For every wall there are two ladders

The wall is coming. Or so we are told.

Initially described as a charming architectural hybrid where AV Jennings meets the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, all brown brick, mortar and razor ribbon, it then became a vast edifice of pre-fabricated concrete. Now, it’s a steel barrier. A fence but somehow not a fence.

Way, way back on Christmas Eve, President Trump fired off this tweet:

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“The only way to stop drugs, gangs, human trafficking, criminal elements and much else from coming into our Country is with a Wall or Barrier. Drones and all of the rest are wonderful and lots of fun, but it is only a good old fashioned Wall that works!”

Tell that to the Jin dynasty (1115-1234), Mr President. They had a wall, a fine wall, a good old-fashioned wall that is still standing today and is known as the Great Wall of China.

As walls go, it was (and is) a beaut. Three metres high with guard towers every 100 metres or so. An almost perfect wall designed to keep out ne’er-do-wells from the north. With their wall as a form of security blanket, the Jin dynasty lived happily ever after, or at least they did until a gentleman by the name of Genghis Khan came along.

Sad to say, the Jin dynasty quickly lapsed into the footnotes of history, slaughtered almost to a man with the children and womenfolk enslaved. Ironically, the wall remained standing, a testament to false hope and confirmation of the axiomatic weakness of walls: for every wall there are two ladders.

There are even greater weaknesses to the wall that Trump wants to build, or more accurately extend beyond its current series of non-contiguous blockades that run approximately one third of the entire 3145 kilometres of the US-Mexican border. And we can see them right now.

One of the stranger coincidences of the US government shutdown over the funding for Trump’s wall is that it has been going on at the same time as the trial of Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman, the boss of the Sinaloa cartel, in Brooklyn, New York.

The trial has, in part, detailed Sinaloa drug-trafficking activities into the US.

For those who don’t know Mexican geography well, the Sinaloa and affiliated groups control territory in Mexico which extends from Mazatlan in Mexico’s coastal west to the US-Mexican border from Tijuana almost all the way to Juarez on the Tex-Mex border.

So, one might presume Sinaloa trafficking hits the cities of San Diego in southern California, Calixico in eastern California or perhaps Nogales in Arizona. Maybe El Paso in Texas.

No.

Sinaloa’s home port in the US is Chicago, about 2500km from the US-Mexican border. Chicago is the main distribution point of Sinaloa cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin.

We know this because in 2013, the City of Chicago pronounced Guzman “Public Enemy Number One”, an award not attributed by the city to a criminal since Al Capone. Capone lived in Chicago. Guzman has probably never set foot there, but Chicago is where he has made a great amount of his estimated $10 billion personal fortune.

Sinaloa has planes at its disposal, some of the light variety, some great stonking cargo planes that fly above any wall that exists or might at around 30,000 feet. The Sinaloa has submarines. I kid you not.

In 2018, with Guzman behind bars awaiting trial, the City of Chicago handed the Public Enemy Number One garland over to Nemesio ‘‘El Mencho’’ Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Again, it is doubtful Oseguera Cervantes has ever strolled around Millennium Park or grabbed a beer at the Old Town House on Chicago’s upper north side. But Chicago is where his drugs go and flow through to the big cities in the east, essentially because Oseguera Cervantes, like Guzman, has developed trusted relationship with Chicago street gangs.

The notion the drug trade from Mexico worth an estimated $150 billion per annum will come to a screeching halt the moment the last rivet pops into Trump’s steel wall is laughable. We could get into all manner of chicken and egg arguments but the only reason criminals traffic drugs is because the end users create the demand for them.

Of course, politics is a good story never distracted by the truth. And that largely unexplored truth extends beyond a steel fence that cannot keep out drug traffickers to the logistics of building said fence in the first place.

Trump’s followers believe in his property developer’s credentials. If Trump couldn’t build a wall, throw in a 36-hole golf course, maybe a casino or two with plenty of parking, then who could?

The problem with that assumption is it denies the basic fact associated with the US side of the border that much of the land is privately owned.

The US federal government owns only about a third of the land and as previously stated much of that is fenced or walled, if you will. The remaining two-thirds belongs to state and local governments, private property owners or Native American tribes.

The situation is pronounced in Texas where the state retained all public lands when it was admitted into the Union in 1845. Much of that land has been sold off to private ownership. The US government would have to negotiate the purchase of land with literally thousands of individuals and entities. If it failed, it would have to compulsorily acquire the land by eminent domain.

Already there are hundreds of Texan landowners loading their shotguns and peering out of their windows. At this early stage they say they will not walk away from what would amount to arguably the greatest federal-government land grab in US history.

Some may ultimately agree to just compensation. Others won’t. And the sight of these people being dragged out of their homes by federal marshals should make for compelling viewing during the 2020 presidential election campaign.

The sheer extent of it would make the Waco siege look like a car repo.

Personally, I would like to see the wall built but not because Trump has some questionable mandate to knock it up and certainly not because it may be effective in controlling drug trafficking or crime in general terms, but for the simple reason it should stand as a great rusting monument to political stupidity and Trump’s wretched excesses.

But it won’t be. Once the complexity associated with the wall’s construction is properly understood, then one realises that this cannot be done in a year or two and probably not within 20.