, or "Dutch treat" to refer to embarrassingly inappropriate parsimony, or "Dutch fit" to mean rage, or "Dutch widow" to mean lady of easy virtue, or "Dutch nightingale" to mean frog, or "Dutch courage" to mean impulsiveness brought on by alcohol, for such are people of narrow minds and even lesser experience of the world. Yea, we welcome all Van Burens, Van Dykes, Bogarts, Fondas, Groenings, Van Halens and even DeVoses, however dark the Calvinist vision to which they subscribe and however deleterious and socially ruinous their future despoliation of resources owed to native-born schoolchildren.
5
The borders are quite secure. There is no crisis. You and Trump are lying about this because lying is what gives you power over that segment of the population that can't see through your lies.
Because your vision of American greatness is fundamentally based on this lie, you are in fact dragging the nation down into mediocrity under a president that lacks the honesty, intelligence, and mental stability to do his job.
But I guess your (hopefully brief) surge of power is worth that to you, right?
2
A brilliant exercise in imperial reasoning. The king has absolute power to destroy and throw things into utter chaos. He should do so because he can for whatever spurious reason he chooses. Yeah. Sounds legit. Who is this joker, Buskirk, again?
1
ahh; Mr. Buskirk; you are missing some basic facts: Trump is already lost - in corruption, in infidelity, in bullying, in lying, in paranoia, in racism, in fascism.
That you sadly believe a wall, in this day, would do anything to make the United States of America a better place, says all that I need to know about you.
Fear is misplaced in a place that is great, with people who are confident. Your sort of tripe trips over itself to prove to your leader that you mean it, you really mean it.
Sadly.
3
So many half-truths, misdirections & outright lies. Did Steven Miller ghost-write this column? Why is the Times giving Buskirk (a Claremont Review star) a megaphone? Will we next be reading Hannity & Limbaugh?
3
The author clearly pines for an autocracy. We don't have that here and he should think about moving somewhere where they do. Russia perhaps...
2
This article is disgraceful, and is nothing more than pro-dictatorial propaganda. This kind of xenophobic trashfire is just a distraction from issues that really matter.
3
....and what of Mr. Trump??? Who imported cheap labor from overseas to finish Trump Tower(built with Chinese steel no less). And the recently "discovered" undocumented workers serving him at Bedminster and Mar A Lago. The man reeks of hypocrisy. So please, Chris Buskirk, spare us your right wing rantings about the importance of a wall.
4
Nancy and Chuck, go on National TV and tell president bone-spurs he can have his $5 billion IF and only IF he releases his tax returns as he promised.
When trump's base of Mensa members sees their president balk at that very reasonable offer, even they will realize the border wall was nothing but a vanity project and had nothing whatsoever to do with border security.
It won't kill the border wall, his base is too stupid and childish to admit fault, but it will go a lot way in exposing trump's vanity and his base's utter idiocy.
3
Apparently Mr. Buskirk is one of the painfully naive and foolish folks who believe what Donald Trump's speechwriters wrote about preserving and protecting the Constitution. Most Americans now know Trump is a lying, cheating, self-serving, willfully ignorant, racist man whose only interests are his own enrichment.
2
Ramiro Gutierrez. Occupation - Illegal alien, MS gang member.
He just murdered another rival gang member in the NYC subway.
https://nypost.com/2019/02/05/alleged-ms-13-member-charged-with-murder-in-subway-shooting/
Those that want open borders should be forced to explain to the families of those who have had their children, mothers, fathers and other family members murdered by these animals why they think it is inhumane to stop all illegals from entering our country.
Build the wall and deport all illegal aliens, full stop.
1
Little more than a sophomoric piñata posing as journalism. Permanently laying off furloughed federal workers? Invoking Nixon's madman theory of foreign policy for domestic use? Really?
A diversity of political opinion has its place in the NYTimes, but this piece serves little purpose save for reinforcing the negative image of an insensitive, misguided, unrealistic conservatism.
2
Best piece of comedy I've read in the Onion in years. Keep it coming! Oh, wait, this is the New York Times? This guy was serious? That is an ever better joke.
2
Bye bye 45!!
1
I love how the column ends by stating "The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor," before explaining who Christopher Buskirk actually represents. Disclaimers are so very elegant in digital print.
Point in fact: Buskirk is paid to spout this nonsense. You needn't pay attention. You're from New York, right? Don't feed the pigeons.
1
I suppose it is to prove that the New York Times covers all points of view that it publishes nonsense like this. Please, NYT get someone on the far right who can make sense.
The US government should fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers? How about forcing them to work or throwing them in jail, in the name of emergency; that would make the point even more forcefully. The newspaper is wasting space and insulting readers' intelligence when it airs the sort of extremist nonsense Christopher Buskirk is spreading.
1
The great alt-country singer-songwriter Tom Russell said it best in song, years ago:
"...Now the government wants to build
A barrier like old Berlin 8 feet tall
But if Uncle Sam sends the illegals home
Who's gonna build the wall?
Who's gonna build your wall, boys?
Who's gonna mow your lawn?
Who's gonna cook your Mexican food
When your Mexican maid is gone?
Who's gonna wax the floors tonight
Down at the local mall?
Who's gonna wash your baby's face?
Who's gonna build your wall?"
1
This article added nothing to the discussion that’s been going on for years. Please spare us!
1
Who let this guy in here?
3
Wow. Trump has really raised the profile on bad ideas. Every paragraph here represents either bad information or a poor understanding of economics.
How did this make it into the NYT? I can go to fox or breitbart if i want read bad arguments for the wall. Why waste your editorial space for it?
2
This argument is ridiculous. It basically amounts to saying that every time laws are broken, the President can declare an emergency and say it’s required by his oath of office. So when a Democrat is President, should s/he say tax structuring/evasion is an emergency and get the army to round up potential tax cheats? Republicans have to consider the golden rule before making idiotic claims like this.
2
My comment is basically a question:
1) Should I post my reaction to this article here, in public? No, b/c it is too outrageous to waste any more of my time, much less anyone else's.
2) Should I fall for the disclaimer that "The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters . . . [blah blah blah, send us an e-mail]. So what good would that do? The Times publishes lot of things I don't agree with, but I still read them, think about them, and sometimes learn from them. But this is really over the top!!
3) Or do I just cancel my subscription after so many years? I've been on the verge for quite some time now for a great many reasons--OK, so the fact that I'm now being told that I have to pay more to get access to the cooking/recipe section is the least significant, but it is reaallly annoying!
So what do other readers think: #1, #2, or #3?
(assuming the NYT gatekeepers even authorize this comment). So off it goes, and we'll see what happens.
This wall’s true purpose is for the most expensive taxpayer funded presidential reelection TV commercial ever produced. It would show Trump, seated on a throne atop a tower resolutely gazing at the wall. The narration would claim that Trump alone saved us from crime, disease, drugs, assassins, the Spanish Inquisition and witch hunts. It has to be a dramatic visual for our reality TV fake president. Comprehensive, smart border security wouldn’t provide the simplistic optics needed for the commercial.
As for the spurious claim that undocumented immigrants take away jobs from Americans: if we truly get to the root cause, we would be deporting all the robots who replaced workers.
152
Ask anyone living along the U.S.-Mexico line, and they’ll tell you: We already have fences and walls, drones and helicopters, surveillance towers, checkpoints, and border patrol agents speeding their ATVs across the fragile biotic crust of the desert. Today’s walls and fences already cover 700 of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, dividing towns and families, and causing damage to the environment and border communities, many of which are low-income, tribal, or on the Mexican side of the line.
https://talkpoverty.org/2019/01/03/already-border-wall-environmental-disaster/
The Trump administration’s policies are leading to wholesale destruction of certain birds and other wildlife.
Search for "the trump administrations war on wildlife"
GAO argues that DHS may end up paying way more than anticipated, potentially wasting billions without anything to show for it.
Search for "GAO border wall" and you will find reasons it is a lousy idea.
Apparently the President and the Republican party like the idea of driving endangered species to extinction. Bulldozing the most important butterfly sanctuary makes them happy?
1
Mr. Buskirk, you are not realistic. What you are is 100% representative of the strange, conservative mindset that picks up on and endlessly rebroadcasts the same, tired, "I-live-in-a-bubble-and-I-cannot-hear-anything-outside-it" talking points about immigration.
Despite the Stephen Millers of this Administration -- who are inflaming the debate we should be having about immigration -- we are not in an immigration crisis. Illegal border crossings are 1/4th of what they were 20 years ago. Insisting otherwise does not lead to productive conversations about immigration.
It would be much better if we could all discuss factual analyses of world economics and climate change as the baselines for what is driving global immigration waves, rather than running around (as Fox News and Mr. Trump do) shrieking about imaginary crises and women with duct tape over their mouths. We need, in fact, more clarity and less craziness on this issue. Your article just stirs up the mud.
Oh, and by the way, no 'wall' is going to save Donald Trump.
2
The one critical piece missing in your analysis, is E-Verify. If properly enforced where the government crackdown on businesses and business owners with hefty fines which would shut down illegal immigration overnight. Trump and others on the Right overlook this on purpose because this would go against their own self interest. Trump and his cronies don't mind cheap labor from the south of the border. They only have a problem when that same dirt cheap labor starts to stand up and demand the same rights, benefits, and the same citizenship status as natural born citizens. Because once that happens their virtual slave labor force vanishes. That's what truly scares them. That is why they use thinly veiled bigotry and xenophobia to gin up their political base up to a level of mass hysteria to win on this issue.
3
It is an alternate reality where supporters, as well as the President, claim the southern border is a war zone. Where are the facts? statistics. The president called out members of the tree of life Synagogue from Pittsburgh last night. The elderly worshippers were killed because a mentally ill man believed the "fake news" about a caravan that was bringing terrorists and murderers to the border. Trump bears responsibility for the climate of fear at least.
Bernie Sanders spoke last night about how Trump selectively brought up an immigrant charged with two murders in Nevada (Not tried or convicted) when the most horrible mass murder in recent history was conducted in Las Vegas by an American citizen. Trump and Mr Buskirk are cherry pickers. Quoting Pogo
"We have met the enemy and he is us".
1
It time that we have some empathy for poor Donald Trump. Up until now this poor guy has been completely wallless. He could be sharply critiqued by history if this continues. All he really wants is just 2K miles of the Great American Wonderful Welcome Wall.
P.S. Perhaps a comfy 8 x 10 cement block space with beautiful vertical iron bar for safety from the caravans could help?
1
Maybe NOT building the wall is the best panacea for the increasing leftist radicalization that we're witnessing right now (in fact some NYT columnists have started posting essays titled "There's Nothing Wrong with Open Borders" and "Abolish Billionaires" -- astute NYT readers will know whom I'm referring to).
Rather than antagonize the left, let them enjoy the traditional lax, laissez-faire approach to border security. Sure, they'll talk about "e-Verify" and stronger checkpoints, but George W. Bush and Clinton and Reagan talked about them too. A deterioration in the quality of life and living standards in the US, while painful, will be a wonderful antidote to their beliefs. Crowded schools and hospitals, rising crime, no money for infrastructure, increasing poverty, increasing social strife, will all be the result. Maybe they need to see it to believe it.
1
I didn't realize that there was a journal of American Hubris.
3
Breathtakingly political... and useless. This isn't about trump "continuing to make the case", it's that he's failed to make the case for 2 years. He's been unable to convince a majority of Americans, Congress, or even the majority of republicans in the house and senate to support this while his own party had majorities. It's time to let this albatross go.
3
The wall is a non issue.
Same sex marriage and abortion are non issues.
Their sole purpose is to enrage people for political manipulation.
The problem is and always will be Trump.
He is right that the only reason people oppose him is because they don’t like him.
What’s to like? Exactly what informs him of his self proclaimed genius?
He is not credible. Not in the least.
He is not honorable or decent. Not in the least.
He has no potential, i.e. zero potential, to become either.
He is to be resisted on all fronts.
Wall, what wall?
You don’t think for a minute he cares about a wall, but he does care about his “fans” and his ratings. His fans care about a wall, but only because they’ve been convinced to disproportionately fear and hate people south of the border, this fear and hatred has been neatly linked to a structure that will save them.
The wall is as imaginary as the Trump’s new clothes, unfortunately his fan base is real.
1
The recent drug bust by a drug dog at a port of entry, Nogales Arizona, should make one wonder about the cost of a drug sniffing dog and handler.
The salary of the handler and the cost of the dog would less than $90,00 per year. Trump’s request for $5.7 billion could be used to get 63,000 drug dogs and handlers.
I believe 63,000 drug dogs and handlers would find plenty of drug smugglers and humans being trafficked.
If you are serious about stopping the problem, put your money where is would be most effective, rather than running you mouth being a Trump parrot.
3
What is this emergency? What charts show a dramatic increase in illegal immigration compared to years past? What obvious tipping point has been crossed? If these can't be demonstrated then we are setting the bar for invoking an "emergency" dangerously low. Where are all those Republicans that railed against Obama's executive overreach? Are they so confident that now Democrat will ever be elected president again? This dumb wall is worth further tipping the checks and balances towards the executive?
(Look at the lengths that Britain and the EU are going to in an attempt to avoid physical border posts, let alone a wall, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. They had a real emergency in 1960s - 1990s, with guns, ammunition bombs and terrorists crossing that border - but knew enough not to build a wall then, and certainly not now.)
There is no ecological, environmental, historical, humanitarian supportable reason to build a wall. Germany learned a wall was not a solution. We need to tear down mental walls that think physical walls are a solution.
It’s hard to read someone advocating for an iron-fisted dictatorship to replace democracy, and for promoting the general welfare by turning the country into an armed camp hunkering down behind a wall, and for denying facts generated by our own government that over 90% of “the vast quantities of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border” are actually coming in through legal ports of entry, and for heartlessly promoting the permanent laying off of federal employees as a perfectly reasonable way to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution…until…you realize that this is just satire. Right Mr. Buskirk?
Boy, you had me scared for a minute. Well, thanks for the comic relief - we sure need it now.
The statistics cited by Trump, and this article, are either false or misleading. The Dems DON'T WANT open borders. They will support smart borders, ones better able to accomplish the goals Trump cites but with both greater cost effectiveness and more rapid deployment. One particularly jarring element of the article. The El Chapo trial revealed that a wall would NOT PREVENT ANY drugs from crossing the border. This isn't about national security, this is about ignorant folks being misled by a con-man who plays to their fears.
I don't see Mr. "Law and Order" Buskirk advocating the vigorous arrest and prosecution of all the business owners and upper management who knowingly hire illegals. I guess the illegal are forcing those poor business people into breaking the law. Prosecuting the bosses will end the illegal immigration but then the bosses will have to pay decent wages to Americans to do the work.
I truly wonder what country this guy lives in, because it bears no resemblance to the one I see when I travel around. He should get out more.
Buskirk wrote:
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage."
OMG, has the entire Rightwing Cabal has its collective sanity! (They might as well, because they lost their brains, hearts, souls, and moral compass years ago.)
Governing by slash and burn? Firing thousands of normal, hardworking, middle-class Americans, causing them unnecessary financial pain, just to score some political points? (And for a "wall" that immigration experts have stated will not be effective!) This is what you espouse is "American Greatness?"
Sorry, you can keep your idea of "greatness!" I'd much prefer to live in a mediocre country that treats its citizens with fairness and compassion. I'd rather live in a mediocre country which doesn't hate our neighboirs and our allies around the world. I'd rather live in a mediocre country where the leaders govern by use of critical thinking and concern for for everyone's well-being, not just for their "base" of voters.
A few decades ago, I remember that my reaction to the slogan "compassionate conservatism" was an oxymoron. Fast forward: It's only gotten worse....
1
Yes, true this was his campaign promise, as was the part repeated at every rally, that Mexico was going to pay for it.
Let him fulfill the promise as sold to his uneducated followers.
( “I love the uneducated”)
That’s what he needs to sell to the public.
This is a man who doesn’t read.
Is he even aware that we have a border on our northern side which needs protecting?
Why allow cheap labor to come through anywhere?
Build that wall and see if you can get Canada to pay for it.
1
Depressing, when writers like Mr. Buskirk repeat Trump's falsehoods, distort the facts, equate a political demagogue's rallying "wall" shout with border security, and cite academic opinions to give an intellectual flavor to an opinion piece, to the effect of obscuring the real issue: a dishonest, simple-minded, uninformed and narcissistic man's fight to protect himself and his interests, survive politically and avoid criminal justice.
By far the largest seizure of fentanyl coming across the border occurred last week. In a truck at a monitored crossing. Using x-ray equipment. People are not crossing the border with fentanyl in their pockets/backpacks. The argument that a wall will reduce drug trafficking is so obviously moronic, it drives me crazy that Dems do not make the point.
It is a serious mistake to describe what is happening in the United States as a battle between liberals and conservatives, It is a struggle for the survival of our nation and our democracy. It is a battle between Trumpists and those who care sincerely about the future of our country. Trumpists have no respect for the Constitution, no respect for American traditions and cannot distinguish the Apprentice Reality TV show from truly governing our nation.
Trumpists live in a closed-in fantasy world where Trump will always be a decent man no matter how many people he shoots on 5th Ave. There are three kinds of voters that chose Trump: racists and bigots, the uninformed and low information voters, and the Evangelists for whom defeating Roe v. Wade overcomes every other Christian value. That millions of American's could be conned into believing that Trump and the powerful manipulators behind him would look after their welfare is also testament to the strength of the entrenched Fox/Breibart propaganda machine, which is the voice of the super-wealthy right wing extremists that have taken over our country. The United States is now just like those so-called Banana Republics that have undergone a right wing coup.
No Wall, Not now not ever!!
1
Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way.
Nixon's MAD (mutually assured destruction) tactic required him to appear irrational at times in order to dissuade the Russians from testing the limits of their power. Now it's the Americans, not the Russians, who need convincing their leader is, from time to time, out of his gourd. Different container, same lousy flavour.
"Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational"
excessively rational
excessively rational
excessively rational
excessively rational
excessively rational
excessively rational
Really sorry but your audience is primarily NYT readers, not FOX News or Breitbart fans (at least on the NYT website, I have no idea of your articles are re-printed for a bunch of Trump-gullibles elsewhere).
We know that most of the highly dangerous illegal drugs already come through legal ports of entry from south of the border or through the mail from China.
We also know that drug smugglers use highly effective tunnels. They also use watercraft (including a submarine) aircraft et al., It makes little sense that the areas Trump plans to wall off are major sources of very dangerous drug imports.
Love for some better sourcing for the “1/3 of migrant women are sexually assaulted on the journey” claim. Have read the references for this claim are tenuous at best.
Kinda like the epidemic of mouth taped trafficked women in cars that turn left at the border....
Once again, the GOP makes the case for Trump's ridiculous campaign pledge (at least 1/2 of it) by conflating border security by wall with actual border security. The entire nation, Trump supporters or no, knows that Trump will be satisfied NOT with border security but with $5.7 billion so he can say he personally wins.
Remember, Trump shut the government down because his campaign promise was unrealistic and simply a gimmick....and he made our entire nation pay.
You understand: we are fighting for NOT a wall but for the fact that Trump has failed to get Mexico to pay for it.
......One thing is absolutely clear: Trump cares for himself, his pride, his thin skin and his money. Our nation? We are mere props and pawns.
Dems have ballyhooed reports that -- supposedly -- in the last year or two -- new visa overstays have exceeded new illegal border crossings.
First, that is only a very recent trend. For decades, border crossings exceeded visa overstays by a wide margin. The new trend could easily reverse itself.
Second, even using the past year or two, illegal border crossings remain substantial.
Third, and most critically, exactly how do Dems propose to deal with visa overstays?
The obvious way is with much stronger deportation actions. But you can bet your bottom dollar that Dems would resist and obstruct that tooth and nail.
The next most obvious way is to impose much stronger "vetting" procedures at U.S. consulates overseas which issue the visas. But you can also bet your bottom dollar that Dems would also resist and obstruct that tooth and nail.
Btw.
Cumulatively, there are still well over 10 million illegal aliens here in the USA. About half are illegal border crossers, nearly all of them having crossed the southern -- not the northern -- border.
The other half, cumulatively, are visa overstays. Guess what?
Of the visa overstays (cumulatively about 5 million), half ( 2.5 million) are Latin Americans, including Mexicans and South Americans. That's as many, cumulatively, as the combined total of all Africans, Europeans, Asians and Canadians.
Yes, not all Latin American illegal aliens are illegal border crossers. Millions somehow managed to get a visa and then have overstayed their visa.
1
The author lost all credibility with his idea that Trump should have fired the federal workers he had furloughed.
Why? How? Who would do the work?
Basically this is an argument that Trump should explicitly threaten to destroy our country to get his way.
Not very persuasive, but it reveals how little the author actually cares about our nation.
"Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational, and they’re getting slaughtered."
Seriously?
Rational analysis and thought, fact-based decision making, those are a bad thing?
OK, here's a suggestion - hold your breath until the wall is approved.
Win-win.
No amnesty for crossing our borders illegally, end of the story. I don't went to see the US eventually becoming a failed state. the line between democracy and chaos is razor thin. No one will come to our rescue and if one does, it will be to partake in looting. How would you feel if some decided to move into your livimg room because he/she can just walk in. Borders make coexistence a lot more peaceful.
1
The only possible solution to the Mexican border crisis is the legalization of all drugs. America should follow the example of Portugal, which has legalized all drugs. Drug abuse should be treated as a medical or psychological problem and not as a criminal one. No border wall will prevent American heroin addicts from getting their heroin. The goal of legalizing all drugs is to take the drug trade out of the hands of criminals. It would put an end to the drug related violence that has forced so many people to leave their homes in Central America. It would stop the illegal migration. Vicente Fox and other Latin American politicians have pleaded for the legalization of all drugs. American politicians should listen to them.
1
Yeah, we need Walls to combat our National Security Emergency.
