Israel has also built a huge wall in the desert, I remember reading and seeing the pictures. It is a no man's land on either side. The watch towers can see literally for miles if anyone approaches. It is patrolled constantly. And it is expensive. But growing.
I think a wall built for security, against people who are trying to invade to kill or take over the country, is one thing. And Israel is a small country, surrounded by nations that hate her.
Mexico is not like this. I'm not saying people who cross the border illegally, shouldn't be sent back immediately, but I think Miri has a point. This wall will have to be manned forever, 24/7.
My husband and I were in Texas a few years back. We flew into San Antonio to visit our son and his wife. He was playing pro hockey there. (Yes, the team is owned by the Spurs!). For fun, we decided to go to the closest border crossing, to see Mexico. We went across at night. The Mexican side had no border guards. Our passports did not get stamped as crossing over.
At the border, we got pulled into the border crossing and sat there for hours, without explanation. And our passports got confiscated, which freaked us out. With Mexicans screaming in Spanish all over the place. I finally went to talk to one of the guards about why we were there, and she would not tell us. I talked about the loose security on the other side and she agreed it was bad, but would not speak more.
After over 2 hours, they took us aside, and told us that we were not allowed to reenter the US at a different border crossing than the one we entered. They had completely done all these searches on our background, and apparently we were ok. One page had a large stamp saying the name of the border town, and that we were approved to come back again.
Except waiting in the holding area, was a list of rules concerning enter the country. It included only having enough medication for the number of days you were going to be there. I always traveled with all my meds, because what would happen if for some reason you could not get back home? And that included some limited and expensive drugs. Since we had planned to check out of our motel, and go across the border with all our luggage, that would mean I was chancing getting all my medications confiscated which were worth thousands of dollars. I was glad they didn't stop us at US customs in Canada before we got on the plane.
Anyway, it seemed like a very tight border. But of course, people do cross the river and sneak in at the Mexican-US border. About 20 miles back into the US, we came to the most scary checkpoint I have ever been through. There were big military type guys with semi automatic weapons. And dogs! Big dogs!
We were renting a vehicle with Texas license plates. He asked if we were American citizens, and we said no! You could see him go on high alert. We gave him our passports, and he started looking the car over. He wanted to know where we were from, why we were driving a car from Texas, etc. I started babbling about coming to see our son, the pro hockey player, playing for the Rampage. Yes, we were Canadians, and we loved hockey. Did he want our son's phone number or maybe the team's?
All of a sudden, he broke into a smile. He let us go through, and we found no more resistance to getting through.
Now maybe we are just dumb Canadians, but Texas seems to have a LOT of security, without a wall! It taught us a lot of things, about being in a "foreign" country. I had never thought of the US as "foreign" since I lived over 2 years there and we traveled sometimes 2 times a week to the US to play hockey/buy things when we lived in Vancouver BC. But Texas showed us that they were serious about stopping illegal immigrants.
Still, one would have thought 2 people with Canadian passports would not have been guilty of trying to illegally immigrant to the US through Mexico, when it would be so much easier to slip in from Canada. To say nothing of the fact we would be leaving our wonderful free universal health care, which would not be replaceable in the US.
