The proposed Mexico Wall of Donald Trump will never be built. The price tag is uncertain: could it be 10 Billion? 20 Billion? 70 Billion? Such a project would be a 1,989 mile, 30 feet high wall, that cannot be built in many areas due to topography, including deserts, rugged hills, and two rivers (the Colorado and Rio Grande), and is opposed by many as unworkable, and sends a horrible message about the United States internationally. It would be a wall that would not prevent drugs, or human trafficking, and would cost loss of trust between two neighbors who share the 10th longest boundary between nations in the world. No wall or barrier has ever prevented breaching such an edifice, and it will happen in this case, were the wall to be built.
The Great Wall of China was built over many centuries, and never effectively barred invasions or prevented wars, and presented a psychological barrier for China, isolating it from the Western world, but in so doing, causing it to fall behind the West, and eventually be exploited in the 19th century by European powers. Disrepair, vandalism, and graffiti became common, and it never really advanced the Chinese economy. It marked China as backward.
The Berlin Wall, built by the Soviet Union beginning in 1961, and being destroyed in 1989, just 28 years in existence, marked the Soviets as a nation trying to stop the promotion of freedom, but the Wall was overcome by some courageous Germans, and became a symbol of the oppression of human liberty. It was a sign of the ultimate failure of Soviet Communism, with a humiliating ending in November 1989.
America gains nothing from such a wall, except to stoke fear and hatred in Mexico, and even in Canada, which has the largest land boundary in the world with the US, 3,997 miles between the 48 states and Canada, and an additional 1,538 between Alaska and Canada, for a total of 5,525 miles.
America’s reputation will be further undermined by a financial boondoggle that will be seen, were it to be built, as a negative development, which will help to sink Donald Trump to the bottom of the Presidential list all time.
It would insure that America would lose the respect and stature that it has had since World War II, as we wall off our nation, and make a very public judgment as to the inferiority of the people of Mexico and Central America, and further make America look like an imperialist nation, which has no respect for the people south of us in our hemisphere.