We need Concrete Sea Walls to protect our Eastern and Western Coastal Cities from being flooded by the rising Sea levels caused by Global Warming.
The Southern Wall will be merely a useless monument conjured by Trump's narcissism.
Future historians will be mysterified by how we, Adults, letting this six year old driving our Federal Government.
And we will be dammed for this crime.
The solution is not a wall. The solution is to prosecute employers and confiscate their assets as we do drug smugglers.
Of course this assumes we really want to end illegal immigration, which we do not. This whole thing is a farce.
this is the mantra, trying to throw a humane and caring slant across a wretchedly evil process.
Not even a mention of Mexico paying for the wall.
Lots of false or misleading statements, such as ignoring that most drugs come through ports of entry.
I did love the part that Trump gains power from "seeming" to be crazy and willing to do destructive things. Seeming?
If you want to end illegal immigration, just throw the employers of undocumented workers in jail. Guess that would include crazy Trump himself.
Enforce the laws or augment the laws that make it illegal to hire an illegal alien. If illegals can't find a way to make money once they get here they will stop coming. It's a long way to come to starve to death. Unfortunately we have read that people like Trump himself hire the illegals. That's the problem. No walls are necessary if we remove the opportunities that motivate them to come in the first place. Now Trump's campaign promises to build walls are another matter, but that's his problem.
I am a federal employee who was furloughed. I'm also an attorney. There is no legal basis to permanently fire furloughed federal employees under these circumstances, and Buskirk cites none. Such an action would not pass muster in court. So the threat that Buskirk advocates is empty.
Buskirk's argument is also deeply immoral. Trump treated hardworking federal civil servants as hostages. He harmed many who could not afford food, rent and critical medications. Buskirk is saying that wasn't bad enough. (Of course, saying that Trump's problem was that he is "excessively rational" is laughable.) Buskirk essentially is saying that Trump should have threatened to kill the hostages if his costly vanity project of a wall isn't built.
Who would do the work if the all furloughed employees were suddenly fired? Buskirk's desired threat is not logical.
And why stop with the empty threat of firing most of the federal workforce? Under Buskirk's reasoning, maybe Trump should have threatened to nuke San Francisco if Trump didn't get his way.
I was shocked that the Times chose to run such a deeply immoral and counterfactual column.
If in reading this you're confused it's because Buskirk understands many Democrats (unlike him and Trump) actually believe in honest discourse, and so can be made to question almost anything if you throw a bunch of random numbers at them. You may feel that this certainly seems like Trumpian right-wing disinformation. It is, just cleverly sheathed in layers in unrelated and ever changing policy details.
This is Buskirk's version of whack-a-mole. Just a short time ago Buskirk used fear and hysterics to try to sell Trump's line that the wall was all about stopping terrorism. The fact that all terrorist come by plane and boat turned it into a joke, so now he's moved to the next scam, telling us to adore "Mr. Trump" because he "reiterated some of the jarring statistics in the State of the Union address" about how these aren't so much terrorists, as criminals, and it's all because of "our government’s failure to secure the border has precipitated a political, economic and moral crisis."
Buskirk has pivoted, or rather popped his head up somewhere entirely different, and now tells us that the crisis Trump created was a humanitarian crisis all along, and only Trump's wall will fix it. (Someone hand me the mallet please). It's nothing but gaslighting.
Here’s a shot of truth for everyone: In his purportedly reasonable conservative website, the journal of American Greatness, Buskirk uses The Gateway Pundit, a far-right conspiracy and disinformation website, as a primary source.
1
"the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage." It's certainly what any good terrorist would have done: make the threat to the hostages real by killing several of them. Right here, at this moment, and with that statement, Christopher Buskirk identifies himself as no better than a Bin Laden. Thanks for identifying who you really are, Chris.
I absolutely agree with you on getting rid of gangsters. I am glad you brought it up because Trump has been surrounding himself with them for many, many years. Some of them already indicted and some in prison or served time.
Let us start by getting rid of the gangsters of the Executive Branch first.
1
Telling his supporters time and again that:
1. we need a wall, whereas ALL national security experts' reports have proven that it is NOT the most effective way to protect the southern border
2. Mexico would pay for it, whereas on day one already he's on the record telling the Mexican president that of course that was a mere campaign slogan, nothing more,
THAT is betraying your voters.
That's where it all started.
Then he didn't even TRY to convince his own party to sign a wall into law during the two entire years that he only needed GOP votes to get it built, once he had decided to not even negotiate with Mexico on this.
That's a second betrayal.
And of course, he never told his voters that what he would actually do would be to no longer pay border patrol agents at all, as he did for a month - third betrayal.
No longer paying them AT ALL, as this "American Greatness" editor now proposes, would only be a fourth betrayal.
With friends like that ...
Only a truly sick individual would find anything useful in this op-ed piece. We're supposed to go along with being forced to throw away untold billions of dollars on a non-existent proposal to address a highly exaggerated threat while undermining what little is left of our democracy.
There is no redeeming social value whatsoever in this opinion.
I don’t understand how mass immigration has ever hurt the economy. No one complained about the mass immigration of African slaves. The Jamaicans picking our fruit . the Mexicans in the lettuce and berry fields. The Koreans tending to the lawns and gardens. What ever we didn’t want to do some immigrant did it for us.
What a whole lot of baloney!
"...more than 60,000 American deaths per year from opiods..." the preponderance of which come through legal ports of entry, not the long, empty swaths of desert in between where this writer and Trump want the wall built.
As to the assertion that jobs are taken away from Americans, here again, as in almost anything Republican, ideology and propaganda trump (pun not intended) reality and facts. Not so very long ago, an American state, to wit Alabama, enacted a very harsh, anti-illegal immigrant law with severe penalties imposed on employers using the labor of same. Guess what happened. The illegal immigrants left Alabama in droves, the local Americans found the work too demanding and would not assume the labor, the crops rotted in the fields, and the cry of the farmers was so loud that the law was rescinded forthwith.
So tell me, why exactly are they unwanted?
You ruefully quote Adrian Vermeule: “Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way. Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational, and they’re getting slaughtered.”
Tantrum-throwing does have its limits. Here's hoping Trump exhausts himself and falls asleep on the Oval Office carpet. Of course, they might have to bring back both Kelly and McMaster to carry him off to bed.
It is very hard to take this writer seriously, who has such poor understanding of what really matters, not just in American society but in modern civilization, and who thinks Donald Trump's assessment of a situation, and Trump's self-serving rhetorical mustering of figures and statistics, are to be believed.
I hope very much that the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 won't want to do it again, should he run in 2020. But it would be much better if it was because they finally saw through Trump as a lying conman with a hideously monstrous ego, an ill-educated world view, and an agenda both unjust and dangerous, rather than because he couldn't give them their ill-conceived, truly immoral wall.
My thinking is more like 'No Wall, No Trump'. And that would be a very good thing.
So this passes for analysis on the right....Trump should use his ‘whip hand’ to fire people who were furloughed more than 30 days but actually wanted to work. Let’s see where we would be now....no TSA, no air traffic controllers, no functioning aviation system, no IRS staff to review taxes and process refunds (giving the people back their own money back as a refund), inspect the food and drug supply, and so forth.
Under what rock did you find this guy?
The depths of Republican hypocrisy will NEVER cease to amaze me. The Republican Party is "supposed" to be so fiscally conservative that they spawned the Tea Party in an effort to deny Obama any Republican support, even on things they once supported. The only quotable phrase from Trump's campaign in 2016 was his "promise" to have Mexico pay for the wall. Now having completely abandoned that path, he's hopelessly and unapologetically, not asking, demanding the U.S. taxpayer pays for the wall and their collective response...crickets. In fact, the silly Fox News personalities are even insisting Trump snatch his $5.7 billion from the pockets of the middle class by declaring an emergency. After two years of Trump one thing is certain - the Republican Party deserves Donald Trump.
Pay for the wall out of red state LOCAL taxes. Kentucky wants it? Kentucky can pay for it.
since Republicans have always been in favor of "cheap labor" they have never had any real desire to prevent illegal immigration.
I'm going some thought as to what this author would write were it, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, portraying (and lying about it) illegal immigrants as all rapists and murderers, and his latest, human traffickers, and taking jobs from Americans, while having hired hundreds of them themselves, even providing fake documents for them. Also interesting is the man we heard admitting to serial sexual assault suddenly concerned about on in three women being sexual assaulted on their journey to the US border...only to be then turned away or arrested or their children torn from them, by this man who is nonetheless so concerned about them. And how you fashion that the lowest border crossings(southern) since the 1970s is "the issue of the day", not global warming, not the destructive and enormous wealth and income gap, not a foreign enemy interfering with our democracy, not the fact that America has gone down in the rankings of free and democratic countries under Trump - no. As usual, it's desperate poor people ruining everything for everyone else and unable to defend themselves.
Like most commenters here, I'm appalled by the baseless half-truths, distortions and lies that Mr. Buskirk flings with wanton abandon throughout his column.
My first thought was, "Gee, if I want to be exposed to far-right, racist and utterly delusional diatribes, I'll listen to Limbaugh, Levin and Coulter - or log onto Breitbart or Town Hall."
But then it struck me. The Times (whether they realize it or not) are doing their readers a great service. I suspect most Times readers are not regularly exposed to the unexpurgated thoughts of "conservative intellectuals" like Mr. Buskirk.
But if they managed to wade all the way through Mr. Buskirk's rhetorical sewer without gagging on this odious example of "serious conservative thought" - now they know that today's conservative intellectuals are, by and large, flinging the same putrid mud as Alex Jones, Stephen Miller and our Current Occupant - only with more sophisticated syntax and vocabulary.
So I give thanks to the Times editorial page for giving the "respectable" Mr. Buskirk this spotlight on the editorial page - to vividly illustrate just how xenophobic, fact-free and delusional virtually the entire "bile trust" of the GOP really is. It's hopelessly infected with the same toxic virus of fear and bigotry which infects the tens of millions of Americans who put Trump into our Oval Office.
November, 2018 was a good start in combating the spread of this virus. May the fumigation continue relentlessly through 2020 and beyond.
From this piece: "His oath of office requires that he “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which itself was instituted “to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare” and so forth. A nation that does not enforce its own laws or defend its borders is doing none of those things."
So i guess that means that the president's constitutional responsibilities require him to arrest himself and prosecute himself for money laundering, violations of the Constitution's own emoluments clause, obstruction of justice and, well, treason in rigging the 2016 election and acting as a Russian agent.
Illegal entry is the problem. Not legal immigration.
Like all discussions of "the wall", the wall is looked at by Trump Supporters as a panacea which will solve all immigration problems. Until there is an intelligent discussion which mentions conditions on the border to be secured, the necessity for security there, the feasibility of walling etc. this entire discussion distracts us from serious problems like those summarized in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/opinion/trump-state-of-the-union.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fdavid-leonhardt&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection. Trump's ability to distract from the issues shown here is legendary.
Cheap labor from migrants is our biggest threat? Can you provide statistics on the entire cash economy that employs 10s of millions of legal Americans who avoid taxation through underreporting their income and pay off the books reduced wages. Go after that along with the illegals and our deficit will be gone.
59
Individual-1 fails to uphold his oath of office when he undermines the ACA by failing to faithfully uphold the laws of the U.S..
Individua-1 hires illegal immigrants, just like many, many businesses do, because they are harder workers and work more cheaply than U.S. workers.
A national crisis is climate change and wealth inequality, not border security.
1
Thanks for publishing this absolutely stunning insight to the thinking of the radical right. We are once again reminded of how out of touch this political faction is from the real lives of working/middle class people. I’m particularly struck by the call to “permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more,” as if the writer couldn’t see the economic turmoil such a move would create. As if he couldn’t see the economic devastation to the very people for whom he claims to advocate. He’s absolutely correct, however, that such a move would verify that the president is indeed insane. Terrifying.
5
Trump's governing (such as it is) is directed almost solely at his base, which is however just one non-majority segment of our society. Just because they are loud and obnoxious does not make their often questionable ideas sacrosanct.
This started with the Tea Party holding the rest of the country hostage unless they got their way. Someone needs to remind the Republicans that they do not own this country nor are they the only ones with ideas on how to govern.
Their abandonment of inclusive government is what got us to where we are today. A large and powerful country hamstrung by silly partisan warfare while the country slips deeper and deeper into irrelevance.
The best legislation is born from compromise between the extremes and finding a sensible middle road. Unless we can find our way back to that the nation is doomed to steady decline.
2
Where to begin??
Studies have shown again and again that More than 90% of drugs come though legal ports of entry. Most illegal immigrants enter our country legally by overstaying their visas.
Illegal immigrants by and large fill jobs Americans wouldn’t do, particularly farm labor. The crackdown on these workers has left produce unpicked across the country.
Our country faces many real crises, environmental protection, global warming and the huge political divide. This administration has done it’s best to put business over environmental concerns, gutting the very agencies charged with conserving our national lands and parks, protecting the air we breathe and protecting our rivers and oceans from pollution. How will spending billions of dollars on a wall help with these much greater problems? How will rhetoric and face saving benefit our country?
2
Border security is a good thing. It's how a country tells its neighbours - and the world at large - to respect its integrity and its laws. No American is against it or unwilling to invest in it. Even Nancy Pelosi. The problem is the Border Wall. Because building a massive concrete structure across the southern border signifies the country is closed for business. And neighbours are not (and will never be) friends. If one's truly worried about migrants taking away jobs, then shut down your global universities that attract thousands of potential migrants every year, with perhaps the most expensive education anywhere in the world. Or demand that global corporations withdraw from markets around the world, as they engender in people the desire to write their own success stories in America. In sum, turn the US into North Korea, gloriously isolated- and safe from immigrants, drugs and crime. Good luck!
3
Mr. Buskirk does what Donald Trump does not: provide a justification for a border wall with Mexico that does not insult its opponents or impugn their patriotism. For that, I give him credit.
But stripped of its xenophobic passion, a wall on the border with Mexico is a solution looking for a problem.
A wall will not stop illegal immigration. Most undocumented workers overstay legal visas. A wall will not stop the flow of illegal drugs. Most cartels use existing ports of entry. A wall will not stop the caravans of migrants seeking asylum. They are looking to turn themselves in to legal authorities. A wall will not stop terrorism. Not a single terrorist has illegally crossed our southern border.
So what does a wall provide? The wall's value is purely political. It gives Donald Trump a symbol to rally the xenophobic instincts of his base. The wall is Trump's cudgel in keeping the GOP in line. Republican legislators fear Trump's base in the primaries. Trump will never abandon the wall's political leverage. In fact, that leverage became even more critical to Trump after Democrats took control of the House. Even if he loses, Trump will keep the support of his base so long as he fights vigorously for the wall.
In truth, the wall is a monument to fear and loathing, a shrine to ignorance and bigotry. It is the perfect political tool for Donald Trump.
10
Not buying your argument that illegal workers compete with middle class for jobs. Maybe some overlap with lower-middle class or working poor but you also ignore the basic economic fact that the total number of jobs is not fixed. The more immigrants, the more total demand and more jobs exist. Circumvention of minimum wage laws, and too low minimum wage rates are the real issue. And considerably easier to fix than spending billions on middle age technology of questionable effectiveness.
1
The jokes continue from the border wall fanatics even after trumps own intelligence officials had a whole list of security concerns that need addressing that are very much 21 Century concerns unlike the wall which made a mention but was not the most pressing of our security worries. The first being cyber security and the direct attack on our democracy during the 2016 election. Wake up, we are under attack! Not by people fleeing for their lives in Central America where past American intervention has caused great instability, but from Russia where Putin is making progress in his war against our democracy.
2
"Cheap labor undercuts the economic security of the American working class and is bad for the country." Wow, union members have been telling republicans that for years.
5
“During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage.”
———-
Maybe, but only after Trump had already “called back” the vast majority of those that were furloughed.
Notice he was already trying to mitigate the damage of his shutdown by calling back a bunch of workers. Many of which apparently didn’t even bother to return.
2
The mind boggles at Mr. Buskirk's logic: Let's get what we want to "save American jobs from illegal immigration" by firing people from their jobs.
I just can't grasp this.
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more."
Seriously, the mind boggles.
8
@PB
Yes, it's nuts.
"Immigrants are stealing our jobs! So I will steal your jobs first before the immigrants have a chance to take them!" - Donald J. Trump
7
“Dear,” said Mrs. Ross to her daughter Susie, “Please stop scattering rabbit food on the back porch. It attracts the wild rabbits, and they come in and eat the vegetables in my garden.”
“But I like the wild rabbits. Bunnies are my favorite animal.”
“Your tame bunnies are fine, but no feeding the wild ones, OK?”
“Darling,” said Mrs. Ross to her husband Mr. Ross, “Please build a five-foot high stone wall around our property. Susie keeps putting out rabbit food, and it attracts wild rabbits.”
“That would be very costly,” said Mr. Ross. “Besides, we don’t get that many wild rabbits, they would still be able to get in via our driveway and even come under the wall when they dig burrows. It’s not worth it.”
“But I don’t want my vegetables eaten! Please build a wall!”
“How about some wire fencing around your garden plot? And take away Susie’s privileges if she feeds wild rabbits.”
“No. I want a big, beautiful five-foot high stone wall around our whole property.”
“Were you listening? I said it would be very expensive and not that effective!”
“I don’t care! I want a big, beautiful stone wall!”
“No!”
I feel like Mr. Ross every single time I hear Trump go on and on about his stupid, wasteful, idiotic wall.
2
I remember that, when I was in high school in the 1950s, I read about the Know Nothing party, which, a hundred years earlier, sought to prevent immigration of Catholics and others. I remember being glad that America had grown more mature and sensible about immigration and I marveled at how prejudiced and shortsighted the Know Nothings were. Well, it seems that I was wrong--the Know Nothings are still with us big-time.
7
I stopped reading when he argues that Trump should have threatened to use his authority to permanently fire 800,000 government workers. What kind of person thinks that's a good idea?
11
How about this for what Trump will do if Congress doesn’t give him his wall:
He gets a secret loan of $3 billion dollars from both Russia and Saudi Arabia which he won’t have to repay due to secret future preferential treatment. He then secretly gives this to Mexico, with the secret understanding that they will build the wall.
But oops! Mexico misunderstood the deal and built a chain of golf courses along the boulder on the Mexican side instead. However, the silver lining was that in the event of another government shut down, furloughed Home Security workers could find employment in these new golf courses.
So, not only did DJT hold America hostage for 35 days to fund a wall that he and the Republicans had plenty of time to do in his first two years when they controlled everything, now we find the real reason for his actions. He wants ALL the investigations into every part of his pathological shadiness to cease. Well, that's not going to happen and neither is the funding for his wall - and it's his wall because clearly Republicans won't support it. Let the investigations proceed!
2
I give credit to The Times for constantly trying to give the "other" side a fair hearing. Shall we assume that this is the best they could come up with despite making a concerted effort? It's really rather pitiful stuff.
7
Has there been an exhaustive independent study that provides a compelling rationale for building a wall ? NO
Was Trump aware of this study when he originally suggested the wall. NO
Has it been established that a wall is the best and cheapest method to prevent illegal immigration and movement of drugs. NO
4
Mr. Buskirk suggest Trump fire 800,000 workers to win a political point? How did Buskirk not get appointed Secretary of Labor?
5
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more."
Interesting...workers who were FORCED against their will to work without pay should have been punished for their terrible crimes by being fired. Or maybe he doesn't really mean it per se but just thinks it would have been a good gambit for Trump
This inspiring bit of strategic "thinking" from the publisher of "American Greatness" where we learn that the US is the greatest country ever, Trump is the most brilliant leader in all of history, and that he is saving our country. Dems are the party of hate, and so much more.
The NYT should be commended for allowing a range of opinions on the editorial page, but this may be going a bit too far.
3
Every “illegal” who is working in the US is employed by someone who is breaking the law. And, there is a government agency that knows who they are and where they work - the IRS (unless they are paid in cash under the table).
What to do?
1. Turn off this jobs magnet and make E-Verify mandatory. An EO would do it.
2. Require the IRS to notify employers of every unmatched, invalid or duplicate SSN associated with payroll taxes and withholding - and RETURN the taxes rather than just keeping them.
3. Fine business owners who are repeat offenders - and this effort could be self-funding.
Of course, the US Chamber Of Commerce would have a “Legal Status” bill before Congress in a matter of days.
3
The extent that Trump supporters will go to make his demand for a wall seem rational is breathtaking. This is a vanity wall pure and simple. The vast majority of crime and drugs that come into this country comes from ports of entry. That is a fact. Trump's wall is a symbol for white nationalists in this country to stop non whites from entering. That is the sole rational for Trump's bases fervor on this issue. You appear to be a card carrying member.
"imperil his re-election"
Ah the pure ego driven import of those words.
3
Has this guy ever heard of the concept of opportunity costs?
A dollar for the wall is a dollar less for everything else -- tax cuts, debt repayment, education, infrastructure, cyber-security, energy efficiency, drug treatment, cancer research, international aid, farm aid, rural development, agricultural research, job training, job re-training, military spending, and on and on and on and on and...
People are opposed to the President's fetish because it is a nakedly wasteful and ineffective way to achieve border security. And we have a lot of other priorities!
The willingness of the GOP and "public thinkers" like Mr. Buskirk to enable the juvenile tendencies of this president is disgraceful. Where is your staid fiscal responsibility now?
3
We're certainly not equipped to deal with all the people trying to come here and obviously that has to come first. The get off my lawn program, while inhumane, might make some sense if there was no better way to spend billions if dollars (5.7 billion being just the downpayment--it's government, after all.)
But the most telling thing is the absence of Willy Hortons. Think about it. If lots of illegal immigrants were threatening our safety, it would be pure gold to someone like Trump. But the fact that his staff hasn't been able to dig up a half dozen serial killers tells me they don't exist.
