29 Mar 2017 Pres. Trump: Build bridges, not walls!
An open letter to the president:
Dear Pres. Trump:
Before you were elected president, you were one of the world’s premier builders. Your buildings fill the New York City skyline, and skylines of so many other cities within the US and around the world. Before starting a building project, you naturally obtained cost estimates from contractors for the various supplies and labor, to bring those projects in “ahead of time and below budget.”
Have you given that same careful consideration in connection with building a wall between the US and Mexico? It is supposed to be over 30 feet high, and run for thousands of miles. Many engineers and contractors estimate it will take tens of billions of dollars to construct that wall. This includes millions of cubic yards of concrete, steel rebar, labor costs of workers, excavation, maintenance roads, buying up rights to private property to build the wall, etc. The annual cost to maintain that wall would be in the billions of dollars as well.
And, will it really accomplish the purpose or goal of keeping people and drugs out of the US? If you build a 30 foot wall, people will buy 31 foot ladders. They will also build tunnels dozens of feet beneath the existing walls, and use catapults to launch drugs and other items over the existing walls.
Moreover, a large number of overstays did not necessarily come across the Mexican border. Many arrived on valid US visas, and remained in the US. Are we can now going to build walls at the seaports and airports?
Rather than spending all of those billions of dollars on a wall, you should spend that money on building bridges. On filling potholes. On building roads, hospitals, public transportation, and other worthy job-creating projects within the US.
If given the choice between spending billions of dollars on that wall versus infrastructure, I believe the vast majority of Americans would want to see our infrastructure built, upgraded, and repaired.
All I’m asking is that you, as a former builder with intimate knowledge of cost overruns, take another look at the wall, and what other worthy, productive uses that money can be put to for the betterment of America.
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