Amid Fed Stalemate, These Folks Are Building The Wall Themselves—And Probably Doing A Better Job
Anna
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“If you build it, they’ll stop coming.”
Okay, so that’s not how the saying goes, but you get the point. Border security is out of flippin’ hand, and the only barrier that will halt the flood of illegal immigration is a physical one.
But, you know the story. Neverending obstruction from Congress, incessant squawking from the media who insist that the president and all of his supporters are xenophobic bigots who hate brown people and want to end all immigration; in short: all static, no wall.
Well, folks, there’s this beautiful thing called “the free market”. Beautiful is an understatement, but it’ll suffice.
You see, in a free market economy (which we sort of have), folks are able to freely associate, make voluntary transactions, and exchange goods and services unencumbered.
Goods and services like, say, for example, land and wall-building. It’s that simple model on which We Build The Wall (WBTW) has founded its mission.
People without the luxury of living in ivory tower states, safe and far from where the real action is, want the wall. People like Brian Kolfage, the Purple Heart recipient and triple-amputee veteran who founded the WBTW project, want to put an end to the “unintended consequences” of limpwristed border security.
So, they’re getting the job done themselves.
We Build The Wall raised over $23 million with the hopes of handing the money over to the government in light of the federal stalemate over funding for Trump’s wall. As they discovered, however, any money donated to the government could not be properly earmarked and would instead go into a general fund.
Yeah, no.
Instead, Kolfage and his crew realized that they could get the ball rolling and at least start patching up the border—and do it far more affordably and quickly than a goverment contractor ever could.
Rather than rely on land-grabbing eminent domain practices, WBTW is working with supportive property owners to build stretches of physical barriers along the border in several states, with a half-mile segment in New Mexico already done.
Not without quite a bit of chest-beating and some obstruction from local government, of course.
The Washington Post reports:
The New Mexico project sparked criticism from Democrats who oppose the president’s immigration policies. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) said in a statement to the Silver City Sun News that she found it “deeply disturbing when outsiders, like Kris Kobach and Steve Bannon, come in and use our community and people as a backdrop to further their racist agenda.”
While permits were called into question and a stop-order was issued by the city, WBTW was able to overcome it and get back to work.
https://twitter.com/BrianKolfage/status/1134142281194323969
As Kolfage has said in the past, it’s not his or WBTW’s job to build the entire border wall, and they ain’t gonna do it a half-mile at a time anyway.
It’s one of the basic functions of government to protect its own borders. It’s their job.
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