It is illegal to hire undocumented immigrants so how do they live once they get here? Who pays for them not to be on the streets? Has to be costing someone and my bet is the taxpayer. I really dont get the democratic position of not wanting to secure our border and limit this expense. As in debt as we are, we certainly cant take on the world to feed. Nor can they fit.
2
I have never heard of Mr. Buskirk prior to this and I am left wondering why has he been offered the platform of the Times to spout such flim-flam? And his idea of playing hardball is the wholesale firing of federal workers?
Mr. Buskirk should seriously reconsider his positions if the only way he thinks he can achieve those is by a person who is "crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash." He is right, though, in assessing that if Trump and his aides display "excessive rationality," then they will "get slaughtered," precisely because their positions are excessively irrational.
5
The real problem is Trump and the GOP blaming minorities and immigrants for all of America’s problems. The wall is just a prop. The inequality of our taxes and expensive health care system are far larger problems than having a few immigrants slip around the already formidable walls we have. Stop blaming the poor for being poor.
4
As a political conservative, I do not wish for President Trump to use a declaration of an emergency to build a wall. Mind you, I have no objection to a wall, as defined by the Border Patrol. I simply don't want any president abusing his emergency powers.
I didn't appreciate President Obama's decrees and I don't appreciate President Trump's decrees. I particularly shudder at the thought of some future progressive knucklehead using such a declaration as precedent for their own run around Congress.
Of course, that means little to nothing will get done to address our immigration system. Neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress really wish to address the issue. As long as it remains an "intractable" problem, they can all make great declarations about the opposition and raise campaign dollars. If they actually dealt with the matter, they would lose a great political tool in their reelection toolbox.
Consider this, my liberal friends, the much despised President Trump is the only politician in a generation who has actually sought to address the immigration problem in a meaningful way that isn't simply amnesty for all illegal immigrants. I doubt that he is going to succeed, but he, the hated liar, is, ironically, the only politician in years who has sincerely tried to keep his campaign promises in some significant way.
3
@Thomas A. Hall I fail to see how screaming about his idiotic wall is dealing with the immigration problem in any "meaningful way." I live on the border and there is no crisis for America. There IS a humanitarian crisis for the folks who are trying to seek asylum and have had their children stolen from them, but illegal entry via the dangerous terrain on the southern border has dropped significantly in the past decade. Most undocumented people overstay their visas, and drugs enter the U.S. mostly through legal ports of entry. Until Americans are willing to actually acknowledge the problem of drug addiction and the practice by American corporations and agricultural entities of intentionally inviting foreign workers to work in their factories and industries for slave wages and no benefits, the immigration problem will not be adequately addressed ever. We have a joke out here on the frontera that the elaborate tunnel system beneath the existing wall has a really nice Starbucks in it, no waiting in line for your latte! thinking. There are many solutions to this complex, multi-layered problem, but Trump isn't considering any of those; he just want his big beautiful wall which is nothing more that a monument to himself.
1
"vast quantities of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border that contribute to the more than 60,000 American deaths per year from opioid overdose..." It is the law of the market. Mexican drug lords sell drugs to Americans because Americans buy drugs.
Donald Trump does not have the interest to lead anything larger than a scheme to "get a win". No serious political movement should consider an individual who is so lazy about assessing unfamiliar situations as Trump has always been. If it does not fit into his narrow view he tries to shoehorn it. He is an immature bully of a man who, as he has said, respects very few people. Trump has learned a few things from advertising psychology, use of propaganda, and the ways authoritarians gain power and control and is not good at any of that. His public actions in the 80's and 90's told enough about his lack of ethics and callousness toward others that were once and always disqualifying for positions of trust. The public record should have informed most serious minded and civically oriented people to beware of close involvement. The Trump money seems to have blinded many. It is no coincidence that he kept "Mein Kampf" in his bedroom or that he most admires "strong" leaders like its author. His incredible need for attention from the news media and praise from those who surround him told me a long time ago that, in the end, he will fail at any attempt at leadership. Trump is a "disrupter" for certain but only for a time. He will go the way of Roy Cohn eventually. He will be broken, discredited and loathed by most Americans.
1
The entire column is premised on a lie. "What is frustrating about this for supporters of border integrity is that the defeat was entirely self-inflicted." We are all supporters of border integrity. This should have said "What is frustrating about this for supporters of a border wall is that the defeat was entirely self-inflicted."
Where is the righteous indignation that should be directed to the employers who hire undocumented workers? Oh, wait. One of those is Trump!
2
First, kudos to the NYT for publishing another perspective. It's important to at least be exposed to alternative viewpoints, even if they are outlandish.
My second point (and remaining ones) can be set aside since I would've used them to rebut the foolish assertions of the author, but upon reflection the best argument against his essay is the essay itself.
'Nuff said.
2
Have you forgotten that Trump made a campaign promise repeated over and over again. His big, beautiful wall would be paid for by Mexico. It is time for Trump to take to Mexico with his begging bowl to have them fill it. A promise made needs to be a promise kept.
2
The argument of Trump et.al. that immigrants are stealing jobs from red-blooded Americans begs the question: blue-collar workers from Detroit and other rust-belt cities and towns would be taking the jobs in Iowa farm fields that immigrants are "cheating" them out of?
2
Trump, Trump's supporters and Mr. Buskirk don't seem to understand the basic tenet of a representative democracy - you need the support of a majority of the people's representatives to pass legislation. They also seem to have a problem with counting - Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes, in the mid-term Trump tried to drum up support for the Republicans by pushing the Wall and his anti-immigrant rhetoric and they lost the popular vote by eight million votes.
Trump and Trump's supporters do not represent the values or sympathies of a majority of Americans. Most Americans don't want a wall and aren't afraid of the traumatized women and children seeking asylum at our borders.
Trump's supporters need to get used to the fact that they aren't in the majority and in a functioning democracy that means either have to convince people of the correctness of their position or accept defeat.
Shutting down the government in an attempt to force the majority to accept a minority's demands, inflicting harm on innocents to gain leverage over the majority, undermines the basic tenets of democracy and is an attack on the legitimacy of our system of government. When Mr. Buskirk states that Trump has betrayed his supporters by ending the government shutdown he is telling us all we need to know about his fealty to democracy and his notion of American Greatness.
6
What sort of “emergency” can be addressed by a wall that is going to take years to construct? If there is an emergency demanding that the border be defended, certainly there are more responsive actions that could be taken. The sorts of emergency the law contemplates is where there is insufficient time for Congress to act. The only emergency I see here is Trump being unable to fulfill his campaign promise and risking his re-election. From where I’m sitting, that is not an emergency. That is cause for celebration!
7
Well Mr. Buskirk, Trump certain has you doing logical gymnastics to defend the indefensible. Why don't we just build an imaginary wall out of alternative facts?
5
Please just stop the pretense that Trump’s position on immigration has anything to do with protecting middle class and working class Americans. That talking point should be challenged every time it’s raised. If the Trump administration wanted to crack down on illegal immigration in order to protect American workers, they would focus on the industries that profit from this labor and promote solutions such as expanded e-verify. They would also have to be willing to accept responsibility for the resulting price increases and potential failure of large scale dairy operations and others who rely on cheap labor to survive. The cowardly Republican way however is to talk big without actually doing anything.
11
@Carol F.
The Constitution’s “Take Care Clause” task presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Immigration and Nationality Act and the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act tasks the president to arrest, prosecute and remove or deport illegal border crossers and illegal aliens residing without authorization in the United States. Rather than criticizing the president for enforcing laws against illegal immigration, you should ask your congressmen to make illegal immigration legal.
I suggested the same in a few comments, some time back, and quite a few supporters of Trump replied that he would be better off playing a middle path than being stubborn about the Wall.
I have also read some comments to this article and the main question is : who will pay for the Wall ? Maybe the govt could charge entrants for crossing over to the USA; put a price tag to 'soft entry' or 'asylum' or 'limited permit' ? Put up temp shelters till applicants are cleared, and charge for a 'cheap' stay in the shelters. Structure part of it on this side, as a tourist attraction ?! Palm it off as the Great American Wall, and steal some of the tourism revenues of the Great Wall of China. Set up training barracks for Wall militia, and also surveillance posts with sat-based tracking devices.
The point is if you force Trump to quantify the cost into units of billing expenses, then he would be compelled to show and maybe we might be able to understand the logic behind his proposed 5 billion dollars of expenditure.
Come to think of it : is it really that much ? when the Wall was clearly a part of his mandate that got him elected.
1
@Nirmal
Just shy of 3 million votes in the hole.
Some mandate ...
1
No one any longer proposes to build a border wall from San Diego to Brownsville. No one any longer plans to build a wall across the Texas despoblado. The proposed border barrier is already 77 percent complete, and it is a fence, not a wall. Trump proposes to add 200 miles of new fencing to the 700 miles of existing fence where the Border Patrol says it is needed—mostly in the Rio Grande Valley.
The completed 900-mile border fence will bear little resemblance to the grandiose border wall Trump envisioned in his campaign speeches. It will cover less than 50 percent of the 1,954 mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. The requested $5.7 billion would also pay for strengthened the existing fence and high-tech sensors to surveil the 1,000 miles of unprotected border.
4
Mr. Buskirk, like all Trump's supporters, equates border security with a wall. Please cite the study from which this conclusion is drawn. Has anyone done such a study? Has there been a cost/benefit analysis? What do the real experts, the ones with years of experience in border security, say? Is this an efficient use of taxpayer's money? And why is America's infrastructure being neglected and allowed to crumble? Perhaps if the GOP had not give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the very people who least needed it, there would be some money for a wall. Priorities, people, please.
3
@KenF
Portion. of the border fence has been in place for more than a decade.There is not doubt that it reduces illegal border crossing. The Border Patrol, which should know, says it works.
The plan is no longer to build a solid wall from San Diego to Brownsville, as Trump envisioned in his campaign speeches, The plan is to strengthened the existing 700 miles of fence and build 200 miles of new fencing where the Border Patrol says it is needed, primarily the Texas Rio Grande Valley, which is now the epicenter of illegal immigration.
4
if the majority of Americans wanted a wall they would NOT have given the house of representatives 40 new seats. Trump is defying the will of the the people. he is Not interested in border security or healthcare .
1
@Barbara
There are many plausible reasons for change of 40 House seats in the mid-terms.
The wall is only one of many.
First, mid-terms historically have usually resulted in a loss for the party of the President in office. The Repub loss in 2018 was less than the Dem loss in 2010.
Second, many people were appalled at the Repub tax bill.
Third, many people were appalled at the Repub view about business de-regulation and Trump's actions on business deregulation.
Fourth, many people were appalled at the Repub view about climate change.
Fifth, many African Americans were appalled at Trump's statements about various aspects of Confederate history,
and about his general failure to strenuously denounce white racists.
Sixth, many women were appalled at the actions of both the Repub party pols on issues affecting women and at Trump's statements regarding women.
And of course, many people voted against Trump's Repubs party on the basis of his general behavior.
2
He argues for excellent border control. No one is arguing against him. No one who matters wants open borders. It's a strawman. But he would permanently lay off 800,000 federal workers? He would make innocent families pawns of a president who lacks the capacity to actually make a deal.
7
Real US power has always resided with the legislature, the President was never supposed to be the seat of power and Im fine with the legislature reasserting its power. Trump can do nothing without money appropriated from the legislature, high time he realizes that. He is in effect been neutered with the loss of the House.
3
"He must educate and persuade the American people, and that means he must continue to talk about it. "
It also means that he will have to talk and think coherently, which is probably impossible for him.
7
Weirdly, the author (like the president) conflates the concepts of "border security" and "a wall", without even seeming to notice he's doing it. History is replete with examples of walls that didn't work. Today, the US government is awash in data demonstrating that the vast majority of persons staying in the USA without authorization didn't arrive across that border between checkpoints. Similarly with the drugs, etc.
This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying. A wall isn't the same thing as border security, in an era when for example airplanes exist. If we're really worried about border security, why can't we make ourselves talk about ... border security?
7
@Paul N M
The data says only that recent visa overstays during the past year or two are more than recent illegal border crossings -- i.e. recently within the past two years.
The data does not say that visa overstays are more than illegal border crossers among the total humber of illegal aliens here now -- counting both the recent additions during the past two years and also the many times more who arrived during the past decades and are still here.
Furthermore, there is nothing in the data to indicate whether the recent trends will continue as opposed to revert to the decades-old pattern.
And most importantly of all, if visa overstays are indeed the more important problem, how exactly do you -- and the Dems -- propose to deal with it.
If you are really serious about dealing with it, there are two obvious methods --
One is much more deportation actions -- including apprehension -- including much more workplace apprehension -- and detention -- and adequate funding for detention -- for those apprehended until the excessively elaborate deportation legal "process" is exhausted.
And the second is much more stringent "vetting" of all visas at the point where they are issued -- at U.S. consulates overseas -- with an especially heavy emphasis on vetting visa applicants in countries whose denizens have a high rate of visa overstays.
2
I applaud that the Times seeks to publish a diversity of views, but is there no requirement that points that can be tied to fact are tird to fact. Ex: there is plenty of case law suggesting Trump's conditional powers related to declaring national emergencies is not nearly as unfettered as offered here. There is also the bit about either house of Congress passing a resolution opposing such a declaration of it is indeed a lie. If the Democratic House were to do such a thing, the Senate must vote on it as well.
Finally, to the concept of an emergency. If there is an emergency on such a scale, how can we wait three weeks? Do we think courts might ask this question? and there will be plenty of opportunities for Trump and his diminishing minions to answer such questions in court.
2
Whatever one thinks about immigration, a wall isn't going to change much, since the vast majority of people here without proper documents are folks who arrived legally and whose visas have expired. Illegal border crossings are at their lowest number in many, many years. There's no emergency need for a wall now.
4
@MJ--Absolutely correct. Trump won't mention the numbers of visa overstayers because it doesn't fit his narrative of "border crisis." Just one way he creates a fake crisis that is short on the truth.
5
@Ms. Pea
The much ballyhooed "data" says only that recent visa overstays -- i.e. during the past year or two --- are more than recent illegal border crossings.
That data does not say that cumulative visa overstays are more than cumulative illegal border crossers -- counting both the recent additions during the past two years and also the many many times more who arrived during the past decades and are still here.
Furthermore, there is nothing in the data to indicate whether the recent trends will continue as opposed to revert to the decades-old pattern.
And most importantly of all, if visa overstays are indeed the more important problem, how exactly do you -- and the Dems -- propose to deal with it?
If you are really serious about dealing with it, there are two obvious methods --
One is much more deportation action -- including apprehension -- including much more workplace apprehension -- and detention -- and adequate funding for detention -- for those apprehended until the excessively elaborate deportation legal "process" is exhausted.
And the second method is much more stringent "vetting" of all visas at the point where they are issued -- at U.S. consulates overseas -- with an especially heavy emphasis on vetting visa applicants in countries whose denizens have a high rate of visa overstays.
Let's see whether you -- and all the others downplaying the border problem -- can support meaningful actions to address the visa overstay problem.
2
The ongoing tragedies engendered by the inefficient approach to border security are real. Drugs, violent crimes and most tragically, human trafficking and (sexual) slavery should be tackled as best we can.
But what's the approach? The author fails to address the critical point of failure in Trump's message: that the only solution is a physical barrier, and that nothing else will do.
The outlined problems along with illegal immigration will never be 100% fixed, but we can certainly do a better job than is being done now. The problems are wide and complex and there is no one silver bullet.
Applying technology, analytics, manpower, better law enforcement and judicial services along with physical barriers where needed are parts of an overall solution. Each one on its own does not fix one or more of the problems, but as a whole, they can significantly curb the crimes and illegal migrations that occur at not just our southern border, but all our borders and other points of entries.
So contemplate the desired solution, then apply the various approaches in their entirety to get to that solution, and we'll rest easier knowing we have secured our borders wherever they may be, not just having a mostly useless barrier on our southern border.
2
First of all if you have to resort to misleading, incomplete and misapplied statistics to make your case, then all it shows is that you have no case to make. I can talk to any used car salesman when I feel the need to be misled. I don’t need to listen to this President or his lackeys.
Secondly, where does this $5.7 billion figure come from anyway? Where are the engineering studies, maps and construction plans that support this figure. Every estimate I’ve ever seen is 3 to 5 times greater. If we as a nation are going to go further into debt in the name of National Security, largely financing that debt by borrowing from a rival and potentially hostile foreign country, then the President is obligated to provide some evidence of due diligence. My suspicion is that the President actually pulled the figure from a place I hope never to see.
Thirdly, if the President is honestly so concerned about National Security, then there are far more effective ways to spend 5.7 billion borrowed dollars. I would note that the amount he’s proposing to spend on an imaginary and manufactured crisis would buy, among other things, two new Virginia class attack submarines at a time when our submarine force is facing a genuine crisis of numbers due to the aging out the older class boats. At least that would be a useful contribution to National Security.
8
Massive bait-and-switch here. A big concrete wall is just security theatre. Looks good, does nothing.
Real border security means: More manpower and equipment at the ports of entry, where the vast majority of drugs actually enter. E-Verify to crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers. Anti-gang initiatives in Central America to make it safe for would-be immigrants to stay home.
9
Trump promised his base that he would restore lost mining and manufacturing jobs.
He has not and can not fulfill this promise.
Building a wall will not make coal competitive with natural gas.
Building a wall will not change the wage differential between US jobs and jobs outside of the US.
So Trump must spew hatred by demonizing immigrants.
He must argue for a wall he knows will be ineffective.
He must retain support of his base as the Mueller investigation closes in on Trump's crimes.
10
"If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he'll deserve his fate."
Isn't Trump president for all Americans, even those majority of Americans who did not vote for him? And if so, doesn't that require that he puts forward the policies that are best for America, not just most appealing to his supporters? If he is convinced that his wall is the best policy, he should be asked to prove it, to the American people and to Congress. America is a democracy, not an autocracy. Do his "most loyal supporters" understand this? Do they believe in it?
16
Mr. Mulvaney told Fox News Sunday that “the president’s commitment is to defend the nation and he’ll do it either with or without Congress.”
The president's power is not absolute.
Only Congress may declare war.
8
drugs? nope, wall won't help; they come in thru ports of entry.
population? not really, we need more people, not less, to keep the GDP rising.
human trafficking? nope, see drugs above.
crisis? there are plenty, but the wall won't help any of them except the crisis of the President's ego.
7
Mr. Buskirk, you say that "Border security is the president's signature issue."
I must ask, why didn't he pursue 6 billion dollars in American taxpayer money for his wall when his party controlled both sides of Congress and the White House? Was that a dereliction of duty? He claims that the situation at the border is a crisis; why has he ignored that emergency for two years? Did he only recently realize that there is absolutely no chance of Mexico paying for that wall so now US citizens will have to fork over the cash?
The "crisis" at the border is a manufactured story, yes we need to protect the border but let Congress attempt to come up with a multilevel plan to address it. Sure, it could include new sections of wall, but a wall with no additional technology to observe and detect activity will not be all that effective. The wall, or fence, around the White House doesn't do a thing to protect me from Trump, I wish it worked better.
12
New. York harbor where my father and maternal grandparents enter the U.S. hosts both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island: the welcoming beacon and the vigilant steward. Symbolism matters just as much as function.
2
@Charles Becker
Your grandparents came in via a legal port of entry.
I am reasonably sure that trump will sign any bipartisan bill directing Mexico to pay for the wall. Why can’t congress just get the job done?
5
I am always fascinated by how republicans (when not in power) decide to ''bend'' the Constitution to their will and against ANY proposal that a Democrat comes up with.
They did it with a Supreme Court nominee by not even meeting with him or having a straight up and down vote in the Senate.
They are doing it now with the House and what the Constitution specifically lays out what their job is - to be the purse strings to the country and the government. (as well as oversight over ALL)
Full stop.
It does not matter what pundit perceives to be the power dynamic, and it does not matter what the president says or wants. The Congress decides what money is going to spent on what.
If you do not like it, then you can vote for someone that will represent what you believe in two years time. That is how Democracy works, and what this representative republic is all about.
Take a vote, and the majority wins.
20
Christopher-
In this article you stated that Mr. Trump needed to "reassert his authority."
I can't help but wonder, how much authority did Trump have in the first place? His only major legislative accomplishment in two years as president is a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, which he probably didn't even have that much to do with. All Trump has ever done is work on his appearance of authority, by name calling and bucking political norms. We also know that Trump only used the wall as a symbol to get people fired up, excited, and ultimately scared, without any real plan for building his wall.
22
Scary. His point seems to be that Trump should have made the shutdown even more destructive so that he could have gotten his way. How is this conservative, just, American, or good for this country?
30
Give it up. The ship of state has floundered, Captain Trump and his crew is in the water and the sharks are circling, smelling the first hints of blood in the water. So far Captain Trump has managed to fend off the attack, but it is only a matter of time before the whole crowd grows bolder and one of the sharks scores a big bite, the water fills with blood and Captain Trump is done for.
4
I hope Trump follows Buskirk's loony advice and declares a national emergency. The immediate consequences would be that the House would pass a resolution nullifying the national emergency. From what I have read, that would require the Senate to also way in with a vote to either accept or reject the emergency declaration by a simple majority vote.
Vulnerable Senate Republicans would be on the record voting for either a Trump dictatorship or democracy. It is a no win situation. Vulnerable Senate Republicans could choice to lose their GOP primary or lose the general election. Either way they lose. Do it Donnie.
25
I'm certain we can all agree that we need real immigration reform, that we need enhanced border security that may include some improved "fencing", but also improved technology, checking of vehicles at legal cross-points and perhaps more more professionals for border patrol. We also need a real plan for the Dreamers. Additionally, we need to work with the South American countries that are so dangerous and without possibility, the people have to flee.
Put 5.7 Billion into a wall and the majority of the items from the list above have no chance.
