President Trump's right. A border wall will pay for itself

A lot of people are talking about President Trump's proposed border wall. It's time to listen to those who are actually on the border.

Raul Ortiz is the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol for the Rio Grande Valley sector, based in south Texas. To skeptics of the border wall, he said in a recent Fox News interview: “Come walk in my shoes."

Mark Morgan, who spent 20 years with the FBI, headed the U.S. Border Patrol under President Obama. In a Fox News interview, he echoed Ortiz in backing the wall, citing the “national security and humanitarian crisis on the southwest border.” The wall, Morgan said, “is in America’s best interest.” Protecting U.S. citizens shouldn’t be partisan, and border security professionals know what’s effective and what’s not.

For five months each year, I live in Tyler, Texas. And, overwhelmingly, the Texans I talk with strongly support Trump's proposed wall. This sentiment is borne in polls, including one taken by CBS/Dixie Strategies, in 2018. This poll showed 57 percent of Texans favoring a wall which would include electronic surveillance and other enhanced security measures along the southern border. The same poll showed President Trump as even more popular in Texas than when he was elected.

To be sure, some other polls indicate that most Texans oppose the wall, and Donald Trump. But as Hillary Clinton found out the hard way: polls routinely understate support for Donald Trump and his agenda.

Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun

According to policy specialists at The Center for Immigration Studies, preventing only a mere fraction of the estimated number of illegal aliens trying to enter our country over the next decade will yield savings greater than the wall’s costs. Immigration analyst Steven Camarota and other national security experts claim that if a wall costing $12 billion to $15 billion stops 160,000 to 200,000 illegal crossers (approximately 9 to 12 percent of those expected to otherwise successfully cross our southern border in the next 10 years) it will effectively pay for itself.

Read the rest from Todd Blodgett HERE.

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