This article was written by the distinguished retired judge, John H. Wilson
During his State of the Union, President Trump mentioned the cities of San Diego and El Paso. Regarding these places, the President stated that “San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in the country. In response, and at the request of San Diego residents and political leaders, a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings. The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our Nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities.”
These statements, as well as Mr. Trump’s other comments during this speech, were aggressively fact checked by the media, even as the President spoke. Interestingly enough, the “instant criticism” of these remarks reported by Politico centered around the deterioration of the fencing along the US-Mexico border in Southern California, and the willingness of “some” Democratic negotiators to discuss funding for some sort of unspecified barrier or other security measures at the border.
Shortly after the State of the Union, claims were made in the media that the wall between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez had nothing to do with the drop in crime experienced by El Paso. However, the wall between Mexico and the United States in that area was built between 2006 and 2008. Crime statistics for El Paso show an overall drop in violent crime in recent years, with a noticeable downward drop in 2006 – the year work on building the wall was commenced.
President Trump’s remarks appear to have been based upon the claim made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who stated that “El Paso used to have one of the highest crime rates in America…after that fence went up and separated Juarez, which still has an extremely high crime rate, the crime rates in El Paso now are some of the lowest in the country. So we know it works.” Despite the headlines denying this declaration, the crime statistics cited above would support this assertion by both the President and the Texas Attorney General.
In fact, the effort made by President Trump’s critics to deny the obvious have been extraordinary, to say the least. During her infamous response to the President’s speech on the need for a border wall, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used every euphemism for border security possible, without once admitting that a wall (or fence, or barrier, or whatever description you prefer) is the most effective way to keep an intruder off of your property: “The fact is: We all agree that we need to secure our borders, while honoring our values: we can build the infrastructure and roads at our ports of entry; we can install new technology to scan cars and trucks for drugs coming into our nation; we can hire the personnel we need to facilitate trade and immigration at the border; and we can fund more innovation to detect unauthorized crossings.”
There can be no reasonable doubt that a wall is the simplest, most cost-effective method of securing any area of land. it makes little sense to have drones or other expensive methods of detecting border crossers, without a method in place to stop those same crossers (or at least, slow them down long enough for border security to reach the area where a breech has occurred).
But, there is no need to follow the logic of this common sense argument. Let experience guide us in this matter.
In 2006, a group of New York City judges took a good will tour of Israel. I was part of that expedition.
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Built between 2000 and 2006, the wall, which stretches over 200 miles, stands between the state of Israel and the Palestinian territory. One statistic alone will establish the effectiveness of this barrier – In 2002, there were 43 suicide attacks against Israeli targets. In 2012, after the wall was put in place there were zero.
Our guides brought us to a section of the wall which divided an Israeli town from a Palestinian “camp” (one of the things I learned while in Israel, is that many Palestinian towns were called “camps,” even when the Palestinians lived in stone or brick houses, with running water and electricity). Here, a port had been placed in the wall – an open area, surrounded with walls, with a wide gate on either side. Here, it was explained, Israeli trucks carrying produce could unload their cargo, while Palestinian drivers could load their trucks with that same produce for sale in the Palestinian territory.
We also met with the Mayor of the Israeli town (an ethnic Arab), who informed us that incidents of violence in his town between Israelis and Palestinians had dropped to zero since the construction of the wall.
Yet, when I returned to America, the outright denial of the facts I witnessed in Israel continue to exist here even to the present day. In January of 2017, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times stated that the Israeli Security Fence “was constructed under very different circumstances, and with different goals, than Mr. Trump’s wall, raising questions about whether the president’s analogy between the United States and Israel is sound.” Yet, even Ms Kershner frankly admitted that “since March 2002, there has been a sharp decline in the number and scope of terrorist attacks by West Bank Palestinians in Israel.”
What exactly is the purpose of both the Israeli Border Wall, and the Barrier Fence proposed between Mexico and the United States? President Trump put it like this – “Simply put, walls work and walls save lives.” In other words, the purpose of both walls is to provide for security.
Any other argument to the contrary is nothing but semantics.
Photo: San Diego (San Diego Official site picture)