Montana point of view about failed Border walls....

https://billingsgazette.com/opinion/letters/why-border-walls-don-t-work/article_e2c81f0b-da3c-5d3f-b9cb-e407c961a73a.html

Why border walls don’t work- echo letter published in Billings Gazette, a Montana newspaper. 

Donald Trump is wasting tax money by building a failed border wall...and Mexico was supposed to pay for it!

Who will pay for the wall?  Who?

Border walls simply don’t work, according to Donna Wiesner Keene, who worked in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations. 

Tunnels, ladders, smuggling people through legal points of entry in the backs of tractor trailers, all circumvent walls. 

In an article from eight years ago, Keene wrote “The value of a brick and mortar structure in a modern, technologically advanced era is clearly limited, if not altogether obsolete.”

Surely with eight more years of technological advancements and innovations since her article we are even further removed from the efficacy of a brick and mortar structure.

According to David Bier, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, “President Trump’s wall would be a mammoth expenditure that would have little impact on illegal immigration.” 

It would also create many “direct harms,” including “the spending, the taxes, the eminent domain abuse, and the decrease in immigrant’s freedoms of movement.”

We have watched ranchers lose land to oil pipelines only to have those pipelines leak all over their land and into their water table: eminent domain abuses really upset us. Many Montanans’ land has been passed down for generations; being caretakers of our land and having access to vibrant, clean public lands are ways of life for us in Montana. We can only imagine what it would be like to have our land used to erect a structure so controversial that even some or our most conservative friends think will be wholly ineffective and a waste of their tax dollars.

For these reasons we support an immediate end to the president’s so-called emergency and call for our fellow citizens to contact their representatives, urging them to oppose a border wall.

Nadine Smith, Billings Montana