What politicians fail to understand is the real threat to America - the lack of affordable healthcare that is destroying the middle class, the extraordinary cost of higher education, the lack of spending on infrastructure and the lack of innovative & affordable high school and tech education that could train millions of young people to fill the jobs that are currently vacant.
Without decent work possibilities for those who have no desire to go to college, with roads, bridges and other infrastructure that's falling apart and with millions who can't afford to take themselves or their children to regular doctor visits, America is going to crumble.
I, for one, am tired of talk about Billion dollar initiatives that have nothing to do with the real lives of the majority of us who live, work and want to live a decent life in this country.
22
If the wall is an emergency, which is defined as "a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action"...why has the emergency trigger not been pulled over the past several months? The continuing delay while calling the wall a national emergency is not logical. You have to question the reality of the emergency?
14
Mr. Buskirk: For all your arguments, you still seem to forget that Trump supporters don't represent the MAJORITY of the American electorate and his recent government shutdown has only managed to see his approval ratings drop even further.
And then there's the question of why wasn't he able to get anything done while Republicans were still in control of the House and Senate? Can't blame the Democrats for that.
Face it. Trump owns this.
The G.O.P. tax bill undercuts his rural working-class base, his trade war with China is taking a toll on U.S. farmers, there's no affordable health care relief in sight, and the jobs aren't coming back to America.
Mr. Trump may blame illegal immigrants for every conceivable ill there is, but it's still going to take a lot more than a wall to solve the problems he has helped to create since he's been in office.
And last night's State of the Union address won't change any of that.
22
It is terrifically useful to read the opinions from core Trump types.
What, after all, they argue, could be so bad about absolutism. extortion. and constitutional sabotage. What could go wrong, really?
Say one thing for Christoper Buskirk's proposal: it would guarantee that Trump precipitates a truly defining issue of our time, which, to quote Ben Franklin's warning, is: "A Republic, If You Can Keep It."
Sorry Ben! You would never have made it into Christopher Buskirk's or Trump's concept of American Greatness.
18
As one of the significant majority of Americans who loathes Trump and everything he stands for, I totally agree: Let him completely exceed his Constitutional authority with a disastrous temper tantrum, alienating even more of the country that doesn't belong to his base and setting a precedent for the next Democratic President to declare an emergency or hold Republican constituents hostage over his or her base's wish list: The healthcare "emergency," the access to education "emergency," the wealth inequality "emergency." I'd rather the President work with Congress in the traditional way but every strong arm tactic will absolutely have an equal and opposite reaction in short order.
15
This article points to what I believe is one area that I believe is a ripe for bipartisanship: Limiting the President's powers. Many of the President's powers are not Constitutionally mandated, but are rather defaulted to whomever grabs them. Congress was intended to be a check on the power of the Presidency - and it has abdicated that responsibility.
The Republicans felt that Obama abused his Presidential powers. The Democrats feel the same way about Trump. It is time for them to get together and legislate limits on the President's power. I believe they can get the votes to override any potential Presidential veto.
7
Trump said over and over and over that Mexico would pay for the wall. That was his signature campaign issue, not American taxpayers funding it. Oh, and by the way, as a Republican who is concerned about an "economic crisis," how do you feel about the trillion dollar deficit?
24
This author writes extensively about "power", "political leverage" and other coercive means to override a democratic process and steamroll Trump's wall over the will of congress. Missing is proof of actual merit of the wall as effective security.
He also quotes Trump's statistics, always questionable.
The worst thing In the article is utter failure to justify Trump's wall in the first place. For whatever security problems we have - and Trump no doubt overstates them because that's his DNA - a wall is only one of many competing solutions. We need to choose the most effective solutions. And it's doubtful that a wall is the best answer.
Even in medieval times there were walls - AND ladders, ropes, tunnels and wall busting tools and projectiles. Enemies could go over, under and even through these walls. And now have added high explosives, aircraft including drones, battery powered pulleys for scaling walls, diamond saws to cut through them, etc. And we have lasers, video, sensors, helicopters, satellites, - tools to detect and respond to border incursion.
We have no business building a wall without first deciding whether it is the best thing to do in comparison to the other alternatives, and then putting our resources behind the best approaches for border security. There should be no room in this process for building a wall because a presidential bully wants to make good on his campaign promises to a voting minority that is his electoral base. THAT DOES NOT JUSTIFY IT!!
24
Is the thrust of this article supposed to be trump’s tantrum wasn’t big enough?
Please, I’d rather have no federal government than rule by tantrums, as I expect
would many more dems than the gop thinks.
After all, our states are competently run; we will be much better off than all the MAGAs who want government out of their Medicare and social security.
11
Road apples. There is no emergency. What is a disgrace is how we are handling this humanitarian problem. And for those worried about how to pay for it, Trump has already figured it out: tariffs. He said in the SOTUA that billions are flowing into the treasury as a result of his tariffs. What he didn't say is that tariffs are a tax on the American people that they don't recognize. Cut taxes where they see it, raise taxes where they don't, and claim a false victory.
6
Suppose you actually cared about the general welfare of Americans. You would consider issues that have a greater effect than immigration. For example, you would increase the number of people with health insurance rather act to reduce the number as Trump has, and you would take action to reduce the effects of climate change rather than act to increase the effects as Trump has.
11
Wow. The reason Trump hasn't already declared a national emergency is that Mitch McConnell has told him repeatedly that he will lose Republican support if he tries it. They don't support him because they know that immigration is NOT a national emergency and that a wall that will take years to build is not an emergency measure. Declaring a national emergency would be a cynical ploy to get around opposition from Congress -- you might not be surprised that Congress won't take kindly to that. No, Trump has put himself in a terrible place through his own shortsightedness. He sold his supporters on a myth. If he doesn't make his myth come true, his supporters will desert him. If he uses the only tool he has to keep his campaign promise, Senate Republicans will oppose him and may just convict him in an impeachment trial. Either way, he will have destroyed his own presidency.
22
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage."
How dare you wish that kind of pain on regular, middle class working people? This is why our country is divided: I find your suggestion abhorent.
61
It might sway Public Opinion and help Mr. Trump implement his wall, if he were able to release his tax statements, proving once and for all, that he is solvent. Barring this possibility, he might ask China for a loan. Other presidents have visited 'The Great Wall', during their term in office, and it is an ancient wonder of the world.
Mr. Buskirk, surrounded by Trump supporters, they do not give a button about The Wall, but love the president for the tax check in the mail, and because he is blunt and does not mince words.
Perhaps he could pay a courtesy call to the Leader of China, and explain to him this dilemma that is holding our Nation back and preventing peace among the patriots of America.
While Mr. Trump has a reputation for keeping his promises, there is a singular feeling spreading through our Nation that we have been the victims of Betrayal.
5
Doesn't his continued threat to call an emergency undercut his very argument. If it was such an emergency two months ago why didn't he call it then. Wasn't it an emergency prior to the mid-term election when the president claimed that the caravan then was an invasion. No, the very idea that there is a national emergency is a fabrication created by the president and his staff to get a wall that was never really his idea. Remember, the wall was created as a memory reminder for the president to remind him to talk about immigration. It wasn't until Rush and Ann called him a wimp that the president started to force everyone to bow down to his request for a wall. This is not an immigration policy its another Berlin Wall issue and we saw how that one turned out.
9
With supporters like Mr. Buskirk, who needs enemies? Instead of urging his man Trump to compromise on border security and attempt to expand his base, which is the only way Trump can possibly win in 2020 - our writer wants Trump to continue pandering to his shrinking core of supporters and fight for the border wall. Is it possible that Buskirk is a Democratic operative? Keep up the good work, sir.
11
It's remarkable that you say, basically, that if a president doesn't get what he wants he just does it without Congress. Constitutionally, Congress controls spending, does it not? And nothing can be done without spending.
I understand that you are framing it as being in the special case of defending the country. But still, if Congress won't, say, fund a bomber that Trump says is absolutely necessary to our defense, then he can use executive authority and just go build it?
Not too long ago Obama declared that he would not wait any longer for the stalemate over "comprehensive immigration reform" and he used executive orders to accomplish what he said was essential. Wow, the right went nuts over that, flipping all the arguments backwards from what you are now claiming.
Finally, you make a single quote from a law professor, a statement that the law gives “the president the authority he needs to direct existing appropriations toward construction of a border security wall, once he has declared a national emergency.”
I have seen many, many statements from numerous experts saying that no, he does not have that authority, and giving lots of details of which law allows what and which law specifies exactly this and that, so I fully expect lawsuits challenging any move by the president to try it.
Our government used to function in something of a reasonable manner. I can remember such days, they aren't just imaginings. I was alive back when things were not like this.
10
How does your claim that illegal immigration is a threat to American job-seekers match up with Trump's claim that more Americans than ever before are working, and wages are rising?
And what would firing 800,000 federal workers for no other reason than that the president is throwing a temper tantrum do to that middle class you seem so worried about?
488
@mmwhite and those wages have been lagging since what, at least 1990, maybe even sooner? Gee, what happened big time beginning in the early 1990s?
11
@gmt
The labor statistics does not distinguish undocumented workers from American workers. The probability is that more American workers and more undocumented workers are employed.
@mmwhite
Wages are still low, significantly lower than they would be without the massive immigration of the past 40 years, and the effect is greatest at the unskilled end -- i.e. the end heavily populated by "immigrants" who came illegally.
2
It is disappointing that the Times found an opinion writer who appears incapable of crafting a sensible argument based on fact and sound reasoning. Mr. Buskirk's opinion piece that is devoid of fact and logic. To assert that Trump should have "asserted authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed" is the height of insanity. What purpose would this serve? Throw government employees into penury by erasing their livelihood in order to get something out of Congress that even the Republican Congress of 2017-19 would not grant? He thinks that hundreds of thousands should become unemployed and be unable to pay mortgages, rent, buy food, pay for their children's education, etc. as a "transgressive threat?" He thinks that Trump is protecting the constitution by circumventing the constitutional requirement that Congress appropriate money? Buskirk ignores the inconvenient fact that the illegal crossing rate is much lower in past years, and that many are refugees who are not violating US law. Buskirk also says that Trump's delay is due to "electoral politics" and that Paul Ryan blocked action. If this is really an emergency, then delay makes no sense, unless there is no crisis.
We have no basis to assume that this cockamamie administration has a rational approach to spending any border security allocation. This is the most incompetent administration in history.
13
For the past two years Trump has been demanding his big beautiful wall, and his supporters joined in the chorus. Turns out, Trump has been hiring illegal immigrants to work at his hotels, golf courses, and wineries for decades. Trump supporters still haven't figured out that they were sold a bill of goods. Donald Trump is never getting his wall. At this point, he'd be lucky to see a few hundred steel slats.
7
My goodness gracious. Please, please bring us some conservative policy solutions that we can work with. We don't have to agree right off the bat: a little "hmm, that might work; that makes sense" would be helpful right now.
What happened to GOP smarts? Have their brains been totally rotted by greed, misogyny, and racism? It certainly would appear so because if their best idea is a wall, we are in a lot of trouble.
10
Mr. Buskirk, I think you have indulged in too much Kool-Aid. Repeating statistics that are lies do not make them truths, no matter how many times they are repeated. That fact that you believe in Trump's lies make you and your arguments for a border wall duplicitous. In addition, the jobs that illegal immigrants take from Americans (and thus ruining the middle class, as you say) are those jobs that no American would do. I have yet to see many out of work coal miners pick strawberries, nor have I seen any illegal immigrants working in coal mines. And finally, walls do not save lives, except in the situation where Trump is behind a series of slatted metal bars: then many lives will be saved, including our democracy.
11
As a Democrat, I can only hope Donald Trump follows this preposterous advice.
5
@Mark Roderick My thoughts exactly if it will speed up the demise of his presidency.
Buskirk's idea of firing federal workers reminds me of the famous, futile tactic in Vietnam: we had to destroy the village in order to save it. It sounds like their real goal is to cripple the Federal government, so that they'll have an easier time usurping the power that we have delegated to our institutions. The Wall will not solve any problems related to drugs or crime. But the fight over the Wall gives Trump, Buskirk and their crowd something to rail about. I'm sure that Putin loves it.
6
Words and words to say that border security can't be attained without a monumental wall.
OMG, what a bunch of hooey. My biggest problem is where to start.
How about why the wall never got built while the Republicans were in charge. Mr. Buskirk was pretty plain about the answer: a lot of even Republicans were cool about or even against the wall. In fact, every poll I've seen has a large majority of the voting public against the wall. So, Trump is supposed to put up the wall not for a majority of the American people, or even a majority of it's politicians, but for the minority (and not even plurality, unless you believe Trump's fairy tale about 3M illegal votes for Hillary) of people that are his supporters, because they are so much more important than everyone else?
As for the wall stopping 'trafficking', there are already dozens to hundreds of drug tunnels under the existing walls. What's to keep them from hundreds more in support of the also lucrative 'people trade'. Trafficking hardly existed at the border 10 years ago. As we've made it harder to get in, all we've done is to enrich the traffickers.
So what do we do? How about take a page from Ben Franklin: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Think how much $5.7B might go toward making Guatemala and Honduras decent places to live, especially if we had a president who supported the rule of law instead of a dictator, as in Guatemala.
I could go on, but even the Times is telling me my time is up.
5
I would start by saying that you should be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Buskirk, but I somehow doubt that you are capable of that sort of humility or introspection.
You talk about winning and losing as though this were a sporting event. You talk about permanently laying off federal workers who have done nothing wrong because you choose to make them pawns in the game you are playing. You claim that the lack of a wall is an attack on the middle class. But you are willing to throw millions of people out of the middle class -- the 800,000 workers, plus their dependents -- because you think you can make political hay out of the act.
Your moral bankruptcy is further established by your reference to George H.W. Bush's political punishment for not keeping his promise about no new taxes. A good leader, which I think H.W. was (although I did not vote for him and disliked many of his policies), is willing to change his/her mind as circumstances and experience demand.
The reason that the partisan divide has become so sharp is that we are no longer talking about policy differences -- such as the ones that I had with H.W. Such differences allow for disagreement while maintaining respect for the other side. Today's problem is that people like you and Trump, lacking in humanity, with their eyes only on their own prize, are now running the country.
I fear for our future.
14
American Greatness, huh. Well, great countries don't build walls, fearful ones do. The Berlin Wall was an expression of the weakness of the Soviet Union, and so too with all other such projects, from the Great Wall of China to the Israeli wall and everything in between.
10
Buskirk makes conclusory assertions with no evidence by hashing the same, tired and xenophobic comments of the right. And for him to suggest that Trump threaten to permanently layoff federal workers is cruel, heartless, and shows that he, like the GOP, prefers to put party before country.
6
The USA needs much stronger immigration control.
The world has seven billion people, rapidly going on eight billion.
Hundreds of millions, or billions, would come here if we let them.
The US already has 330 million people,
plus, every year, for decades, we are granting 1 million more "green cards", the right to legal permanent residence,
plus hundreds of thousands of supposedly "temporary" residence visas in a plethora of categories, most of which somehow end up being extended endlessly.
That is plenty.
We do not need more people.
If you think we do, just take a look at Los Angeles,
with its hugely overcrowded school system and roads.
I challenge Dems to put a numerical limit on the total number of immigrants annually, in all categories combined,
then stick with it, and enforce it.
But the Dems obstinately refuse to agree to any limits.
Instead, they keep cooking up more and more ways for more and more immigrants to come, without limit,
whether legally, with all sorts of new categories for immigration,
and all sorts of exceptions for existing categories,
and more and more amnesties for those coming illegally,
and all sorts of anti-enforcement actions.
Most recently, the Dem House proposal for the House-Senate Conference Appropriations Committee (the "bipartisan" committee) strangles funding for detention facilities for so-called "asylum seekers" pending hearings for their claims -- with the result that they are let loose into the interior, and 90% never show up.
41
@sam finn, a wall simply does not equal “stronger immigration control”. Maybe if someone started with a comprehensive, realistic proposal to tighten our southern border the democrats would respond with their own proposal and negotiations could begin, but the only thing that insistence on a wall does is block serious discussion of the issue.
79
Democrats want border security. Democrats have not opened the floodgates on immigration. Democrats simply want a humane and effective response to the facts that there are refugees on our border who deserve asylum, to the inhuman separation of children from their parents, and to millions of undocumented immigrants who have lived peacefully and worked productively in the US for many years. Doing jobs that White folks ain’t gonna do. Including a substantial part of Trump’s loyal workforce who have helped make him very rich, whom he is now suddenly brutalizing with wholesale firings merely for the purpose of political posturing. If he was serious about such folks posing a threat to the nation’s safety and economic well-being, he could have called in ICE and had them all deported. Just imagine the public outrage in response to that kind of cynical cruelty. So - Do you want to exercise that kind of firing and deportation strategy on a massive scale? Sorry. That’s where we part company. The wall is a primitivist and alarmist response that won’t stop illegal immigration. (Think: Tunnels. Boats. Hidden vehicle passenger compartments. Airplanes. Ropes. Ladders. Cranes.) More intelligent and thoughtful strategies including the use of sophisticated monitoring devices would improve border security. And let’s cut the nonsense about there being some kind of crisis. The flow of illegal immigrants is much lower than in the past.
78
@Craig King
So, what have Dems actually proposed to strengthen border security?
The following is what they actually have done.
Resist and obstruct significant increases in border patrol personnel to actually monitor all those whiz-bang surveillance cameras and devices and to follow up and apprehend persons those devices supposedly will be able to detect.
Strangle funding for detention facilities for those dragging out the legal procedures to resist deportation.
Prohibit or seriously restrict huge swaths of illegal aliens from being detained at all because detention is "inhumane".
Resist and obstruct tooth and nail nearly all deportation as "inhumane".
If you don't believe it, read the fine print in the Dem House proposal to the current House-Senate Conference Committee on Appropriations (the so-called "bipartisan" Committed), which is S.O.P for the Dem approach to what they claim is border control.
In addition, Dems resist and obstruct mandatory requirements for employers to use -- at the point of hire -- e-Verify to determine who is actually authorized to work -- and instead simply chant "hit the employers with fines" or "jail the employers" -- as if it's the employers' who somehow know who is and is not illegal and as if the supposedly innocent "undocumented" employee applicants somehow do not know perfectly well their own illegal presence here.
6
Let’s review how many walls have been successful. The walls around Jerusalem, torn down by the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall, abandoned and assimilated, the Great Wall of China, pierced and overrun by the Mongols, the walls around Constantinople, breached by the Ottoman Turks, the Atlantic Wall, broken and bypassed by the Allies in less than a day, the Berlin Wall, felled by people seeking freedom in a peaceful way. I can think of several more examples but they never work well for long, especially in this modern technological era. The country doesn’t “need” this wall for anything other than to assuage The Donald’s ego.
4
@HKS. You neglect to say how long the walls were in place. And the wall in Israel?
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more."
Seriously?
The shutdown ended so recently, and yet it seems that Mr. Buskirk has already forgotten Pelosi's main argument: that giving in to pressure on federal workers would allow the GOP to hold their paychecks hostage whenever they wanted to get their way over the will of the majority.
Laying them off goes a huge step further. Not just paychecks, but air safety, law enforcement (remember the FBI?), and, if you suddenly unemploy enough people, the entire economy would be taken hostage. (Many more departments would be damaged, of course - but I have only so many characters left here...)
Of course Pelosi wouldn't cave into that; it would be the end of any semblance of balance of powers.
Just the idea suggests the bankruptcy of the author.
20
@Steve J.
Did the article say Mr. Bushkirk is the editor and publisher of American Greatness or American Vapidness. I forget.
1
Paul Ryan made a mess of being Speaker, but if Trump wanted 6 billion in the budget for his wall it would have been in the bill. For whatever reason it slipped through the cracks, the Democrats flipped the House as predicted and Trump went to battle minus his sword.
The Wall is symbolic, a campaign rant including a pledge Mexico would pay for it. Now as the writer points out Trump believers bought the pledge and by whatever means possible the Wall must be built. Much needed Immigration Reform and Border Security measures held hostage to Wall US taxpayers will pay for.
6
Your political analysis is decent. Your support of a wall in the name of national security is wrong.
121
@torroid Any talk from Buskirk about national security is 100% disingenuous. This is completely about politics and winning, it does not matter if the wall is simply ornamental, it was a promise and Buskirk wants that promise (however empty, however nonsensical, however wasteful, wrong, and immoral) kept as a means of securing political power.
37
@torroid The idea that Democrats want an open border is a myth that Trump invented. Dem's just don't want to spend billions on a wall that anyone with a tall ladder or a rope with a grappling hook could be over in 5 minutes. Just because Trump made the wall his rallying cry doesn't mean everyone has to go along with this ridiculous idea. How many really great ideas that Obama had were squashed by the Republicans?
7
@torroid No his political analysis is insane and immoral.
2
If you hire an illegal the owners and executives should go to prison. No wall needed.
275
@Bob D
And the only thing Buskirk analyzed well in this piece is how oligarchs give lip service to building a wall and reducing immigration, so they can garner votes from fearful people, but don't really fight for it, as doing so would result in their inability to hire people at lower than subsistence wages and an inability to rip as much profit out of their ventures as possible.
This does help undermine the working and middle classes, but so do automation and off-shoring and a batch of other things Republican "populists" seem to have no qualms about.
18
Why just single out business executives? How about your family, friends and neighbors? Literally tens of millions of Americans casually employ undocumented workers for child care, landscaping, construction, property maintenance, etc.. Want to put everybody in jail?
8
@Bob D Does that include Mr. Trump of Trump Co himself? I understand he has had many "illegals" working at his properties.
12
No, border security is NOT the defining issue of our day; it is global warming.
And when was the last time Trump did anything because he wanted to fulfill his Constitutional duties?
12
@Edward Rosser. Poll after poll shows climate change is at the bottom. Remember when they used to call it global warming?
