Compiled by The Express staff
On Mar. 13, President Trump visited California for the first time since he was elected. He came here to prove a point: the wall along the Mexico border is definitely coming.
We feel that the president doesn’t understand the culture of California, which has long been home to “the largest number of immigrants in the United States,” going back as far the 1600s, according to the non-profit, non-partisan group American Immigration Council.
During his visit, the president was presented with eight possible prototype designs of the “big, beautiful” wall as he puts it.. Viewing the footage on KTVU, it felt to us on the Express editorial board like the president was all over the place.
On one hand, he said he would prefer a concrete wall, which would supposedly be harder to climb. This is because he is apparently under the impression that illegal immigrants are like professional mountain climbers. “Who would think getting over the top is easy?” he remarked.
The president had also hoped for more see-through designs. According to an article on azcentral.com, only three of the eight designs had a see-through feature. “You have to have see-through,” he said. “You have to know what is on the other side of the wall,” he said.
Also, the wall the president intends to build is 30 feet high. When asked in an interview with Esquire magazine, mountain climber Ed Viesturs said a wall of that height could probably be tackled “in a few hours, easy.”
Trump also criticized California and its governor Jerry Brown, saying, “The place is totally out of control. Taxes are way, way out of whack. You have ‘sanctuary cities,’ where you have criminals living. “If you don’t have this kind of wall, drugs are pouring through California,” Trump said at the event. As we stated in the editorial in the ____ issue, statistically, it’s the white males committing crimes, not immigrants.
If the president thinks we are “totally out of control with wack taxes” maybe he should set his priority straight and not spend 18 billion dollars to fund his rock climbing wall.
The current border, which is apparently “lousy” according to Trump, “stops 90 to 95 percent. But with the real wall will stop 99 percent, maybe more.”
18 billion dollars have been set aside to increase the border by less than ten percent, but maybe more on a good day. This mass amount of money could be spent on more dire necessities for America like repairing our broken education system or creating more jobs for the unemployed, but instead is fulfilling Trumps’ desire for a life-like toy in the form of a massive border wall.