this is implying the wall doesn't go underground deep enough to prevent this
If it does, that's sure as hell not in the budget we've seen so far. I don't think there's like a flat 'dollars for excavation of m^3 of dirt' figure anywhere, but it's gonna be expensive. One of the big reasons nobody has basements in Arizona is because you hit rock-hard clay after like a couple feet. Now extrapolate that to thousands of miles.
looking up on google ("gurgl iz mah srze"), the high-end security cameras available to citizens at least were a couple hundred bucks, either for one of them or for a set of them
considering the sentiment of the $25 billion price tag, this cost would be a tiny chunk of it, that's even considering everything you said is accurate
You have to pay people to monitor those cameras 24/7, you have to power them, and you have to fund maintenance year-round. The Southwest also features some of the only giant duststorms found in the US, so it'll be fun knowing that we're paying a couple thousand people $50k/yr to go out into the desert with cotton swabs to remove dirt from camera lenses. Woo-wee!
even googling the maximum range of security cameras, you can see the effective range of most long-range night-vision cameras (which are at the same price as previously mentioned) far exceeds 100 feet
using a conservative estimate of 300 feet, that cuts your number into thirds; 35,200 cameras
I used the word 'field-of-view' because I meant field-of-view, not range. The issue is that if you have two cameras spaced 300 feet apart, they might be able to see 300 feet in front of themselves, but what's likely is that there's a huge blind-spot in-between them. When cameras are used indoors, they're usually pointed at a mirror that gives a better panoramic view of the room. It also distorts the image terribly, meaning that areas on the outskirts of your field of view are highly scrunched-together.
I guess you might be able to fix this problem by having your hypothetical border surveillance cameras swing back and forth wildly to minimize blindspots, but remember that someone's actually gonna have to watch the footage. You don't want them barfing all over the place.
even then I doubt you took into consideration the landscape of the border
lots of flat land means you need less and less cameras; the most cameras would be in mountainous regions where it's hard to see around foliage and terrain
I've lived in Arizona my entire life so I can dispute this based on personal experience. Yes, the Southwest is a desert with less trees and hills, but we've still got tons of mountains. There are areas I've driven through where building a wall would be nearly logistically impossible, and you'd need to expend loads of money on terraforming to even consider building a structure there.
Hell, if you look at a map, most of the border is mountain ranges.
"she's at fault, she was wearing a tight skirt, she incentivized me to rape her!"
"he called me a bad name and made fun of my mom, he invented a scenario in which I would want to kill him!"
see how stupid that sounds
This is a stupid brown townogy for a reason that starts to get at the heart of what makes a law 'bad'.
Basically, murder and rape are crimes in almost every society because humans have a completely consistent moral system regarding rape and murder. Virtually everyone does not want to be raped/murdered, and virtually everyone doesn't want other people raping/murdering in their town. Generally speaking, raping and murdering people makes you a criminal
not because it is a
crime, but because humans find it abominable.
But look at something like the War on Drugs, where a very small number of politicians and special interest groups decided for everyone else that using/possessing
certain drugs was 'bad' and should be a 'crime'. We have mountains of evidence showing that our decision to make marijuana illegal has hurt society far more than it's helped, but still we have people calling to keep it illegal to keep 'criminals' from using their 'criminal drugs'.
Of course our society is starting to re-evaluate that logic, and over half of the population wants to legalize weed. Perhaps maybe a similar conversation should happen with immigration, since the fact that we have illegal immigrants is explicitly a result of the fact we don't accept more immigrants legally. Maybe the solution is just to take the 'illegal' out of the immigrant?