Most Americans can clearly see that this wall is simply fresh red meat to his base. Studies have shown illegal crossings are at the lowest point since 2000 when crossings were at 1.6 million. Currently crossings are at 1/4 mil. How is that a crisis? We also know that most immigrants who overstay visas are the real problem, in the area of immigration. What is a real crisis? How about the 40,000 murdered in 2018 by gun violence? Or even climate change which has accelerated at a terrifying rate? We can tell the difference you know. We resent having this fake emergency pushed on us when he outright denies the problems stated above.
497
@Andrea Serna The wall is a ruse. Soviet Russia collapsed when their wall was torn down. Putin wants Traitor Trump to build a wall to cause American economic collapse.
7
@Andrea Serna,
I'm pretty sure that your "40,000" number is simply wrong. CDC tallies just over 14,000: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Please provide a citation for your data.
4
The President of the United States is supposed to represent all Americans, not just his base. Most Americans do not want a border wall. Furthermore, the data on immigration, crime, drug smuggling, etc. tells us that a wall will not address the problems Trump claims it will. He needs to work with Congress to come up with solutions that have a greater likelihood of working.
7
Trump and his MAGA Muppets don’t like data - or legal processes
Buskirk doesn't say what he will trade democrats for wall funding. This is the crux of the matter. Who pays for the wall? Not Mexico, obviously. Not democrats. Why would they pay for a Trump and Republican priority?
Trump and the Republicans must pay for the wall by trading democrats something of value for their votes. Trump and Buskirk don't want to pay for the wall, so they resort to extortion, hostage taking, or power grabs to get a wall without paying for it.
It is absurd.
238
@DB
How about the government selling "wall bonds", like they
sold "war bonds"during WW II? Then Trump's supporters and all the people who think we need a wall can buy the "wall bonds", and THEY can pay for it, and leave the rest of us taxpayers alone.
19
1. None of the 9.11 perpetrators of 9.11 came though our southern borders, but arrived on commercial flights. None of the ensuing terrorist attacks in our homeland were by illegal immigrants from our southern neighboring countries.
2. To curb the flow (and possibly stop it completely) of illegal immigrants trying to find work in the United States, jail all owners/managers of businesses that illegally employ them. Publicizing a bunch of them being perp walked during prime time TV will work miracles in stemming the flow. We might not get crops, fruits and vegetables picked since these jobs are too arduous for us...but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
3. The drugs come through the established ports of entry, by container loads, trucks, vessels, et al. A trickle seems to come through underground tunnels.
4. Building a so-called wall for $5.7 billion is an absolute waste of our taxes, especially as we all know by now, this sort of boondoggle project has (1) the unfortunate habit of massively running over budget, and (2) of handsomely lining the pockets of those involved in it.
10
Trump Construction Company is standing by to build for $40B
4
What utter bilge. In its race to save itself financially and from any intellectual criticism, the NYT continues to allow these political screeds to be published in its pages and online presence. It is tiresome and shameful.
6
Mr. Buskirk comes across as yet another Trump sycophant trying to explain away his idol's stupidity. Plainly put, Trump could have had $25 billion for his wall in March 2018 if he had accepted the DACA deal offered by the Dems. He turned it down, making the art of the deal the art of being a moron.
15
Discussing whether border security is important or the most important issue is a red herring. Shut downs and executive orders are not how we govern our country. How we govern actually allows us to debate and vote on issues, like this one, and all the others, but you have to allow that governance to happen and/or accept its outcomes.
4
I just finished "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman (he is the economic historian whose telling-off of a bunch of billionaires at Davos went viral recently). In the book, there is a chapter on borders. In that chapter, various studies are laid out on the economic impact of easing the current system of closed borders or evengradually opening them. He is clearly on the side of re-opening borders (they were effectively open until WWI), but he also cites studies by anti-immigration researchers and think tanks--because (perhaps to the chagrin of their authors) they too show that making borders as open to people as they are to goods will benefit the entire world economically, and especially underdeveloped regions.
4
This piece is shallow and repetitive to the extreme. It offers nothing new. It is a waste of time and space.
9
A threat to lay off federal workers would have been met with precisely one response:
"We don't negotiate with terrorists."
13
That Trump could “educate” the country on anything is perhaps the most laughable excerpt from an already absurd commentary.
19
Border security is the defining issue of our day? Gee whiz.
Not China? Not global warming? Not the spread of AI and automatisation and their impact on the labor force (which will give the good ol' days of illegal immigration a halcyon glow, believe me)?
Even Brexit is likely to be more of an issue that the piddling "crisis" on the Southern "boarder."
11
Trump 'caved' by reopening the government? What kind of Chief Executive shuts down his own organization? The most irresponsible and immature thing to do. Like the head of a household starving the children, in order to get a concession from the spouse! Blackmailing his partners by making their joint dependents hostages.
This not the way a President is supposed to negotiate with the legislature - taking hostages, using blackmail. Learn how Lyndon Johnson negotiated, not how Don Corleone did it.
409
I’m not sure I buy your comparison between Trump and Don Corleone. Fredo, maybe?
@David Gold
"Starving the children" works as long as you don't care for them in the first place...
5
Mr. Buskirk knows as well as anyone that the chances Trump's wall will be built are slim to none, regardless of what nonsense he pulls. Multiple landowners along the southern border that are not thrilled about giving over their property to the government are ready to file lawsuits the minute Trump either declares his emergency or Congress gives him the money. Trying to take the land through eminent domain is just as time consuming as each case is heard separately. Some have said that the cost to acquire the land would amount to more than the cost of the wall. Enough legal entanglements will be forced on Trump's administration that they'll be tied up for years trying to work them out. Way after 2020, when Trump is kicked out of office, the wrangling will go on. Buskirk and other Trump followers better be satisfied with lip service, because that's what they'll get. Trump can crow about "winning" his wall, but still there will be no wall.
5
It continues to completely baffle me how anyone can be not embarrassed to support a politician about whom this could be written:
" ... the president had the whip hand — if he had only recognized it and chosen to use it. Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, noted on Twitter that 'Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way. Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational, and they’re getting slaughtered.' "
11
Excellent thoughts, but why not take them to their logical conclusion? If Congress won't protect the American People, shouldn't the president simply dissolve Congress in order to fulfill his Constitutional obligations? Isn't that what Mulvaney was implying when he said that the President would secure the border with or without Congress? Does anyone doubt that the President's base would fully support such an action? Wouldn't it virtually ensure his re-election?
2
@TS That might be what Mulvaney had in mind and it might please his most diehard supporters, but your final question/proposition, that such a move would virtually guarantee Trump’s reelection is absolute nonsense.
As a country we are powerful and rich and, until recently, one touting a vision of universal human rights, including the right of asylum for people fleeing violence and persecution. (Perhaps our image was somewhat tarnished by the observation that the violence and persecution from which people fled was often instigated by our agents and policies.) But we still offered a vision of rights that transcended national borders. Our commitment to that vision gave us strength and standing in the affairs of the world.
Now Trump's unlawful refusal to deal fairly with asylum seekers speaks of a country shrunken in spirit. Trump's immigration rhetoric tells the world that the US is so divided by racist resentment that we can no longer sustain our commitments to human rights for fear of the non-white others outside our borders. He has divided us from the world and from one another. We are immeasurably weaker because of Trump's claims that our strength depends on a racist barricade.
13
Christopher,
Did you forget about the scene of the airports having lengthy delays and no flying permission, along with air traffic controllers on stress alert? If a plane came down, or if an accident happened in any of various ways, can you imagine the wrath felt towards Trump? No, I have to disagree with your premise that the shutdown could have been maintained. It was looking like chaos at the airports with planes kept at terminals, a virtual shutdown at LaGuardia, and dire warnings from FAA officials. I think that would have been an enormous gamble for Trump to take. As it was, it was looking like Trump was causing chaos at the airports.
Question: Would you have willingly flown with depleted or exhausted flight controllers?
6
Mr. Buskirk, thank you for illustrating the best arguments those on the wild-eyed Trump fringe can come up with. And on Fox I'm sure they are convincing.
20
It is certainly refreshing to see an editorial from this viewpoint in the NYT. Since I don't regularly read Republican friendly publications, I wondered if there was anybody who could address these issues intelligently. This editorial certainly fills the bill.
And it fails to convince me of the usefulness of the Wall.
All the arguments continue to defy the published realities of the border situation offered by people who live there.
It fails to address the inhumane treatment of immigrants and their children.
It does not address the fact that most of the drugs, trafficking, and actual illegal entry come not through the southern border, but through airports or by sea, and those that do come by way of trucks or tunnels.
It actually suggests that Trump should have compounded his error by actually laying off the workers who were furloughed.
The article, in fact makes it plain that the struggle over the wall is more about political will than border security.
The argument that immigration impacts wages is also disingenuous, first because it seems to hold harmless the poor business people who are just trying to cut costs, instead of blaming them for seeking the lowest cost (illegal) labor available. Second it fails to note that jobs on offer fail to pay a living wage or offer any benefits worth mentioning.
So thank you, NYT, for presenting the most cogent argument against the wall, from the mouth of one of its supporters.
Keep shining the light
22
The problem here, seems to be that Trump made a promise out of a stream of consciousness during a campaign rally without doing his homework, and to date still doesn't seem to have done the homework necessary to formulate any sort of plan that would form the basis of legislation to build a wall. The alleged need for a wall rests on his assumptions that 1) there is a crisis on the border that is a threat to national security, and 2) that a wall is a solution to the alleged crisis--both of which are highly questionable. If he was able to convince those outside of his base as to the veracity of these assumptions, then there'd be a wall, but he's not been interested in persuading--only threatening and cajoling.
While the concept of border security is popular, "the wall" is not a border security plan so much as a political object. "A wall" could be part of a border security plan, and would not be controversial if it was the result of unbiased research and assessment of our border security threats and vulnerabilities, and more studies from the relevant experts on the best ways of addressing any threats and vulnerabilities.
There were 2 years where he could have easily gotten his wall, but he squandered that opportunity. Nobody should be required to indulge him, just so he can keep a campaign promise that they (and their constituents) vehemently disagree with in principle. He can try to build it by other means, but there will be consequences for him and his party.
5
In many political debates, both sides are partly wrong.
That's the case regarding illegal immigration.
On the one hand, Trump is right that illegal immigration is illegal, and should be recognized as such.
Thus declaring certain cities as sanctuaries is inflammatory because it essentially says that local communities can vote to defy the votes of Congress and support undercutting of US laws.
Open borders is not a real solution, and Democrats are demagogues when they suggest it is.
The population of Guatemala has exploded from 4 million in 1960 to almost 17 million now. Democrats display incredible innumeracy when they suggest that poverty in Latin America can be effectively addressed by admitting a few thousand from migrant caravans every month.
But Republicans also miss what should be an important component of the immigration debate.
We are our brother's keepers. We have an obligation to help the poor in Guatemala and the 1.2 billion in Africa where the population is projected to double by 2050.
Immigration is not a viable solution. But access to family planning is part of a solution.
Trump should have demanded such access as a condition for free trade with Latin America in any renegotiation of Nafta.
Unfortunately the religious right seems to rule out discussion of that part of the solution.
With each party taking unrealistic positions and then making those positions into nonnegotiable demands, they set the US up for government shutdowns and gridlock.
3
@Jake Wagner Find me a nationally recognized Democrat who is advocating "open borders," or who contends that admitting refugees is anything more than a tiny part of a comprehensive response to the humanitarian poverty crises in Central and South America.
I won't be holding my breath.
13
“During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more.“
I see this guy on PBS’s News Hour every now and then. Apparently he’s one of the go-to conservative pundits the News Hour relies on for the purpose of achieving balance. Who knew that his blinking, bland demeanor and lifeless delivery on those broadcasts masked a subversive bent on destroying a functioning government altogether, and throwing the lives of federal workers into chaos.
23
I hope this piece isn’t the paper’s response to Trump’s request for one good story. He requested this of the publisher in their recent interview.
11
@RjW,
It would be a shame, because there are so many skilled writers who would be able to offer Trump in The New York Times a feast of good stories, authored just for him, while he stumbles through his trials and tribulations. Twittering away lonely at night, it makes some of us of sad listening to his trumping, and all he wants is His Country for a Wall.
1
I can't speak for other Trump supporters, but, the President would have to take few steps backwards, before I started to lose my enthusiasm.
"What is frustrating about this for supporters of border integrity is that the defeat was entirely self-inflicted."
Defeat sounds so, final. Actually, round Two starts in 9 days.
Some less attentive citizens may imagine the President conducting executive duties with the equivalent of a flame thrower. In reality, he is performing surgical strikes. He gave congress a choice. They dared him. And the non-essential elements were turned off for 35 days.
He came back to the table for 3 weeks. Dem leadership has all but said, "He'll be sorry if he does that again." Some don't think he will. When was the last time Trump pulled out Obama's red crayon and drew a line?
I hope you Federal pawns have been listening to Dave Ramsey.
3
@Mike....."I can't speak for other Trump supporters,"....You do realize that just like "Obama was born in Kenya" repeated over and over; "Build a Wall" repeated over and over is intended to be code words for a racial slur? Now the question is, do you really want to "Build a Wall"?
2
@Mike "They dared him."
Democrats let him follow through on his promise to shut down the government over the wall. And he did it. And he opened it up again--without gaining anything and costing the country $11 billion ($3 billion net). He did it after air travel was disrupted, for one day. You think that won't happen again in "Round Two," and that he won't cave again?
3
Mike, his executive duties consist of watching TV and tweeting. Where does the idea that he's a patient master strategist come from? He doesn't have the attention span to make "surgical strikes."
1
My father volunteered for the Army the day after Pearl Harbor. That, Mr. Buskirk, is what is called a "National Emergency."
If 99% of citizens don't see something as a "National Emergency" then it's not one. The people I ran into today cared much more about their golf game than about this so-called "emergency."
Instead of being a "National Emergency," it is a problem to be solved. The "National Emergency" is that we don't have a President who is a problem solver. Instead, he is a tweeter.
26
Key piece in this article is "But the real answer is that big-business Republicans like Paul Ryan blocked action in the last Congress." Why do you think the Democrats will fund a wall?
Dear Buskirk - You need to own the idea as Republican - that this is a WALL symbolizing hatred of "Brown" people, who ironically also happen to be Christian. And how do you explain food going bad because no one is around to pick it?
Americans don't want those low wage, back breaking hard labor jobs.
Maybe you should watch Will Hurd on Bill Maher interview. Hurd seems so sensible.
I agree we need
4
This country's tax dollars get spent by Congress. Period. This grandstanding attempt to circumvent the will of the people cannot stand. It is a perversion and a subversion of the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
17
So Trump should have threatened to execute a few of his economic hostages--he should have threatened to fire the furloughed employees? In the author's own words: "During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage." Those are terrorist, not American, values you are promoting, Mr. Buskirk.
46
In reality the WALL is just a symbol, like the MAGA hat. Is it really that hard to imagine how a determined immigrant could scale a wall - even a 30 foot one? But it's not really a matter of keeping people out, it's just the scapegoating and instilling of fear that matters to Trumpists.
11
@Horace
Has it occurred to anyone but me that a wall could be for the purpose of keeping people from leaving, fleeing, escaping a dictatorship should our would-be dictator do something along they lines of declaring martial law, say in the event of House votes to impesach and Senate votes to convict our amoral President?
1
@Horace
Has it occurred to anyone but me that a wall could be for the purpose of keeping people from leaving, fleeing, escaping a dictatorship should our would-be dictator do something along the lines of declaring martial law, say in the event of House votes to impesach and Senate votes to convict our amoral President?
There is an excellent article in this very NYT issue that calls out DJT’s lies and exaggerations in the State of the Union address. Mr. Buskirk should read it before he admiringly repeats the same fictions in supporting a border war. His willingness to accept such twisting of fact negates his entire argument.
9
This guy gets a soapbox? Even the Senate Republicans are begging Trump not to declare a national emergency. They know that the courts would probably invalidate it, as they did during WW II when Eisenhower tried to use it to force striking steel workers back to the job. If the courts invalidated that one, what are they chances they would allow a few thousand immigrants to qualify as a national emergency?
More than that, if it was somehow allowed to stand, the Republicans know that an incredible precedent would be set that represents a sort of "who needs Congress?" mentality, moving us toward a place where a President is in reality a four-year dictator, issuing executive orders and declaring national emergencies to do whatever he/she feels like doing. I hope the Congress realizes this is an existential threat of sorts.
Also, when the Democrats gain control of the Presidency, what's to stop them from declaring, arguing from this precedent, that guns or climate change are 'national emergencies'? The GOP should be shuddering.
Trump, incapable of the larger ramifications, couldn't care less.
18
@John Snow
I typed too hurriedly. It was Truman during the Korean War who declared a national emergency and tried to seize the steel mills. The Supreme Court overruled him
Quite an article but reminds me of some sort of crazed chucky doll spewing a torrent of words to cover over what is nothing more than another xenophobic rant about how brown immigrants are taking middle class jobs and destroying the fabric of America. Yawn... I can count on one hand the number of white high school graduates who want to pick kale or clean toilets. In any event, what remains of the middle class are steadily being replaced by robots at the behest of the 1% seeking greater productivity to maximise their shareholdings. The problem is more complex, requiring a rethink of the consumer society as well as honest engagement with Mexico and its southern neighbours. Unfortunately I think this is beyond our abilities at the moment.
14
Believe you missed a few things in high school - the President is not an emperor. There are 3 branches of government set up as checks and balances on each branch. Trump had 2 years with a republican Congress to build a wall. Oops. A wall is a worthless endeavor. To paraphrase that Republican always brought up in reverential tones - Mr Trump tear down that wall! (Reagan in case you forgot!). I would happily give twice as much funding for more personnel - border guards, immigration judges & appropriate technology, not one cent for a useless wall.
17
If Trump and the rest cared about illegal immigrants they'd raid the employers. A few fines, a few CEOs in jail and the issue would be dead in six months. (Oh, and how about making E-Verify obligatory?)
But of course nobody wants those embarrassing confrontations at the country club, and everybody wants those lovely campaign contributions . . . .
18
To summarize his argument: “I’m wrong on every single point, and the vast majority of Americans know it, but I refuse to back down. The few who think like me will take this country down, no matter that we’re misinformed and will make things up to try to scare others.” Except you’re going to take yourselves down; the rest of us will win. You are your own worst enemy. Please keep talking!
7
The wall is an issue made up for and by right wing extremists. It is same sort of phoney threat we had to put up with during the cold war. Then, the right was forever warning us that the Russians were out to steal our souls. Now that the Russians are a legitimate threat, the right wants us to believe that it's migrant workers that want to steal our souls. Why? Because Trump says so? Give me a break children.
13
I have lived in America all my life. Immigration like taxes is talked to death and nothing is ever done. During the past two administrations, the GOP refused to do anything, to work with President Bush or President Obama now the GOP had two years to do something and as usual the do nothing people did nothing.
So as the infrastructure of the country falls apart, many of us feel good that Anne Coulter can live in her gilded gated community because she is so worried about the brown people.. Funny the people who live in the area are ok its just the rich talking heads. What year is it and we are building a wall however the plans have never been shared with anyone. After the wall it will be something else outdated. The real solder who was insulted by the five time draft dodger wanted to do something about immigration but the do nothing GOP sat on there hands for years.
Interesting that the draft dodger is going to Viet Nam for a meeting with a dictator but he didn't want to go when everyone else was serving their country. Well he would of just had more self hate since he wouldn't of may it out of basic training.
6
His most loyal supporters are a small minority of citizens. Screw ‘em. They do not represent the United States, nor does Trump.
16
I'm thinking I might drive down to the White House with some bricks and a bag of mortar and a not telling Mr. Trump and telling him to build his own d*mned wall. Maybe Mr. Buskirk will give him a hand.
Besides, he's "really rich" so he could pay for it himself.
6
I can only assume that this is a wonderful satire. And naming the journal 'American Greatness'...brilliant.
21
"A nation that does not enforce its own laws or defend its borders is doing none of those things."
The Wall people love to repeat this as if it were self-evident, but in the real world it is anything but, because some laws are intrinsically harder to enforce than others. The US-Mexico border is difficult to secure as a matter of geography and simple economics. Cross-border interaction is a fact of life, a stubborn fact which will not yield to grandiose construction projects.
Border security is an ongoing activity, not something that can just be built.
7
If "cheap labor" undercuts the American middle- and working-classes and harms the economy, why are Republicans so desperate to destroy what's left of organized labor? Unions and collective bargaining _could_ protect workers from rapacious management, if only these techniques are not vilified by politicians and hobbled by a captive Federal judiciary.
If "no wall, no peace" brings about another Federal shutdown the only proper response must be "no pay, no work." A general strike by "essential" workers so-coerced, such as TSA & FAA employees among others, should focus Trump's attention. Unlike Reagan's busting of PATCO in the early-1980s, Trump can't fire them all.
Seems like my long-deceased parents -- New Deal Democrats, both -- were right. When a Republican claims to be on the side of labor, we all better watch our wallets.
35
"Power unused is power lost. It’s a political truth that Democrats understand and Republicans pretend doesn’t exist."
Really? It seems like the Republicans understood power just fine when they blocked Merrick Garland's nomination for a year. And when they stifled congressional collusion investigations for two years. I could go on, but Mitch seems to understand power okay.
31
It's rare that I read a Times piece that I find hardly anything to agree with. But, in this case, we have an all-time winner. The one and only thing I agree with Mr. Buskirk about, at all, is the subhead:
"If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he’ll deserve his fate"
THAT, I wholeheartedly agree with.
22
It is bizarre and baffling to encounter the suggestion that threatening to permanently lay off federal workers would have gotten Democrats -- or anyone -- "in line" behind funding the wall. That anyone might imagine, at this juncture in history, that to do so could have been anything other than a dramatic act of political self-immolation testifies to exactly how out of touch with reality wall advocates can truly be.
