Courtesy of Latino Policy Forum
Edited by Lawndale Bilingual News

Congress must fix our broken immigration system. Building a border wall that will cost billions of dollars to build, plus billions more to maintain, will do nothing to address this problem. At best, the proposed wall is the result of a flailing political agenda and at worst a symbol of hate and nationalist supremacy.

The fact is plain and simple: There is no crisis. Apprehensions along the border have sunk to a 10-year low and even the conservative public policy think-tank, Cato Institute, proves that Trump does not cite accurate facts. Building a medieval wall to solve a complex immigration issue is simply throwing money away, as it will not eliminate the drug trafficking or terrorism threats that Trump hangs his wall arguments on. Nor does it consider that the current migration flow is legal and includes law-abiding immigrants seeking asylum from dangerous countries.

Now after a month-long shutdown, experts say this stalemate already has weighed heavily on U.S. economic growth and endangered our nation’s prosperity. The longest shutdown in our history has hurt everything from the financial well-being of federal government workers to national safety. To add insult to injury, the shutdown has increased the backlog of immigration causes, causing over 400 immigration judges to be furloughed, and pushing the backlog to 1.1 million. The political posturing by the Trump administration that birthed this shutdown has gone on for far too long, and we call on Congress to support an immediate resolution.

Moreover, an expanded wall will disrupt landowners along the border, the economies of our border towns and cities. Perhaps the greatest and most overlooked human impact the wall would have is the loss of life it would cause, as it will divert the journey of those seeking refuge to find more hazardous paths to their American dreams.

Simply put, the wall is not sound public policy.