Back of the napkin math....

It is sad to note that almost all of the presidential candidates campaigning through the Great State of Iowa are a fan of building a border wall to combat illegal immigration.  I was mulling this over this afternoon, and decided to figure out what the approximate cost of said wall would be, give or take a few billion dollars.

1. Length of Land Wall- The Mexican-United States border is 1,969 miles, and the Canadian border is 5,522.  You'd not want to replicate the mistakes of the Chinese in leaving gaps in the wall for the Mongols to come through, right?
2. Length of Sea Wall- Since it is trivial to just sail or swim around our land wall to open coastline, as immigrants from everywhere from Vietnam to Haiti can attest, we'd obviously need to build sea walls as well  (completely obliterating tourism and the fishing industries, and hobbling all international shipping trade, but we'll avoid those realities for this exercise).  My last count has our shoreline (water) borders at 12,383 miles. This gives us a grand total of 19,874 miles of total border to protect from the North, South, East and West. 
3. How high does the wall need to be?  Previous self-circumvallation exercises like the Great Wall (25 feet), the Berlin Wall (11.8), Hadrian's Wall (15 feet) and the more recent Israel Separation Barrier (18-25 feet) would average out at approximately 18 feet high.
4. CapEx?  Well, if you were really conservative and took the recent Israeli estimates of slightly more than $2M per mile (over primarily flat land) for the ISB and applied that to the great expanses of the plains as well as the impressive peaks of the Rockies, not to mention all that shoreline, you'd end up spending a mere $40,741,700,000 to box in the polis of the United States with an 18 foot wall.
5. OpEx? We are much more technologically advanced than the Romans were with Hadrian's Wall, or the Great Wall of China.  We have accurate sensor technology, satellites, and many more tools at our disposal.  For the sake of argument, lets say that if you had a small detachment of guards, say 5 per 20 mile segment, on duty at any given time.  If you paid these guards the new U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, then the annual labor costs (not including benefits, if any) would only be $317,000,000. Where they work, what they eat, if they have equipment like guns or tasers, are not factored in.  Of course, all these minimum wage employees could supervise themselves, right?

So, net-net, about $41B for the wall to be built, and North of $310M a year to man it.  You'd add about 20,000 guards to the payroll of the US Government to monitor and police a wall 13 times the length of the Great Wall of China.    That's only a one-time-cost equal to the annual budget for Elementary/Secondary and Higher education for the Department of Education. No problem.  Plus, it worked so well for all those other civilizations who walled themselves in during some reactionary isolationist phase.

A corollary idea, posited by my lovely wife at dinner, is that the wall could be multi-purpose.  Given the quickening erosion of our civil liberties in the United States, eventually people will not want to immigrate to the US, but from.  The repurposed wall could keep those reluctant citizens from wandering away to some less Orwellian country.

Whoops, looks like I ran out of sarcasm already.  More later.

Comments

[Aaron Sarazan]

American Wall Part Two: Solving the "Canada Problem"... Of course I can't imagine the Canadians would take exception, and might even subsidize the damn thing if things keep up like this :-D

[Jimbo]

Bro, you know I love ya man, but you either spent too much time in the Bay area or too much time away from So Cal - I'm not sure which.

Something needs to be done to control our borders. A wall may not be the perfect solution but it can be part of one. It also doesn't need to be done all at once or even entirely to make a significant impact.

If not a wall, then what is the solution?

[Duke]

A possible solution is to offer 40 acre land grants along the land borders with the stipulation that the grantee police the area as necessary. The reality show possibilities are endless.

[Paul]

Perhaps as an alternative we could take all that money and invest (both here and in countries with citizens emigrating to the US) in a mix of:

1) Education
2) Business development and economic reconstruction

The up side is it would drive economic growth for both countries, improve quality of life for all involved countries, and most importantly it will build good will outside the US.

[Jimbo]

Really? Don't you think there are things we need to spend our money on in this country before we pour our tax dollars into educating other countries and funding their BD and economic reconstrution?