28
"During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. That is the sort of transgressive threat that could have been used to his advantage."
The President is evidently cursed with deluded supporters. Had the President acted on a threat like the one Mr. Buskirk suggests, many federal functions, including air travel, would have ground to a long-term halt. He would have single-handedly broken the economy, not to mention all the misery such a move would have caused.
There is wisdom in understanding one's actual leverage in a situation, and beating a quick and quiet retreat when necessary. Fans like the author do the President no favors in encouraging him to keep doubling down on a weak hand.
18
This article and the most recent one published by Tom Friedman on this very issue ((What if Trump Could Explain as Well as He Inflames? - Feb. 5th) are perfect examples of two diametrically opposite approaches to the problem of immigration. Friedman's analysis and proposals are smart, long sighted and practical.
The one offered in this piece is perfectly consistent with Mr. Trump's and the whole conservative's approach to reality: misguided, shortsighted and purely symbolic.
An expensive, cosmetic fix that does nothing to address the core of the problem.
20
While the nation's attention and some of its military troops are focused on the southern boarder the terrorists are going to being crossing in from Canada.
2
@Just paying attention
Don't worry, no one wants to leave Canada to come to the United States. Believe me, no one. Indeed, we would benefit from a wall on the Canadian-US border to prevent the spread of white supremacist terrorism northward.
1
I can think of at least 3 reasons that Trump hasn't declared a National Emergency over the southern border: One, there is no emergency; 2, Mitch McConnell has told him not to do it, and 3, the courts might very well upend it.
There is virtually no chance that Trump will shut down the government again, as even Congressional Republicans would not stand for it. I believe Trump will accept what the Conference Committee agrees to and Congress enacts. This will not be what Trump wants. He will just have to engage in his well honed process of claiming victory whatever the facts are. He will probably retain his base, but not Mr. Buskirk's support.
29
No, Trump will declare a national emergency. As the op Ed shows, Trump’s base wants him to seize power for the sake of seizing power and will reward him for the attempt. For them, the only unforgivable sin is for Trump to not attempt it.
5
"Both the security and the prosperity of the nation are at stake." Well... no, they're not.
"In the State of the Union address, Mr. Trump did a good job making the case for a wall and other security measures." Well... no, he didn't.
And neither does the author of this piece.
74
It's obvious that the proponents of "the wall" as well as many of the opponents don't understand the issues involving this spending. This wall spending is about as rational as a wall across the Atlantic to keep the Japanese and other riffraff from swimming across. It has become obvious that neither the media, nor the President and supporters understand this issue. All sides need to propose a detailed proposal as to just how border security will be enhanced by the proposal and why it is even necessary.
10
The author cites "the vast quantities of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border that contribute to the more than 60,000 American deaths per year from opioid overdose" as a partial justification of Trump's walls. But how would a wall do anything to address that? An inexpensive commercial drone can carry $250K of heroin, and can easily carry it over a 30 foot wall. The wall is an expensive, ill-considered idea that doesn't stand up to 21st century technology.
23
@Gary R Worse for this author, virtually all of the drugs smuggled over the Mexican border come in the trunks of cars or cabs of trailers through legal points of entry. The ones that don't come through tunnels dug under the existing walls into trap houses on the American side.
With all the job openings in the Trump administration, Mr. Buskirk could do more that write opinion pieces and, instead, take his insights and advice directly to the President. That idea about terminating all the furloughed workers is a real gem. Unfortunately Trump is going to miss out on this brilliant idea because it's in writing rather than a Fox News soundbite. Come on Sean, invite this guy on your show so the Prez can benefit from his genius.
25
The defining issue of our day?
Not climate change?
Not income inequality?
Not voter disenfranchisement?
Not a Republican-fueled health care debacle?
Not plutocratic control of our political system?
No, it's all about a few thousand huddled masses at our border. Give me a break.
151
As has been reported elsewhere, "the wall" was a rhetorical device Trump's early advisers gave him to keep him focused on border security as an issue. From there it evolved into a catch phrase, then a nonsensical campaign promise. Now we have a swath of citizens, the author of this op-ed apparently included, who seem to think it's an actual solution even after it's been repeatedly pointed out to them how and why it isn't.
It's hard to fathom how dumb all of this has become, yet here we are.
69
@DennisMcG, That's not dumb, that's willful ignorance. Even more dangerous because it's done with a smile.
You presented basically the same case last night on the PBS Newshour and after-speech time.
It was no more convincing orally than here in writing!
23
Trump had a GOP-dominated Congress. But did not push for his wall.
This article starts from the wrong premise. And so did Trump!
NO WALL!
18
The most frightening aspect of this policy “debate” is that pro wall Tumpistas, like Mr. Bushkirk, would literally destroy the government unless they get their way; someday the whip-hand may belong to a president who wants to ban assault weapons or establish universal health care!
16
“If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he’ll deserve his fate.“
Trump’s well deserved fate is signed, sealed and soon to be delivered to a theater near you.
16
If Mr. Trump's support is so shallow that the absence of a "wall" sinks his candidacy, then this Country deserves Democratic Party identity politics.
Again, Trump really got elected because Hillary Clinton stood for nothing, no change, no ideas, just a promise that the issue of transgender bathrooms in the Carolinas and closing down West Virginia coal mines would take precedence over negotiations with North Korea, reducing unemployment, lowering taxes, getting better trade terms from our partners, and confronting China.
There is no Democratic candidate thus far who will appeal on election day to a majority of independent voters. Not unless independent voters decide that "redistributing wealth" is more important than the freedom to work hard, advance in life without regard to identity politics, promote the choice of healthcare but not the choice to abort a fetus at the end of the third trimester, and the freedom to be free of onerous government regulation in most areas of life.
Of course, the alt.right is now cancelled out by the hate by the alt.left, and the Dems will continue to take certain groups' support for granted, like that of American Jews. But you really cannot fool all the people all the time.
No matter what happens with the Wall, I still like Trump in 2020 unless there is more. And the Dems produce a candidate who is a true centrist in the mold of Henry Scoop Jackson or Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
3
@Jubilee133 Nothing, I repeat nothing, is better than Trump. That says a lot.
@Jubilee133
You'll be in a short line of Trump supporters, most of whom have wised up to his lies, treachery, and corruption. But some ignorati are still down with that, I guess.
1
Mr. Buskirk echoes the dog-whistle politics that is The Wall and attempts to validate the President's position by including Border Security in the article. For example, “The president would do well if he emphasized the degradation of human trafficking and the vast quantities of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border that contribute to the more than 60,000 American deaths per year from opioid overdose”. Mr. Buskirk wishes deeply that the President would say this, or would think this. The President, however, talks about The Wall and The Wall only. The vanity project is the President's signature issue. Border security, as described by Mr. Buskirk, is real, and is complex, too complex for the President to talk about without a TelePrompTer. Let’s face it, The Wall is a loser and Border Security is the real, multi faceted, issue. The dog whistle phrase “Build That Wall” has replaced “Lock Her Up” among the President's supporters, Mr. Buskirk included.
13
Trump represents a minority of Americans. He needs to start acting as if he is the president of all Americans, not just his bigoted base and the very rich.
15
@David
Grand One Percent
Grand Old Plantationomics
Make The Confederacy Great Again 2019
11
Trump will be weakened by House investigations thru 2019, the release of the Mueller report and investigative journalists following up on disclosures that are made. Taking a hard line could find Trump losing support of some GOP politicians ,the independents and he could face a primary draining his ability to fight back vs the onslaught . The INTEL agencies and Justice dept he has trashed along with the military will step back and let him fall down in public a payback he has earned . White nationalists will stick with him .
7
Is this guy seriously suggesting trump should have fired all the furloughed federal workers to play a political game? For no fault of their own?
26
This piece is so precious. Another conservative (white) male know-it-all takes it upon himself to school the nation and the president. If only Trump would listen. If only the public would do what I say.
19
"Border security is the president’s signature issue. It is in many ways the defining issue of our day."
Sorry, Mr. Buskirk. Immigration isn't even a top 5 issue.
The climate crisis is the defining issue of our day.
48
@M urray Bolesta. At this rate, it's going to be the defining issue of our extinction, or at least of the collapse of civilization.
Wow, so shutting down the government over a wall he couldn't be bothered about during his first two years is "excessively rational"?
Don't bogart, pass it over to me.
17
Once again, building the wall is being conflated with border security, which is disingenuous at the very least. We should develop policy based on empirical evidence of what the best solutions are. If it turns out building a wall is the way to go, I'm all for it, but unfortunately for Trump and his supporters, the issue is far more complicated than that. We should treat it that way.
Perhaps Trump could have worked on border security, or infrastructure, or some other bipartisan issue when his presidency was in its infancy, but instead the Republican party spent months trying to tear down the affordable care act, which is probably the most polarizing track they could have possibly chosen. You can't blame the democrats for not wanting to deal when everything this administration has stood for so far is reversing the legacy of the previous one, sometimes to an irrational degree.
Congress has the power of the purse in America. The executive branch doesn't. That means the president has to build alliances and work toward mutually agreeable solutions. The problem with the shutdown was that it happened in the first place, not that Trump didn't hold a gun to the country's head for even longer. His campaign promises are his problem alone, and if he declares a state of emergency, it will hurt him as well as circumvent the constitutional balance of power.
12
No crises. No emergency. No national consensus to build Trump's wall. No firm fail-safe republican mandate to use emergency powers. (what emergency?). Your arguments are old and no one is listening anymore. And to permanently lay off federal workers? You must me joking if you think that will help Trump's poll numbers.
21
What is exactly meant by "The Wall" I know plenty of Trump supporters that don't think we can or should build a concrete barrier spanning the entire Southern border from the Pacific to the Gulf. For them it's merely short hand for understanding that illegal immigration is wrong and should be stopped. On the other hand the Democrats recently refused to expand the current physical barriers where the Boarder Patrol has testified its needed because they viewed that as "The Wall" and therefore "immoral".
@I want another option, If it's shorthand, then Donald Trump should learn to read it, because he acts like he wants a wall as a literal entity. If it was just border security most Democrats would be on board.
2
@michaeltide
Really then why did Trump request and the Democrats reject $5.7 billion for a strategic deployment of steel barriers at high priority locations last month?
The Democrats claim to be for increased border security, but refuse to vote for anything that might actually prevent someone from illegally crossing the border.
1
@I want another option, thanks for your reply. My memory of the recent standoff is a little different. So my question is: why did Trump refuse, at the last minute to sign a government funding bill he already agreed to?
Actually there's only one thing the Democrats aren't voting for.
It seems as if donald trump thinks there is only one thing that will increase border security,
With all due respect, but there is no emergency at our Southern border beyond the one that exists in Trump's mind. Border apprehensions are well below their peaks in the 1980's and 90's. Even if there were an emergency, building a massive concrete wall running for 1500 miles is likely to be ineffective and a massive waste of money according to every border security expert on both sides of the political spectrum. If we want to spend money on border security lets get some bang for our buck and build the Israeli-style smart wall advocated for by Bret Stephens on this page a few weeks ago.
10
@Bob ....what would be better if the Israelis came over and built a similar wall for us at thier cost...given how much money Israel gets from the U.S. Its only fair...what a bargain by the way...beause it would be a much better (effective) wall.....
Dubya in effect declared a national emergency, the solution to which was to invade Iraq. Trump has already betrayed his most loyal supporters by selling them a false solution to a false problem (a shiny object to distract them from reality), and deserves the fate that dubya collected in 2009. This fate was not painful for dubya, but would be agony for the Donald, since his criterion of his own existence is that he is popular or at least talked about. Thus dubya's fate would leave him experiencing his own nonexistence.
A national emergency has to be real, or confronting it will bring huge problems. Our border emergency is not real; we have lived with our porous border for decades and done various things about it for decades and when it flares up we cope with the flareup. We enforce some of our laws and not others, and our porous border has often aided the general welfare by giving us cheaper food and increasing the profits of resorts and golf courses.
To do something real for his supporters rather than giving them inedible symbolic victories, he would have to turn against big business, whose preferred policies result in letting Trump-supporting areas slowly wither and depopulate. But Trump is a symbol whose only reality is manipulating and polishing the facade of his own image. Reality is foreign and unintelligible to him, the equivalent to water for the Wicked With of the West.
11
This author makes a number of astonishing claims regarding the 'social compact,' 'identity politics' and 'class warfare' that could be interchanged between a very radical and a very reactionary agenda. The fluidity of theoretical commitments to sustain opposing ideological positions is a strange feature of our present politics. Invoking the interests of the American working class--which is not only native-born and white, as this author imagines, but immigrant, black brown and Asian, and more intelligent than he understandts--in service of a profoundly elite agenda beggars belief. It's very funny that he claims to edit a 'journal.' That implies anonymous peer review and scholarly citation. Is that what 'American Greatness' practices?
12
The process of Government matters for Americans on both sides of any issue. Mr. Trump did very little to craft legislation beyond photo-op meetings during which he hoped his antics and boasting would force the capitulation of his political opponents. Trump's base is deservedly sore at him. If they know what's best for America, their anger should be for failing to negotiate. He could have offered the Democrats the chance to pass immigration legislation that is truly important to them in exchange for the wall (no, DACA doesn't count - he created that crisis using executive fiat to use as leverage, then he was blocked from doing so by the courts). The problem is that he doesn't have Win-Win in his "deal-making" repertoire. He lost on the shut-down, and he'll be blocked by the courts or the Congress if he tries to pull his "Emergency" stunt. I've heard the rebuttal that we should move past politics and "do what's right for America during this emergency": It's not an emergency (or if it is, so is gun violence); please refer back to the first sentence of this comment.
8
@Darwinia. Been to the border and I think its an emergency....only to get worse....need to stop the flow NOW!>
@Darwinia
For someone who watches TV all day how could he think enough to work with people who know how to craft meaningful policy
There is currently a labor shortage, so I'm not exactly sure whose jobs immigants are supposedly taking. There are plenty of open positions in farm work, janitorial services and construnction. If unskilled labor isn't your thing, there are hundreds of thousands of skilled manufacturing jobs available, same with teaching, sales, healthcare and shortasges in many other areas as well.
There will be drug smuggling so long as there is a market for smuggled drugs. The law enforcement based strategy employed in the "War On Drugs" over the past five decades has been a monumental failure. This proposed wall would be a monument to thagt monumental failure. It should be mentioned that almost all significiant drug smuggling takes place via legal points of entry, not the areas a wall would be built.
15
What is being missed in all this, is the senate refuses to bring the house resolution to a vote, because if it passed and was sent to the president, and he does not sign it, it becomes a pocket veto and in ten days goes back to the house to be overridden.
That puts the Republicans on the spot to make choice to open the government with a veto override of Swindler Donald, or tell the public they don't count.
Also if Swindler Don does declare a national emergency, the house can pass a bill rescinding it, which also has to go through the senate, and it takes several days, weeks I think before the president can use his emergency until the bill is acted upon, so congress does have the power to prevent the emergency declaration. The court overruled Truman on the steel mill takeover.
Any action like this will cause a major increase in the national debt, causing interest rates to rise, slowing the economy. The house has the power to set the budget, the money has to come from somewhere, that means selling T Bills at higher interest rates than present.
10
As an Assistant Scout Master, one of my responsibility is to teach young men citizenship. I try to instill in these Scouts a desire to serve their communities and the Nation by being informed, understanding how the system is supposed to work and recognizing that no one person has all the answers. My goal is to have them use their sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair as a barometer for choosing policies good for the Nation as a whole.
I am disturbed by Mr. Buskirk's cavalier ignorance or rejection of constitutional checks and balances. Also, having lived within 100 miles of the border my entire life, his lack of compassion and knowledge of immigration is astonishing. Many other commentators commenting on his article already have noted the discrepancies in his "logic" such as the fact that undocumented workers provide labor most Americans won't, that the failure to instill truly effective system of E-verification is bipartisan, and that there is no crisis on the border other than the one that exists in the minds of some members of the present administration. The most shocking argument was that Trump should have terminated all of the federal employees furloughed.
37
Anyone who has lived with a toddlers know that, for them, not getting what they want when they want it does seem to be a dire emergency.
41
@JK
It’s their emergency.
Not yours or ours!
The main question is whether the Wall will actually achieve the objectives Trump and Buskirk say they want. How many words does Buskirk devote towards answering the main question? Precisely zero.
19
@WmC
The objective trump seeks, no matter what he says, is very very simple: get reelected. He has no other goal whatsoever, and if anyone thinks he cares about immigration in any way other than to fool people into voting for him, they are under an enormous delusion.
8
Why the wall? Your piece needed to make a case for a border wall, as does Trump. Everyone's on board with the importance of border security and enforcing the law, that's not where the impasse is. If the idea of a larger border wall has merit, just write about that. You shouldn't need the strawman.
17
Trump could have easily said that “We are building a wall” and left it at that.
But no.
His racism got the worst of him and he just has to add “And Mexico will be paying for it.”
And this—his overt racism—is what differentiates him from the rest of Republicans who can still temper their hatred for people of color, Republicans like McConnell, Hatch, Grassley, Graham, Ryan.
Building a wall has nothing to do with border security. It has everything to do with building a monument to racism.
31
@Opinioned!
"...Republicans who can still temper their hatred for people of color..."
Sadly, it's a short list.
@Opinioned!
True, the others "temper their racism." But it's still there among them...
I am so happy that there are people saying this.
If Trump had stood up to Ann Coulter and called her a nutcase, he might have a third of a chance to win another 4 years.
But letting Ann Coulter call the shots, it shows how feeble minded he is, and it assures that he will be gone in another 2 years.
But keep writing stuff like this. And let’s hope he hears about it.
It will be the end of him.
14
We live in a society in which a minority of people ( but far too many) think like Christopher Buskirk. Unfortunately our starved education system has left portions of our population undereducated and vulnerable to the misguided nonsense spread by corrupted and politicized religious organizations and right wing media. Christopher Buskirk
may be right when he says that by failing to build the wall Trump will fail his most loyal supporters. But who cares...those people are not relevant to the future of America. They are the burdensome shell of a system the world has passed them by.... and they will either change or disappear. Good riddance to them and the horse ( president) they rode in on.
27
@K25 Unfortunately for all of us, these people are an inherent drain on our society and our economy since they are not producing and are taking from those who do produce. Most of them are white so this is not a racist observation.
For only a billion dollars Trump could bulldoze a 5 mile swath on the southern border, and plant it with non-lethal land mines. Maybe he'll do it, who knows?
2
The problem is that this column presents complicated arguments that Trump doesn’t have the mental capacity to follow. Neither do his followers. Even if he did, he has absolutely no credibility to make them. Not to mention the arguments don’t explain how this “emergency” is any more important and urgent than machine-gun massacres, the opioid problem and about a hundred others that could be enumerated, nor why all these are so vital that getting Congress to act isn’t an option.
7
"[Border security] is in many ways the defining issue of our day." Really? More so than health care? Or defeating radical Islamic terrorism? Or domestic terrorism? Or climate change? Or education? This seems like an almost laughable claim.
I am a Democrat, and I don't understand why no one in my party seems capable of or or willing to make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration (the former being something we could all get behind and the latter being something we should all want to curb or control). But regardless, the only reason this issue is so "defining" is because the President hasn't shut up about it in somewhere between 4 years and 4 decades. That the support of his base depends on him getting his wall does not mean it's the most important thing to the country.
30
@emily g. Wait a minute....We are talking democracy here.. the support of his base wants the wall...as he has promised to do....so he is acting in behalf of his constituency....this is democracy....get it!....
Disagreeing with the tactic of a wall doesn't necessarily mean one is against the overall strategy of border integrity or is not concerned about possible threats at the border. That is the constant response to the Democrats "no wall" position. Because I don't like sushi doesn't mean I hate fish. The wall is the wrong solution. There are others. I'll take the salmon instead.
42
@Terry
The Democrats don’t want a wall because it would prevent foreigners from entering the country.
Instead, they want “border security” to apprehend “undocumented aliens” and then release them into the interior, after filing fraudulent asylum petitions, where they will disappear and never show up in immigration court ever again. Until someday (soon) the Democrats will claim “there are just too many to deport and we need to give them a path to citizenship.” That’s their plan.
1
The issue here isn't about whether or not we want improved border security. We all do. The issue is, how do we most efficiently accomplish it with minimal negative side effects. Is a continuous 30ft wall from the gulf of Mexico to the Pacific most effective? It certainly has a major negative side effect on migrating wildlife who don't recognize borders. And the benefits the wall would bring, given its steep cost, might be disappointing. There are most likely other, more effective, ways to spend the money. Recall that during the 2016 primaries, only Trump pushed the wall idea. All other candidates had other, I think much better, ideas for improving border security. Unfortunately, now the wall has become a proposed monument for a group of diehard Trump supporters. A proof that he is indeed the most powerful man in the proverbial jungle.
I suggest that a non partisan committee of border security experts (people who actually work on the problem) be formed with half picked by republicans and half by democrats. This committee would oversee the $5.5 billion allocated for border security improvements. All ideas would be on the table, including the wall. A simple majority vote on an idea would authorize the requested amount of money to be applied. I am no border expert, but I could trust the judgement of experts who are.
12
You mention "During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more." I am really surprised that you would support the president to do this. The shutdown was already a ransom. This would be akin to encouraging the threat of inflicting further harm and destruction to U.S. citizens and property in the name of building the wall. These workers have key functions necessary for our country to function properly. Which country's interests do you represent?
69
@Michael Weiss
Did you notice the absence of the furloughed workers? I certainly didn't. The only reason the public noticed the shutdown at all is because TSA workers who were on the job without getting paid staged a sick out. He would have done all of us a favor by laying them off and using some of the savings as a bonus pay thank you for the workers who showed up despite not getting paid.
1
My heart went out to them. But the consequences are not immediately observed or observable in day to day life. You have to read the news to understand the impact. How many FBI agents do you interact with daily? Much happens behind the scenes for the government to function properly and our society depends on it. If you live in the US you are benefiting from public servants.
