By Ron Wolf
“The debate over Trump’s wall isn’t really about border security. It’s really a debate about whether we’re willing to live in a fact-based world.”
That’s the premise of a compelling column in the Washington Post today by Anne Applebaum, who professes at the London School of Economics and writes about national politics and foreign policy for the paper.
How we resolve the latest government shutdown — if we resolve it — “will tell us whether we are still capable, as a nation, of making decisions using facts and evidence,” she writes. “Specifically, it will tell us whether Republicans in Congress, the White House and on Fox News live in the same reality as the rest of us, or whether they have retreated fully into a world of make-believe.”
“This wall will serve no purpose,” she writes “Not only will it be ugly and bad for the environment; not only will it drain the budget; it also will fail to address the concerns of Americans who claim to oppose illegal immigration.”
The cold hard facts are that most of the immigrants entering the country illegally are not coming across the southern border. Illegal crossings there have been declining for years. Trump and his supporters are looking at the wrong fix for the wrong problem.
Trump’s vanity wall “wall make our nation weaker and poorer — $5 billion poorer,” Applebaum writes. “That’s why this isn’t a debate about border policy. It’s a debate that tells us which of our politicians cares about the real world inhabited by real Americans and which prefer to live in a fantasy world created by the president’s imagination. For the future of the country, it’s important that reality wins.”
Photo by Dave Webb