Current Event: Donald Trump and his Wall

 Trump and the Wall

Bibliography: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37243269

  
  The president of the United States started his endeavor to build a wall to separate the US from Mexico. Though the border covers 1,900 miles, Donald Trump claims, “I would build a great wall , and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I build them very inexpensively.”

  The article deals first with how much would the wall cost. The president affirms that the cost will range from $10bn to $12bn. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calculated otherwise, a cost from $12bn to $15bn. A study of the Washington Post estimated a cost of $25bn. So far, 650 miles of fencing has been already laid on the frontier, with a cost of $7bn. "Adding even more to the expense, the new 1,000 miles would crisscross private land, which would have to be purchased, perhaps by legal force, or financial settlements made with owners".

  Next, the article goes deeper to who will pay for the wall and how. While Donald Trump insists that Mexico will pay for the wall, the President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto has, on the other hand, equally insisted Mexico will not. For the first steps, US taxpayers provided the initial funding. One the ways Mexico could pay for the walls, is for the US to raise tariffs on imports. Another way is remittances. Taxing the $25bn a year that migrants send to their families, would raise a considerable amount of money. A third way is to lower the tax on exports. Imports would stay the same, and would raise up to $12bn. The fourth way, is to raise the travel visa and border crossing fees.

At last, the article talks about the environment that would be affected by the construction of the wall. The wall would probably affect the ecosystem because it would prevent the migration of birds and mammals traveling north to mate.

  This article has a definite order, without jumping from one topic to another as I have seen on other articles. Apparently, it does not have the purpose of persuasion, but gives answers to the questions that disturb the minds of many citizens. It does speculate about the material of the wall, giving no real basis for the sentence “Concrete is the obvious choice” and bases the following three paragraphs on this assumption. In general I found the article to be very interesting and informative.