Did you visit the national parks? Should those be sacrificed? Do you know about park rangers? I noticed the damage. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Do you rely on safe aircraft to travel?
Do you care about other people besides yourself? Weather forecasts? Safety inspections? There are far more things to list.
13
Oh what a great idea /sarcasm/ So let’s fire all these workers and then re-hire than when we need them. Shouldn’t take more than two or three months to get the workforce back up to the necessary level. That’s assuming 10 or 30% of them have not just gone and gotten the work elsewhere. So much for your summer vacation flight plans!
1
Remarkabe op-ed: almost every paragraph bristles with fact-free assertions to try to rationalize Trump getting back the "whip hand." It's clear he has mainly had power because of Republican toadies who lost their way. And with the new Democratic House his whip has the strength of a wet noodle.
Mr. Buskirk is simply one more sad voice pretending to advance an argument on immigration but it's really about what would be good for Trump, not what is good for this country.
85
Why do you so quickly accept the premise that "walls work and walls save lives"? That is true of border security maybe, but the dems are not against that. The sticking point is the "wall," which is a ridiculous vanity project that the president has stuck to as a matter of pride only. He doesn't want border security, he doesn't care about it at all. He just wants it as a rallying cry, which has been made especially clear by the increasing frequency with which he ties it to the opioid epidemic. It's a way of blaming those problems on brown foreigners and doing nothing about them. It's a farce, and would be humorous were it not so tragic.
46
Given that numbers of potential workers immigrating at the border has not skyrocketed, and unemployment in the US is very low, I am unclear of the basis of a national emergency.
I am clear that flaming xenophobia, and fear of the "dirtiness" (thanks, Tucker) of others is a sure way to keep a segment of the population in fear and enthralled with their leader.
25
The border antagonism that already divides our country is similar in concept to the border wall promoted by American homophobes. The wall would require taking land from ranchers and family farms by eminent domain and disrupt migration patterns of unique border species. A study endorsed by over 2,500 Scientists describes the threat to biodiversity. (BioScience, October 2018) Another consideration are the raptors and bird species impaled and killed by miles of needless, impotent barbed wire and concertina wire. Modern immigration has been proven to benefit our communities. Take down this wall.
17
I'm happy to hear Mr. Buskirk's perspectives on how "losing" on The Wall will "hobble his presidency and imperil his re-election." How easy it is, apparently, to do away with the worst president in history.
47
@N. Archer
Thanks for sharing Christopher Buskirk’s opinion. In my opinion, his opinion is interesting and ridiculous.
“Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way. Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational, and they’re getting slaughtered.”
Let’s hear it for rationality!
7
Here's a plan for protecting America's borders: Trump claims the wall will be a deterrent for any migrants to even start out. How about preventing them from finding employment by prosecuting anyone who exploits them economically in the US by hiring them? We could start by arresting one Donald J. Trump who has broken exactly that law by hiring people without proper documents at his businesses. Why are "American Greatness" law and order types conspicuously unconcerned about those law breakers? Because to them, only non-white people commit crimes, or (as the president's lawyer argued, "It's not like he killed someone") the crimes committed by white people don't matter.
32
I love all the silly assumptions that once the president declares national emergency the wall is as good as completed. I am pretty sure there is an army of lawyers that will challenge it in courts. At which point the administration will have to show that there is a real national emergency/crisis at the border, and that is a very tall task.
11
Oh boy. It's really hard to know where to start with this piece. The author makes assertions, but presents no facts as to why building a wall will 'secure the border' or prevent the loss of jobs for Americans. While I believe the NYT is justified in publishing opposing views, the only thing that I can agree with Mr. Buskirk on is that Trump is a terrible negotiator.
It's going to be even more fun to watch when Trump doesn't get his wall funding (he won't), his base goes ballistic (it will), and his declaration of a national emergency will both further divide Republicans and be held up in the courts. When will this 'reality TV show' nightmare end?
13
I live and work in Brownsville, Texas. I can agree with the residents you interviewed for your article on on the California town near the border. I agree with their feeling that the “WALL” is nothing beyond painting the US as a racist nation. I am a Caucasian professional and I could not work without many legal immigrants who cross the border daily to work. Strengthening the immigration laws is a valid concept. Trying to turn the US Mexico border into the Isreal- West Bank border is an absurd concept.
26
I’m all for trump declaring an emergency to build his wall. Five billion of utter government waste is a small price to pay when measured against emergency actions by the next president. The fight against climate change would finally get the federal government partner we’ve been missing with the declaration of the Environment Emergency. Voter suppression solved by the declaration of the Democracy Emergency. Economic inequality vanquished by declaring the Plutocracy Emergency. Dysfunctional health care crushed by the Why Can’t We Get Healthcare Right Emergency.
Hmmmn, then again there’s the 2016 election to consider. The reason we’re in this latest shutdown idiocy is probably the greatest argument against emergency powers. Arguably the greatest emergency is the one that put a character like Trump in office in the first place and make nonsense such as that expressed in the author’s opinion piece pass for rationality for a significant portion of our citizenry. There have been many days recently when I fear that catastrophe is the one that matters and which we seem utterly unable to solve.
11
I've read this paper for 35 years. World famous, of course, and perennially the go-to source for casual readers and researchers alike. In-depth reporting, rich and end expressive, appropriate yet unabashedly scathing, iconoclastic and explosively revealing to the chagrin of certain powerful interests and governments through the years. So, enough plaudits, I am afraid to say that I cannot comment on this column about Trump and his boarder issue; I can't comment because there is nothing to answer fiction with except more fiction. To say that I am surprised is understating how I feel, and this is said without any personal animus towards the writer who cogently discusses missed opportunities by the president recently. With respect, however, I did not think that the Times' view of a balanced opinion section was now making room for presumptions about, in this case, the wall that are so far afield from any mainstream view; in particular, the notion that there are real existential dangers moving north that can only be stopped by a wall. Wow.
10
I’m afraid this argument was the limit of their ability to discuss the situation
If Trump were serious about curbing undocumented immigrants he would work to reform the Visa system, add more security checkpoints and personnel at the border, and do work permits. He is more concerned with a wall that is nothing more than a symbol of fear and bigotry. Yeah, he had Congress for two years and did nothing. Maybe he should have called out Paul Ryan if the former speaker was the roadblock. He didn't. Now it's an issue? It's a wedge, and a pointless one. I'm tired of his dumb games. The 5.7 billion could buy a lot of textbooks and fix a lot of roads.
16
@Chad....AND also eliminate sanctuary cities, get eVerify to work with ALL employers and stop automatic citizenship for Anchor Babies... Coupled with your suggestions...then we would not need the wall.
1
Maybe this would "piece" go over better on Fox News.
The House controls the purse, not the President. Democrats won the House in a landslide largely campaining against Trump's policies. Why would the House cave to Trump when Trump is completely ineffectual as a leader or negotiator?
Trump takes his marching orders from hateful people like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. Those people "represent" a viewpoint shared by a minority of this country. There is no reason the rest of the country should be held hostage by them.
13
"Border security" has nothing to do with "the Wall". If Trump cared about "border security" he wouldn't have a 40-year history of mass-hiring illegals, he wouldn't oppose E-Verify, and he wouldn't have shut down the federal govt. (which hurt Homeland Security).
Just a conman duping a bigoted base.
19
Your statistics (& those of Mr. Trump) are, at the very least, questionable parsings of the true numbers. You're writing in The TImes but have you read the paper in which the numbers are broken down into what heinous crimes are being counted? e.g. traffic tickets & other misdemeanors. I don't know who you are or why you're so scared of chimeras but just read the paper & maybe you'll be able to sleep securely.
7
I saw this guy as a post speech analyst on PBS last night and wondered what country he lives in. After reading this piece I am convinced he has no clue as to what most people in the US actually feel, and that he has absolutely no idea who Trump is. Does he really believe Trump cares for anything other than DJT? Even his kids run a distant second to his own ego. Trump has been using illegal alien labor for decades and after he leaves office will probably continue to do so. It has been revealed that the whole wall issue started out as a mnemonic to keep him focused. If his supporters hadn't been so profuse in their adulation of him he would have dropped the wall issue long ago. All he knows to do is manipulate the media and public opinion. But hey, that shows that he does know something and that is more than I can say about Buskirk.
The only real question is why do the Times and PBS allow this guy to opine.
18
What absolute rubbish; this article contains all of the currently popular right wing arguments based on garbage statistics for a wall. Here’s the one fact that blows this article out of the water: Illegal Immigration is at a 40 year low. How about strong unions with labor having a part in corporate governance? No, instead we’ll claim immigration is driving down wages instead of the fact that CEO pay is out of control. How about eliminating pharmaceutical advertising and prosecuting the big pharmaceutical folks who unleashed the opioid crisis? Nope, its all coming in on the backs of immigrants. Next we’re going to read that gun violence is a direct result of immigration, not an out of control trip gun industrial complex arming Americans to the teeth. What’s next? Let me think. Climate change. Those pesky Central Americans are burning coal with abandon.
I’m down for reading opinions based on facts. But please don’t waste my time on this drivel.
15
Mr. Buskirk...You know what will foster and restore "the economic security of the middle and working class"? Affordable and high-quality healthcare and education come to mind. Much needed investments in infrastructure and research are a close second to ensure our future in a warming world. We do face a life-threatening crisis - climate change - but this one is not addressed with a border wall but with scientific innovation and better education. A border wall ...the idiocy of this campaign promise cannot be overstated...it will be expensive to build, expensive to maintain and it will be easily overcome (e.g. tunnels, ladders, drones). A true monument to the ignorance and irrationality of our country.
13
Pure sophistry. There is no imminent crisis at our southern border other than issues of Trump's own making: separating children from their parents without any thought as to how they would be reunited, putting troops at the border as a hysterical reaction to a ragtag band of desperate asylum seekers, succumbing to right-wing talking heads and holding 800,000 federal workers hostage in an ill-advised government shutdown. All this at a time when illegal immigration has fallen to its lowest level in decades.
There is a badly needed immigration reform and border security deal out there that involves beefing up ports of entry, constructing physical barriers where necessary, giving border security the necessary tools and personnel to do their job, permanently solving the DADA issue, a guest-worker program, a major revamp to legal immigration, improved enforcement of laws that already exist for those of all countries that overstay their visas.
But the wall that Trump envisions solves none of that and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress recognize that fact, which is why there was no funding for the wall when Republicans ran every branch of government. The real reason Trump wants the wall is so that he can stand up in front of adoring crowds during the 2020 election cycle and brag about his self-proclaimed greatness, of which the wall is a tangible symbol.
6
Funny thing -- the wall wasn't necessary under Reagan, Bush Sr. or Jr., Nixon, Ford and so on.
346
@Roy AND it wasn't even an emergency during Trump's first two years. Funny how it suddenly became an emergency.
20
Mr. Buskirk seems to be a sincere believer in the con. Without factual backup, he relies on all the phony predicates, e.g., we "actively encourage gangsters to traffic in human beings" (Um, that would be in trucks moving through points of entry). What's more, he shares the same inhumanity as the Con Man: ". . .[Trump] could have asserted his authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed. . . ." Thanks to the NY Times for publishing this window on the morally bankrupt insanity that drives the 35%.
14
A second flawed premise of this article (other than the notion that the wall = effective border security) is that Trump's base would abandon him if he doesn't build the wall.
Hah! Good luck with that one. They will not abandon him for anything.
7
This is an excellent editorial - interesting, with Buskirk's main points supported by facts and arguments.
However, the immigrants who illegally come here to work and live are doing nothing wrong. Ethicists have known since, at least as far back as the killing of Socrates, the chasm between law and ethics. The law simply isn't a good substitute for ethics. We use ethics to judge the legal system as to whether it complies with ethics, or it is illegitimate.
The immigrants who simply want to live and work here are not invading us -- they are joining us. No invasion!!! If the Mexican Army were to march into America, the only problem we would have is to find enough cooks who can prepare authentic Mexican food to staff restaurants and diners in the area. We would probably need to bring some in from Mexico.
5
The problem with this column is it uses Trump facts and figures which are distortions and falsehoods and builds it's thesis on faulty like assumptions.
6
It is time to state exactly what "Build a Wall" really means. Do you remember when Trump repeated over and over that "Obama was born in Kenya? For the slow witted, that was code words for a black President is not legitimate. It was intended to be a racial slur. Well guess what, "Build a Wall", is code words for? The Government can have money for border security. It can have money to repair existing structures, extend barriers, or put up fence; but there won't be any money to "Build a Wall" because real Americans do not build monuments to racial slurs.
15
Build the Wall.
Make the Security Checks at the Border more complete.
Completely reform Immigration.
Allows Seasonal Workers to take the jobs Americans
will not take.
Provide them with an Identity Card.
Require employers to pay them at the least the Minimum Wage and to provide Safe Work Environment.
If they wish to eventually become citizens, let their
time working in the US, without committing any crimes,
count points toward citizenship.
If families cross the border illegally then
place them in family detention units.
Work toward creating governments in Central America
that can eliminate the gangs and toward providing economic opportunities.
6
"Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way."
We hear ya' Mr. Buskirk
When my three year old doesn't get her way she can be impossible.
19
The idea that immigration hurts American prosperity is completely false. For the exact same reasons why open trade promotes economic growth, open borders do the exact same thing. Indeed, so extensive are these labor market distortions as compared to the distortions of other trade barriers that, were we to completely eliminate these artificial barriers to labor market efficiency, some experts estimate that global GNP would double from the resulting utility gains. Bob Hamilton & John Whalley, Efficiency and Distributional Implications of Global Restrictions on Labour Mobility: Calculations and Policy Implications, 14 J. Dev. Econ. 61, 70-72 (1984). Assuming, however, that Mr. Buskirk does not care about our moral obligations towards humanity as a whole and merely wishes to maximize American welfare (ignoring the obvious problem that these immigrants are prospective Americans themselves, and therefore their preferences should be weighted morally, if not politically, equal to those of other prospective Americans--such as future generations, whose preferences we do not so readily hyperbolically discount) let us focus merely on the distributional impacts of immigration on the American economy. The overwhelming consensus among economists is that immigration produces a net positive impact on American economic growth with minimal impact on native wages. See, e.g., Ian Goldin et al., Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future 164-168 (2011).
9
@Dave
You are assuming that the planet can take a doubled GNP. There is growing evidence that this is a dubious assumption. Human welfare depends rather on developing economic systems and societies that can be stable rather than grow like cancers until they destroy their environments.
Growth has been sold as the answer to class struggle. We are reaching a point where we need a better answer, and the old ways of thinking block its development.
1
@sdavidc9
I apologize for the incomplete answer; unfortunately initial comments on this forum have a 500 charecter limit, which limits one's ability to clarify their thinking and anticipate questions. Let me be clear now: there are many reasons why reasonable policymakers might want to have closed borders--the functioning and administration of a social safety net being, in my mind, chief among them. The idea, put forward in Mr. Buskirk's article--that immigration inhibits economic growth and hurts native workers--is simply not compatible with the observable data, however.
To respond to your point: I think you run into trouble in assuming that growth is incompatible with, or indeed fails to encompass, sustainable growth. The alternative to economic growth--economic contraction, is not desirable for myriad, readily ascertainable, reasons. Producing more goods and services with fewer inputs--that is, economic efficiency--is, to my mind, manifestly desirable from the perspective of both human welfare and sustainability.
@Dave
You must produce not only with fewer inputs but also with fewer unpaid-for externalities, like carbon dioxide or raw sewage or traffic jams.
As a grifter, Donald Trump is interested how things "Look" rather than what they achieve. Border security was NEVER what mattered. If border security had been Donald Trump's goal he would have asked a group of experts what is the most effective way to secure our border. Then he would have tried to get congress to fund that group of technologies. Legislation to fund these technologies would have passed and the border would be more secure.
However, Donald Trump's goal was to keep brown people out of America and have a physical structure that says, "You are not welcome here" if you are brown or black. The wall stands for this and it's something tangible his base loves. Donald Trump needs to be able to tell his base "promises made, promises kept" to get re-elected. The wall is all about this.
We can only hope that Donald Trump's time in office is coming to a close and that someone with a history of public service, rather than criminal activity, is elected president.
24
Mr. Buskirk makes some reasonable arguments for border security. But the wall is not a border security proposal; it's a trophy for President Trump. The problematic traffic Mr. Buskirk cites (drugs, undocumented migrants, etc.) occurs overwhelmingly at formal entry ports where a physical barrier already exists. An extended wall does nothing to address any of these issues, but additional border-security funds proposed by Democrats does. Attempting to identify the president's trophy wall with border security is a huge rhetorical swindle that his supporters cannot be allowed to get away with.
39
I am a retired USAF officer and traveled around the world as directed for national security. I also lived only ten miles from Mexico in southern Arizona for about 15 years. With that as background, I can tell you without a doubt that the wall would be a waste of time and a complete waste of tax dollars. As most of us have learned, it is easy to go over, through, or under any wall. That's why even the Republican controlled Congress wouldn't approve it. There is another big misconception. Those arriving here aren't taking our jobs. What they are doing is jobs we don't want. And they are doing them better and for far less than we would. Finally, except for Native Americans, we are all aliens. So let's drop this wall issue and get moving ahead on our nation's business.
591
@RLG
Thank you, Sir. My thoughts, exactly.
10
@RLG
So true. Like so many right wing policy positions these days, Buskirk's article starts of with stupid assumptions like WALL = BORDER SECURITY and BEING ANTI-WALL = PRO-OPEN BORDERS both clearly false to anyone who's willing to think about it for 30 seconds or longer.
The US IS defending its borders and a wall won't do anything to help; not paying border guards and then firing them when no wall money is provided is clearly going to weaken our borders.
Why is this drivel even printed in the NYT?
12
Everything, absolutely everything in this article is wrong. The president is not a dictator and America is not Nazi Germany. There is absolutely no need for a border wall, undocumented immigrants are not stealing jobs from legal residents. Large companies use foreign labor wherever it is cheaper. That’s called capitalism. Live with it.
85
The complete lack of facts in this editorial is startling. The reason Trump cannot and should not declare a national emergency is because no emergency is happening. Illegal border crossing is down; 90% of fentanyl is imported from China via USPS, while the vast majority of other illicit substances coming from the southern border enter via smuggling across designated border crossings. This is a clear case of scapegoating - the working class of America is being left behind owing to our failing education system, inflated cost of living, growing income inequality and technological advancement. It feels safe and simple to pin the complex demise of the white working class on brown foreigners rather than genuinely addressing the true issues which are undermining American society. If only we had a leader who could approach these issues with the degree of nuance, insight and compassion that they require.
154
Buskirk seems to think that he lives in a parliamentary democracy with a majority government where the leader can have near dictatorial power. Maggie Thatcher or Justin Trudeau could probably force a border wall to be built.
Instead he lives in a country where Congress controls the budget and legislation with a President who can veto laws he doesn't like.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised a wall paid for by Mexico. Even if paid for by US taxpayers, that wall would never get built unless the GOP got 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House unless it could be funded by the reconciliation process so 50+ were needed in the Senate. But the GOP never cared about Trump's law -- they wanted to overturn Obamacare and slash taxes for the wealthy.
A smart politician would have told his supporters that the wall wouldn't be built and move on. Instead Trump shutdown the government and couldn't win. He's now in a bigger mess with an emergency declaration that he can't win even if the courts say it is ok as it does nothing for the current problems with those seeking asylum. Once again, all he had to do was rule out such a declaration at the start and that would have been that.
Instead he has the worst of all possible words, a wall that won't get built for years, damage to the GOP in Congress, peeling off some support and angering his base.
14
You cannot violate the law to enforce it. Declaring a national emergency for a border wall stretches the terms beyond any rational or reasonable interpretation.
The President is well within his rights to continue to make his case to the American people. And, if he can do so, which is problematic for him given that he has shown himself to be so untrustworthy, then he will be able to, through that, convince their representatives, i.e., Congress, to fund his wall. That's what it means to have some vague shred of democracy.
33
@NA
Democracy ended when Obama “enacted” the DACA program. Sorry.
2
@Greg...People opposed to permanent residents status for people who have grown up in the U.S., but were brought here illegally years ago as children, have no sense of moral justice. None.
13
If I actually believed that Trump wanted to protect working class Americans by securing the border I would agree, but the fact is he is a racist and only wants to build a wall on our southern border to keep brown-skinned people away.
If he wanted to protect working class Americans, why does he not mandate all employers use the E-verify system and ask for legislation to severely punish employers found to employ undocumented workers?
The fact that the majority of immigrants that are here undocumented came in through an airport and overstayed their visa makes your insistence on building a ridiculous wall that can be scaled over or tunneled just a waste of our tax dollars.
67
Buskirk’s notion of “permanently laying off federal workers...etc.” is as fine an example of Trumpian thinking as anything spouted by the equally odious and morally vacant Stephen Miller.
213
@Michael Judge Yes, the month long shutdown was such a winning strategy that Trump had to cave without any concessions from the Democrats. A permanent layoff, aka firing, would increase Trump's disapproval numbers substantially. Go ahead, Mr. Great Negotiator, I dare you.
16
@Michael Judge They need to just do it, because this country NEVER changes anything unless people suffer. I hate to say it, but we all need to suffer as a nation more because it's the only way we ever change. Fire those workers, cut social services, let people go hungry, let people go broke because of their healthcare costs. We still don't know how bad it can get, so it's time to suffer a little so the idiots sitting in the back row get the message. Those idiots are still too comfortable, give them what they say they "want" and let's see how quickly they change their tune when they have their cake and eat it.
3
Trump and the Grand Oligarch Party controlled the Presidency, the Senate and the House for two full years.
They had two years to fund their Trumpty Dumpty Wall, but instead all they could come up with was a $1 trillion handout to billionaires and large corporations.
