President Trump wants to build a wall - down Mexico way. Some are comparing it with the Berlin Wall though that wall was to keep people in, this one is to keep folks out. And it isn’t really a wall; more like a high fence in keeping with the original, started back in 1994, but never finished.
As of January 2010 the existing “wall” runs from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona, there it continues into Texas and consists of a fence 6.4 metres tall with 1.8 metres buried in the ground.
Mr Trump thinks that his completed edifice will stop “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists” who are pouring in from a number of South American destinations. Certainly a percentage of these people will be of the criminal element; just about the same percentage that occurs in most societies.
Others will have more legitimate reasons to risk crossing the border. One commentator reckons the first thing an illegal immigrant sees once he has reached the promised land is a sign that says: CHEAP LABOUR WANTED.
The minimum wage in America is $7.25 an hour. Poor South Americans have learnt to live on less in their countries of origin so they manage to survive on whatever penurious employers pay them and are even able to send money back to their families at home.
The other problem Mr Trump observes, with some justification, is that with the porous Mexican/US border, drugs are flooding into his country at an alarming rate.
The real problem then is that Americans have an insatiable appetite for drugs and cheap labour.
We shouldn’t really judge a country by the movies and television programmes that emanate from it, but you can’t help but assume a large percentage of the American population smoke pot, the southerners drink Jack Daniell’s by the gallon and that the elite in Los Angeles, where most of these images are created, seem to have no compunction about sniffing cocaine in the most public of places.
I’m not going to even try to paraphrase life in the ghettos where it seems anything goes.
Mr Trump’s stunning electoral victory came because he appealed to American blue-collar workers who have seen their jobs being exported to low wage countries thanks to the “global economy” that America once championed and a promise to stop illegal immigrants from taking what few opportunities there might be available.
But we mustn’t get too smug. Our “wall” is the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. We’ve had factories close too, but thanks to our temperate climate, land-based industries have taken up the slack. Our wages are static and a disturbing number of our populous are hooked on drugs. The evidence of p-house production discovered after tenants have left the building is testament to that.
If I were Mr Trump I would set aside the money he was going to use to build the wall and instead use it for more prisons. I would then sign an executive order to give drug dealers a mandatory life sentence.
If the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was running the country of course he would shoot them all.
That may just be a step too far.
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