Do border walls work? The consensus among Democratic pundits and lawmakers clearly is “no”:
“We know walls don’t work, that they don’t stop drugs. That they don’t stop migration,” Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar told CNN. Trump’s main shutdown-opponent Chuck Schumer echoed much of the same, that “a big, concrete wall is expensive and it doesn’t work.” “The Conversation,” a website with articles authored by academics and edited by professional journalists, published a piece beginning with the sentence “history teachers us walls don’t work,” before failing to provide any evidence in the 800-word article that followed. Nancy Pelosi has taken the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez approach and decided to put morality before the facts, arguing that walls are “immoral.”
And of course they all know better. After all, both Pelosi and Schumer were among those who voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which approved construction of 652 miles of fencing at the border. Three years after voting in favor of the Act, Schumer was pleased by the progress, stating in a speech that “construction of a 630-mile border fence that creates a significant barrier to illegal immigration on our southern land border,” before he then turned to slam employers who hire illegal immigrants. Surely he doesn’t believe that fencing is a deterrent, but concrete isn’t.
All that Schumer and company needed to change their opinion was a change in President – thus confirming their complete lack of principles.
Rather than speculate over whether a complete wall at the U.S. Mexico border would work as intended, history does have much to teach us, and it’s that walls do work. Just Facts Daily‘s Daniel Marulanda and James Agresti examined the effects border walls had on illegal crossings and terrorism in two countries: Hungary and Israel.
Hungary
Hungary constructed a barbed wire fence along their border on Croatia, which was completed in October 2015. The wall was in response to the refugee crisis, tens of thousands of which were illegally entering Hungary. Judging from the figures of illegal entrants into Hungary pictured below, you probably didn’t need to be told October was the month construction was completed:
It took a mere two days before daily migrant captures fell 99%.
Israel
Israel has numerous examples of success with walls in combating both illegal entries into their country and reducing terrorism. Israel began constructing their West Bank Barrier in 2002 following a surge in Palestinian terrorism, which immediately cut terrorist deaths nearly in half, before mostly reducing them to the single digits annually.
Israel also began constructing a fence along its border with Egypt in 2010 to thwart illegal entrants from Africa. Illegal entries from Egypt to Israel fell from 10,000+ per year to near-zero. There was an uptik in 2015 as entrants began using ladders at certain border sections to get across, but the border was quickly approved to prevent that from continuing.
Everyone Also Knows Borders Work
And lastly, as Marulanda and Agresti note:
Far from being relics of a distant age, a wide variety of nations have built, fortified, or expanded border barriers since 2010. This includes Austria, Kenya, Jordan, Spain, Greece, Norway, Slovenia, Macedonia, Gibraltar, Myanmar, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Oman, Algeria, Ukraine, Tunisia, Hungary, and Morocco.
If walls didn’t work, we’d expect fewer of them, not more. Even Democrats are aware of that. The reason they’re afraid of a border wall isn’t that it won’t work (because then what would they have to fear?), it’s because it will work as intended.