Trump and the Grand Old Phonies don't care about 'the wall' except to the extent they can use it to whip their Whites R Us foaming masses up into rabid distemper for electoral victory.
The border crisis peaked in 2000....19 years ago.
Should we now give our Moron-In-Chief $5 billion to work on the Y2K computer crisis, too ?
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
- LBJ, complaining about white voters in 1960
That quote is also the heart and soul of the Republican Party from 1968 to 2019.
Nice deplorable GOPeople.
461
@Socrates Thank you...You should have a column in the NYTimes.
10
This article supports my theory that the Trump base wants Trump to declare an emergency and go around Congress to raid the Treasury for its own sake, as a transition to a strongman unfettered by law or constitution, and not for the sake of the wall or any other policy goal.
It's not the wall that matters, it's Trump "reasserting power", and "showing the whip hand", and carrying out "transgressive threats" and "doing it without Congress". The wall is merely an excuse, and if it wasn't a wall, it would be something else....which is pretty clear from the fact that nobody thinks an actual physical wall has anything to do with actual security.
Rather, the rally cheers for the wall built by Mexico were simply another transgression for people who live for Trump to express his contempt for people from south of the border and to pretend like he can muscle Mexico to cough up billions. Now, those same cheers are modified slightly for people who live for Trump to express his contempt for US and to pretend he can muscle US to cough up billions. It never was about more than Trump becoming El Duce. There is a segment of America so enamored of living in a dictatorship, so much so that they are backing literally the first man to want the job.
63
It would appear that Mr. Buskirk took seriously the State of "The Onion" address.
19
Mr Buskirk,
Perhaps border security could be improved. After all, there is very little in this world that can't be.
But people never have enough time, money or manpower to solve all the problems they face. They are forced to focus on a shorter list than endless.
Democrats in Congress are willing (& anxious) to bolster border security ... heck, they've already passed bills to improve the situation! They just don't include a "wall" as part of what they think is needed.
Presidents ought not to rule by fiat; that's something normally left to dictators. After all, Congress and the Courts also have their say how our Country is governed.
And, you might note that - immediately following T's acceptance speech - the chosen music was: You Can't Always Get What You Want!
16
Am I supposed to take seriously someone advocating that Trump was not irrational or vicious enough in negotiations with Congress?
74
What a joke. Trump does nothing for 2 years while the republicans hold congress.
40
And if Trump doesn’t betray his most loyal supporters, they’ll deserve what they get, including less access to healthcare, wage suppression, more debt, lower quality education, a climate that’s increasingly hostile to human civilization, and a really big dumb wall that will forever serve as Exhibit A of government waste and stupidity. Unfortunately, his most loyal supporters will take us all down with them.
25
It’s a lose-lose for him - he just doesn’t know it yet. One way or the other, Americans will have their say and it will not end well for Mr. Trump. The question is whether McConnell and his other cronies and enablers will also get what they have coming to them.
27
It's always interesting/instructive to read what 30-40% of the country seems to believe.
It's also very disturbing and frightening.
The NYT should publish more opinions such as this one...
23
@HapinOregon I don't think the New York Times needs to give people like Buskirk a platform such as this to get these views across. This paper could easily write an article that attacked the faulty reasoning and bad morals (seriously, Buskirk is advocating the president make an illegal power grab and subvert the Constitution because he'll likely get away with it). It's not like there's not a thousand conservative publications (that have zero circulation and are propped up by conservative billionaires as make-work programs for conservatives), take one and print what they're saying - and also fact-check, debunk, and argue against it. The stakes are too high to just let the commenters be the ones making the relevant points in response. It's a dereliction of duty for NYT to print Op-Eds like this under the guide of "diversity of viewpoint".
"factually incorrect" is not a diverse viewpoint, it's just wrong. Op-Ed writers should be required to meet a higher standard of truth in order to be published here.
7
@Torm
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
Michael Corleone
In the Jewish tradition the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah and the other evil cities beg the question how come Sodom and Gomorrah and not all the cities which eschewed the commandments given to Noah at the time of the flood.
The story of the one last chance given to the evil cities to save themselves by explaining their behaviour. The explanation given by the wisest men in the evil cities so enraged God that punishment was harsh and immediate.
The attempt to justify the unjustifiable is the most heinous of sins. The grievous crimes committed on strangers and God's emissaries to the evil cities did not end up with destruction. Sodom was given chance after chance to redeem itself but instead of acknowledging their wrong doing they chose justifying the unjustifiable.
There is no justifiable reason for treating the those fleeing their dysfunctional societies and there is justifiable reason for Trump's Wall. When so many of you give the same justification as the wise men of Sodom as to your behaviour I wonder where are the Jews who know our stories and our explanations.
At 70 I suspect I will not be around when the USA is no more but suspect my grandchildren will witness the demise of the USA.
2
@Montreal Moe Sodom and Gomorrah did not actually exist, those stories are allegories. It's fine to choose to believe, it's fine to root your thoughts in faith, but I just want anyone else reading to understand, these are stories, not fact. There was no Tower of Babel, there was no David and Goliath. Stories. Fiction.
5
@Torm
I am not a believer. I have not been a believer for six decades.
The bible is allegory and as the Canadian theologian Tom Harpur said if there is any real history it is totally an accident.
Harpur also said more often there is more truth in allegory than in purported history.
You don't need to go back thousands of years, there was no famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1850 and Ireland's food export economy boomed and the starvation was deliberate and journals like The Economist encouraged the starvation.
The allegory of the the destruction of the evil cities in the Jewish tradition is that its final chance at redemption Sodom's wisest men were allowed to say why Sodom shouldn't be destroyed.
Instead of acknowledging their sins the wisest men of Sodom used the same argument your President used yesterday.
Needless to say the evil cities were destroyed.
One needn't be a believe to acknowledge the Bible as great literature with many important lessons to teach as well as some lessons that are not soon enough forgotten.
2
Liberal or conservative, pro or anti-Trump, can all of you answer just one question for me? Why should we have policies and actions that allow people to stay in this country illegally? If most of them enter legally (with visas) and simply overstay their visas, we should definitely take actions to address that problem and deport them. If some of them enter illegally (without visas) we should deport them also - or stop them from entering in the first place.
If some of us don't like those solutions, then the solution is to change our laws - not to choose not to enforce them. It doesn't matter whether the illegal residents are law-abiding people or felons...whether they are gainfully employed (albeit illegally employed) or not. They're still here illegally. And we should either enforce our laws by deporting them, or change our laws and let them stay. Our current situation is untenable.
4
Because the same people who rant about illegal immigrants knowingly hire them to work in their hotels and country clubs, for example. Because no one would pick your fruits and vegetables except for undocumented workers. Because many of those being incarcerated on the border are children and families pursuing a legal right to apply for asylum. Because any reasonable approach to immigration reform that would balance humanitarian and economic values is currently impossible because of the irrational, vicious, and racist appeals of Trump and Stephen Miller.
30
@Mike "If some of us don't like those solutions, then the solution is to change our laws - not to choose not to enforce them."
Actually, we often change our laws by nonenforcement. You're seeing that now, with the end of marijuana prohibition. Marijuana is still illegal, federally, but many states are refusing to prosecute people for marijuana possession.
Currently, the state of Utah, due to an outdated state constitution, still allows for human slavery as a punishment for a crime,”
RE: "It doesn't matter whether the illegal residents are law-abiding people or felons...whether they are gainfully employed (albeit illegally employed) or not."
I'll go ahead and argue the opposite; it does matter if the people who are here illegally are law-abiding and gainfully employed. Those people, a lot of them, are going to be grandfathered in. We're not going to do some Romney-style mass deportation fantasy (and big business doesn't want their cheap labor going away, either - so that idea is DOA). The conservatives seem to think they've got the winning hand on immigration, they don't seem to realize that this is going to end with a lot of the people already here, who are part of their community, getting citizenship.
8
@Mike.....So what does that have to do with building a wall? Hello. "Build a Wall" is code for Mexican immigrants, even the ones who were born here, are rapists and murderers, and we don't want them in our country.
2
The Wall is Trump's effort to use hatred and racism to unify his base. Illegal immigration has declined massively over the past twenty years and experts have made it clear that the Trump Wall is an unnecessary squandering of billions of taxpayers dollars..
The Wall is a political symbol of the extreme right wing White Nationalists that approve of Trump's lifelong racist behavior. It is reminiscent of the Swastika as a rallying image.
If resisting the construction of Trump's monument to himself and to the hatred of foreigners means there is no peace with the White Nationalists that love Trump, then so be it!
33
This piece is so disingenuous it borders on the delusional. The idea that Trump and his hardcore followers want a wall because they are concerned about human trafficking or the welfare of women making the journey north is absolute rubbish. They can't stand the idea that white people might not be the dominant group someday. That is what this is all about. Everything the writer purports to want to accomplish in this piece could be done more effectively with other methods besides a wall.
144
Border security is "the defining issue of our day" you say? Two words: climate change.
Where is your head at?
240
@Brian Unfortunately, this is the state of modern politics. Hating a group of people is a bigger rallying point than doing something proactive to deal with impending environmental collapse (and the economic and humanitarian crisis that inevitably follows). I blame it on the electorate's ignorance. There's always more dumb people than smart, more greedy people than generous, more angry people than happy people, and those are the people who control everything. The red states are literally dragging the country down, they need to be identified as the enemy (sorry if your cousins or whoever live there, it's not their fault), they need to be defeated. It's not about compromising with Republicans; they've shown they refuse to compromise and they've shown they want things that are bad for the country and that the majority of people steadfastly oppose.
20
Wait a minute...wasn't Mexico paying for this wall????
26
This article assumes that (1) there is a border crisis and (2) walls work to combat illegal immigration. Neither is true. Arguments based on false assumptions are worthless.
If this "border crisis" justifies a president invoking emergency spending powers, then the next (Democratic) president can divert budgeted funds by declaring national emergencies regarding climate change and gun safety. Is this the precedent the GOP wants to establish?
172
@Michael K. - With all Trump is doing to increase use of oil and coal and drop any sort of regulation on greenhouse gases, climate change will genuinely be a national emergency. But as to precedent - it's one thing to declare a national emergency over a made-up fear, and quite another when the danger really does exist.
5
Trump “promised” a wall that was paid for by Mexico, not American taxpayers. His “promise” has already been broken.
Trump’s easily conned, incurious, and poorly educated followers just don’t understand the difference.
89
Wow, those really are jarring statistics: "100,00 assaults, 30,00 sex crimes and 4,000 killings." The author of this piece doesn't cite the source of these genuinely scary statistics but I can guess at their provenance--the mind of Trump. They have the same weight and substance of all of Trump's claims whether they're about his wealth, his success in business, this political triumphs or his policy formulations. They exist in the air. They exist in the minds of people who are desperately frightened and who rush to embrace their worst fears; fears which Trump and the Republican party are happy to conjure and inflame.
97
Mr. Buskirk seems to forget that most Americans are against a "wall" and that Trump consistently promised that Mexico would pay for it, not U.S. taxpayers.
118
If building a big wall is the defining issue of our day, I hope Kim Jong-il gets the message that nuclear annihilation is off the radar for now. Global warming? That's for scientists and--let's be honest--scientists know a lot less about science than conservative talk show hosts.
But facts aside, anyone who would suggest their can be no peace between one group of Americans and another, is what? An anarchist? A traitor? It makes George W. Bush's claim that he was a uniter, not a divider sound almost plausible.
19
Well said, he will have some kind of wall come what may.
Politically, this is a no brainer, and he really has no decent emergency exit on this. As for the fight with the Congress, it is bizarre to think that their not-so-large majority can stop the president.
Half a country voted for some sort of wall, after all. It is only the incessant support for illegal immigration and illegal work in the US coming from the mostly left media, of which NYT is the prime and perhaps most shameful example, that pushes the balance against Trump and wall.
1
@ss half of the country did not vote for the wall. A numerical minority of voters voted for Donald Trump. For many of those who voted for him (but not all) the wall was an important issue. However he promised the American taxpayer would not have to pay for it, so it is reasonable to assume that support has declined since the election, which is in fact what polls are showing.
As to "incessant support for illegal immigration", that is yet another factual error in your post. Most democrats support border security, just not a pharaonic project that is primarily symbolic and solves no real problems.
Cheers.
5
@ss "Well said,"
No, this is a very poorly-argued piece that advocates the president circumventing all check and balances to do something no expert agrees with.
"Half a country voted for some sort of wall, after all."
No, that is 100% false. About *a third* of the country voted for Trump, while *the majority of American citizens* voted for Clinton (3 million more votes than Trump), and a third did not vote. Trump won the presidency due to the Electoral College (and the fact that the FBI intervened in the election), that does not mean, by any stretch of any imagination, that "half the country voted for some sort of wall". You need to disabuse yourself of this wrong notion. Look into a mirror and tell yourself "No, half the country did not vote for Trump and the wall. Even if I'm limiting it to just people who voted, half of them did NOT vote for Trump".
3
In all the arguments in favor of the wall put forward by Trump and conservative pundits like Mr. Buskirk, there is none more galling than their contention that they are concerned about human trafficking and the safety of border-crossers ("we not only permit, but by our dereliction, actively encourage gangsters to traffic in human beings across our border"; "one in three woman is sexually assaulted on the long journey north").
You can't build your political career out of broadly demonizing immigrants from Mexico and Latin America as "criminals," "rapists," etc, and then turn around and pretend that you are concerned about protecting them. No one outside Fox News is buying that, even when this hypocrisy is repackaged - in a single sentence!! - by a more articulate xenophobe like Mr. Buskirk.
Also, a more practical point: A bigger, badder wall will do nothing to deter undocumented immigrants' reliance on coyotes and the criminal enterprises that unfortunately often employ them; if anything, it will increase it.
And another: Many of those arriving at our southern border these days are asylum seekers from Central America. Meaning they are often turning themselves in at border points of entry. So a wall is not only an expensive boondoggle, it also is irrelevant to the most pressing issues at the border.
61
There is so much nonsense in this piece that at first glance I assumed the author was writing satire, but no, he really means it. But if he wrote the headline as well, then is he telling us that Trump's frustrated followers are going to launch a civil war unless he gets his precious Great Wall of Trump? Is this an ultimatum?
113
He is not even embarrassed to show his only concern: that Trump does not look like a winner.
12
I'm sorry, but as an argument of principle this article doesn't even rise to the level of parody. Permanently lay off furloughed workers? The president's Constitutional oath “to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare” applies nowhere else but to the construction of a wall that the overwhelming majority of Americans don't want? Citing the "jarring" statistics the president used without acknowledging that the numbers are deeply flawed or even untrue? Articles like this make me nostalgic for the time when Conservatives argued from a position of integrity and adherence to basic facts. Those people I could (and did) disagree with, but I did so with respect, knowing that they were being honest. Mr. Buskirk's article? Not even close.
328
@Longtime Dem, Turns out those positions were malleable, made up, like Trump. The most powerfully appalling thing about this presidency is the people who enabled him. I expect politicians to be hypocritical, out for themselves and immoral, I never thought I could say that about the American voter.
4
@Longtime Dem " Articles like this make me nostalgic for the time when Conservatives argued from a position of integrity and adherence to basic facts."
You are remembering things incorrectly. At no point did this modern Republican party argue from a position of integrity and adherence to basic facts. You are part of the problem if you can't recognize the Republican party as an enemy.
3
If Trump is to have any chance of getting funding for any kind of border wall he is going to have to stop referring to the building of a wall as something "I will get done," as opposed to something that should be done for the good of the country. For those who (understandably) detest Trump, getting in the way of his ego is a huge motivator.
4
So this is your only argument for border security: "Cheap labor undercuts the economic security of the American working class and is bad for the country. Border security is part of a solution."
Huh??? Why not go after the employers who are hiring the "cheap labor"? Either get them to pay reasonable wages or prosecute them for hiring illegals. No argument about "cheap labor" necessitates building a wall!
792
And the corporations that peddle it. Our entire food system is dependent on the false pricing created by this cheap labor. And of course middle America needs cheap food if our corporate powers are not going to raise wages.
58
@Tom The competition with immigrants is for the lowest unskilled jobs....those which do not pay a living wage. And the entire fight regarding jobs stolen by illegal immigrants obscures the real problem that NONE of our government is addressing: there are good paying jobs for the educated, gifted and skilled. Unfortunately, many of us are ill-suited or unequipped for these jobs, jobs that once could be filled in manufacturing, labor and construction. The real crux is that the employment movement is towards replacement of all of these jobs by automation, not citizens, not immigrants.
(Not to mention that the increased prosperity, production and profits have all been given in greatest part to the top management of large corporations, not the people actually doing the work. The inequities of our present society is the problem.)
43
@Tom Go after the employers? You con't mean Trump by any chance, do you?
19
Trump should build wall with emergency powers and ignore all of the temporary injunctions he will inevitably be hit with from liberal judges who don’t understand the true meaning of power. Let them try to enforce their own orders for a change and see how far that gets them.
34
That's not tiptoeing towards authoritarianism, that's diving in headfirst.
229
Is this a joke? If so, not funny; if not, would you have advocated the same for any number of Obama initiatives?
122
I also guess that if Trump told you that the Super Bowl was exciting you’d TiVo it?
35
Please proceed, Sir. Keep pushing this propaganda. I hope that Trump “ reads “ it, and takes it directly into his cold, cold, Heart.
2020. Can hardly wait.
23
Chris: I agree. Congress should not be involved in a fight over funding a boarder wall. The wall should be built as soon as Mexico writes the check.
92
First of all, the promise was that Mexico would build it.
Second of all, good work ignoring the fact that the most recent huge drug bust we had came through a legal port of entry, which is where the Democrats are offering billions to secure.
51
This Op-Ed is just more conservative trash. There is no crisis at the border except the one that Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller created to drum up support for The Wall. Immigration has been dropping for some years. Dude, if you want to enter the country illegally these days, you fly here on a plane and overstay your visa. That's how it's done. What we need at the border is new technology that can detect border crossings and check at legal crossings for the drugs and other contraband that enter the United States. This Wall is an empty campaign promise made to uninformed people who do not understand the importance of immigration for our economy. The Wall is a rally cry, not a policy, designed to inflame fear and hatred. It will not work, because as mentioned above, most illegal immigrants enter on commercial flights. The recent caravan at the border is a desperate attempt by a small group of people from Central America to find refuge from the violence in their countries. A sane immigration policy would involve America doing more to change the lives of people in their home countries so that they did not feel their only hope of survival was to feel to our border. But we do not have a sane president, just a tool of foreign enemies and arch-conservative, racist-fueled organizations like the author of this Op-Ed.
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Buskirk asserts Trump could have used his authority to permanently lay off federal workers furloughed more than 30 days. It is true such a provision exists, and I know federal workers who thought Trump irrational enough to do it. In advocating this tactic, does Buskirk propose to let commercial aircraft depart and land without federal air traffic controllers? Who would inspect our food, process tax returns, collect fees and all the other government functions we now understand are vital. What Buskirk fails to mention is the government lockout (not "shutdown") was a political and economic disaster. His myopic views on the politics of border security add little or nothing to the public debate. I'm all for hearing all sides of an issue, but op-ed pieces such as this are readily available on well-funded, right-wing media outlets.
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Declaring a National Emergency for the building of a wall is one step towards the desired Trump Autocracy.
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I'm confused. If Democrats are concerned about low wages for unskilled workers why don't they want to control immigration? I would think they'd be the ones demanding construction of the wall.
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Democrats have long believed that they can affect wages by fiat rather than market forces.
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@From Where I Sit
The movement of competitive-cost labor to markets where high labor costs are the norm is part of a truly free market. Locking out immigrants because they'll undersell high-cost native labor isn't pro-market; it's a form of protectionism. If the GOP was truly concerned about free markets, they'd let labor move as easily as they let capital move.
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@Ronald B. Duke Control You ARE confused if you think Democrats haven't tried to reform the immigration system and increase border security.
You're also, clearly, very confused if you think building a border wall is a viable solution. It's not, no immigration expert as vouched for Trumps plan (well, actually, Trump doesn't have an actual plan for immigration besides building a big wall, which again is not supported by any reputable experts in border security or immigration).
We can increase border security without wasting time/money/resources on a wall. Also, Trump had 2 years to get his wall built with no opposition. He let that window of opportunity close and now he's trying to get what he wants with a Democratic Congress that has no reason to work with him. You reap what you sow; the Republicans showed during Obama's term that obstruction can work (and our not-so-bright electorate will actually blame the president because that's literally all they understand about politics).
Also, Democrats suggested raising the federal minimum wage to combat low wages (this is what's known as "walking the walk"), but Republicans have steadfastly opposed raising the minimum wage. Are you "confused" about that? Because I can explain it to you further if you need.
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It's hard to know where to start with this piece. "During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more. " is impressive, to say the least. Did the author somehow miss all of the chaos because of the temporary furloughs of those hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were actually doing work that needed to be done?
Then there's "His oath of office requires that he “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” ", which is probably not a subject Mr. Trump and his supporters should emphasize right now, given all of the swirling ...issues surrounding him vis a vis Russia etc.
I could go on, but really, why bother?
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@dmsilev The comment about firing federal workers for being victimized by the shut down isnt just profoundly immoral, which it surely is. It shows how out of touch Buskirk is. If the Democrats were totally lacking in empathy this is exactly the sort of person that they would like Trump to listen to. Following this advice guarantees that Trump wins his hard core base of around 33% and nobody else.
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@dmsilev I spoke to a Park Ranger a few weeks ago. I shamefully had to ask if he was getting paid. It was so disturbing. Even my profuse apology felt haunting. Trump is trying to destroy America, from top to bottom.
I wonder who benefits from the chaos?
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@dmsilev
“During the shutdown the president could have asserted the authority to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed for 30 days or more.”
Yeah, what a laugh it would have been to permanently lay off all those air traffic controllers, for instance. Can Chris Buskirk push tin?
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