To the Editor:

L

inda Chavez’s critique of Donald Trump’s position on illegal immigration (“On ‘the Wall,’” May) is flawed. She states that we have “already built fencing along about a third of the border,” but the reality is that much of the “fencing” includes vehicle barriers that will not prevent pedestrian traffic. Only about 36 miles of the 1,900-mile border consists of double fencing that actually works. Ranchers, whose borderlands are constantly ravaged by marauding bands of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, would welcome a real barrier protecting their lands.

Ms. Chavez fails to discuss the many burdens of illegal immigration in her analysis. Eleven million illegal immigrants do take American jobs. Some of the 93 million Americans not working in the Obama economy could fill those jobs. Illegal workers are also employed in well-paying trades, such as construction. California even permits illegal aliens to become lawyers. The U.S. spends countless billions incarcerating, educating, and providing free health care to illegal immigrants. The organization FAIR estimates the annual cost of this effort to be $312 billion. Illegal immigrants constitute 25 percent of our federal prison inmates. Tragic murders, like that of Kate Steinle, happen all too often. Illegal aliens rarely pay income taxes; most are paid under the table in the underground economy. And immigrants send $23 billion in remittances to Mexico every year, money that is unavailable for investment here.

The dividends of a wall in mitigating these burdens easily outweigh the billions it would cost, a mere asterisk in the bloated federal budget. A small fee on wired remittances to Mexico could help pay for the wall’s maintenance. I’m sure Donald Trump would agree that the wall would not have to be built over impassable mountains, but along urban and easily crossed corridors.

Our federal government has a duty to protect our sovereignty and our borders. The Obama administration has failed miserably at this. No new barriers have been built, and its catch-and-release policies and questionable executive actions only encourage new arrivals. Americans are rightly upset at the border chaos and lack of enforcement, and Mr. Trump’s wall concept is a reflection of this frustration. Fences and walls have worked well for Israel and Hungary in keeping out unlawful visitors. The proverb “good fences make good neighbors” makes sense.

Jeffrey Hartwick

Los Angeles, California

To the Editor:

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inda Chavez has exaggerated the negative effects of Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies. A workforce reduction of 6.4 percent, when unemployment is currently at 9.8 percent, seems unlikely to shrink the economy, much less shrink it by 5.7 percent.  Unemployment has been above 9 percent since December 2007, so such a workforce reduction might be very beneficial.

If there is actually a dire shortage of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) graduates, as Ms. Chavez seems to fear, their real salaries should be increasing rapidly. But data show real salaries of engineers roughly unchanged since 1987. So a pause in legal immigration seems unlikely to be a major problem in that area.

The assertion that U.S. citizens and permanent residents don’t want the jobs illegal aliens do is demonstrably false. The problem is the compensation offered, not the nature of the job.  With the proposed departure of illegal immigrants, some salaries would have to increase to attract new workers, and more homeowners would probably decide to mow their own yards.

Dan Koury

Address withheld

Linda Chavez writes:

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effrey Hartwick is correct that not all of the current fencing between the U.S. and Mexico consists of double-layer fencing, but his claim that only 36 miles of existing fencing “actually works” to deter pedestrian traffic is highly misleading. In March, National Geographic published a photo essay depicting the intimidating physical barriers that separate our two countries, available online for those wishing to see what the fencing looks like. The magazine also described the scanners, drones, and guards that deter illegal traffic across much of the rest of the territory. The argument that we need to spend hundreds of millions more building double-layered fences much less walls is belied by the facts. Illegal immigration is down to levels not seen since the early 1970s. Donald Trump has made illegal immigration an issue not because the problem is getting worse but because it plays into the fears of his target voters: non–college-educated whites.

Yes, there are costs associated with illegal immigration, but the figures Mr. Hartwick cites from the anti-immigration group FAIR (an organization whose history I discussed at some length in my article “Donald Trump’s America” in the October 2015 issue of Commentary) are grossly exaggerated. Illegal immigrants do pay taxes; all such immigrants pay both sales and property taxes, either directly as owners (an estimated 30 percent of illegal immigrants own their own homes) or as a pass-through cost calculated in the rent paid to landlords. A recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that 75 percent of illegal immigrants pay Social Security taxes and about half pay federal income taxes, too. But there are costs largely born by states, including education and health care. Although illegal immigrants are not entitled to access safety-net programs, except for emergency medical care, their American-born children attend schools and are eligible for some benefits such as food stamps. As for Mr. Hartwick’s figures on crime, they too are misleading. Some two-thirds of illegal immigrants incarcerated in federal prisons are there for immigration offenses. Virtually every study that has looked at crime committed by the foreign-born shows a remarkably low crime rate—half that of the native born—and this holds true for those born in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the leading sources of illegal immigrants.

Dan Koury cites unemployment figures that are out of sync with those used by the Bureau of Labor statistics. He claims nearly 10 percent of Americans are unemployed when the July 2016 figure of 4.9 percent is half that. While it is true that the nation’s labor-participation rate is at 63 percent, a nearly 40-year low, the reasons are complex and cannot be explained by illegal immigration. Mr. Koury’s assertions on STEM workers were taken from a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration group that is an offshoot of FAIR. He ignores Department of Commerce data that show employment in STEM fields has grown nearly 8 percent between 2000 and 2010, while overall employment has grown only 2.6 percent. While the number of college degrees in the STEM fields is growing, many of the students earning those degrees are foreign-born: 33 percent of all engineering graduates are foreign-born, 27 percent of those in math and computer science, and 24 percent of those in the physical sciences. We pay to educate these students but do not allow most of them to remain and work. As for wages, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has a much more nuanced analysis than CIS’s. The ITIF found, for example, that in some IT categories, wages grew significantly more than overall wages, and in others they declined; but even those that experienced the steepest declines were in occupations that were already the highest paid in the industry.

Both Mr. Hartwick and Mr. Koury, however, seem to miss the obvious point of my argument: If we want to deter illegal immigrants, there are better ways than building walls. Reforming legal immigration to accommodate bringing in more of the workers we need would be a more effective and economically beneficial alternative to Donald Trump’s dreams of 40-foot barriers across our southern border.