Don’t hold your breath waiting for the media’s self-appointed “fact-checkers” to verify the latest data from President Trump.
Yesterday, Trump tweeted that border-wall building is a big business. And with good reason. Walls work, despite the claims from open-borders Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that a wall won’t work and will waste money.
Who says walls are the go-to border security measure? USA Today, the mainstream media organ from which Trump pulled his numbers.
Trump Tweet, Wall Facts
Trump, of course, isn’t right about everything. But the one subject he’s been consistently right about is immigration, the issue largely responsible for his election to the presidency.
Building a wall was his key campaign promise, but leftist Democrats trying to import future voters to alter the demographics of the country are tenaciously blocking him from building one.
House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer called a border wall “ineffective,” “unnecessary,” “expensive,” and a “waste” when they answered the president after his nationwide speech from the Oval Office on January 8.
But they lied. And they know it.
“There are now 77 major or significant Walls built around the world, with 45 countries planning or building Walls,” Trump tweeted yesterday. “Over 800 miles of Walls have been built in Europe since only 2015. They have all been recognized as close to 100% successful. Stop the crime at our Southern Border!”
Undoubtedly, Pelosi-Schumer partisans in the Fake News Media were rushing thither and yon in newsrooms everywhere hoping to poke a hole in wall tweet.
But they couldn’t because Trump was, again, exactly right.
USA Today Report
In May, USA Today disclosed the number and length of walls that have been built.
“Today, as President Trump pushes his campaign promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico,” the newspaper reported, “there are at least 77 walls or fences around the world — many erected after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon.”
In 1989, it continued, just 15 such walls had been built, and at the close of World War II, just seven border walls had been built.
What accounts for the wall-building craze? Danger.
Forgetting the Great Wall of China, and the Berlin Wall that the communists built to keep people in, “India is nearing completion of a 1,700-mile barbed wire fence to curb immigration and smuggling” along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh, USA Today reported. “The fence is to block migrants from low-lying Bangladesh who want a better life in India. India also has a 450-mile barrier with Pakistan — a militarized ‘line of control’ to keep out militants because of ongoing tensions between the neighboring nations.”
As well, in 2002, Israel built a 20-foot high, 400-mile-long wall made of concrete and barbed wire on the West Bank, while Britain paid for a wall at Calais to stop migrants from getting into the Channel Tunnel.
In 1975, Morocco constructed a “1,700-mile sand wall fortified and surrounded by millions of land mines … along disputed, ungoverned territory on its border with Western Sahara,” while Spain built a 20-foot-high concrete wall around Melilla and Ceuta, its cities in Morocco.
Another example? “In 2014,” the newspaper reported, “Saudi Arabia built a 550-mile-long wall with Iraq, a response to the rise of the Islamic State militants sweeping across parts of that country.”
And in Europe, the newspaper reported, “800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia and others — a swift and concrete reaction as more than 1.8 million people descended on Europe from war zones from Afghanistan to Syria.”
So again, Trump was right.
But Walls Don’t Work
Hilariously, USA Today quoted an expert who claimed that “walls are public relations exercises where governments demonstrate that they are actually doing something,” and that walls “usually create more problems.”
The “expert” did not explain what those “problems” were, and neither did USA Today “fact check” the expert or otherwise attempt to verify her claim.
The obvious question is this: If walls don’t work — if walls are “ineffective,” “unnecessary,” “expensive,” and a “waste” — why do nations under siege build them?
Indeed, as The New American reported on Saturday, reports from San Diego show that border barriers do work, which CNN’s anti-Trump Jim Acosta amusingly and inadvertently demonstrated in his report from the steel border fence in McAllen, Texas.
Photo: AP Images
