Will The Border Wall Stop All Illegal Immigration To The US?

One of Trump’s campaign policies was to oversee the building of a wall between Mexico and the USA. While it was one of his more controversial statements, there were a surprising number of people behind it as well as countless more who were hoping that the campaign pledge would soon be dropped after he came to power.

Unfortunately, despite those hopes, Trump remains convinced that building a 1,300-mile border wall will solve all of the USA’s immigration problems including terrorist acts and human and drug trafficking. Experts have pointed out that this certainly won’t be the case. With this in mind, here are just five problems that the wall simply cannot solve surrounding illegal immigration.

Undocumented Immigrants Already In the Country

While the president believes that building a wall can stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country in the future, the fact remains that the main source of illegal immigrants is legal entrants who then overstay the terms of their visa. Of 45 million people who entered America on a business or tourist visa by sea or air with an expiry date of 2015, around 416,000 were still in the USA a year later. No wall can resolve that problem.

Economic Problems

The primary reason for undocumented immigrants coming to America is to get a job. The recession in Mexico during the 1980s resulted in huge numbers of illegal immigrants coming into the USA searching for work. As the economy in their homeland strengthened, they then returned. Most Mexicans who move to the border today have every intention of staying there and working in the local manufacturing, education and healthcare industries which are booming at the moment. However, new signs of stress in the Mexican economy are now appearing and with the disruption that a border wall will cause, including the increased cost of trading and construction-related environmental damage, it’s likely that massive unemployment will eventually ensue. That is bound to result in yet another surge of illegal immigration over the border.

Overwhelmed Immigration Courts

The US immigration system is severely hampered by the overwhelmed nature of the immigration courts. There are ever-increasing numbers of deportation cases to deal with and with few resources and not enough judges, it’s no wonder that there is such a backlog which has led to wait times for court hearings averaging out at 3 years or more. If Trump gets his wish to target three million more immigrants for deportation, the court system is surely going to snap. Again, this is a problem that a border wall will only exacerbate rather than solve.

It’s clear that, while there are many supporters of Trump’s vision of a border wall, the reality is that it certainly won’t help to solve some of the major immigration issues that face the country today.