Wednesday, April 3, 2013

THE GREAT WALL OF THE AMERICAS

No, this is not a pun on the Great Mall of the Americas of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  I would rather wish it to be a light-hearted joke, but I am afraid it is not that, either.

Rep. Steven King (R-Iowa), an opponent of immigration, pronounced recently that building a fence along the approximately 2,000 mile long border with Mexico would not be too much of an engineering marvel.

"We can (sic) do the Panama Canal 100-plus years ago and I've been over there to take a look at the Great Wall of China that was built more than 2,000 years ago, and that's 5,500 miles long. So building a fence is not that hard; I'll just show you how to do it if it's too complicated for our public policy people to get their mind around."

For a Congress that cannot find the money to invest in straight-forward and badly needed infrastructure repairs such as fixing crumbling bridges and highways, it would for a starter be interesting to hear a floor debate on how to finance Rep. King's project.  And as a point of fact, the Great Wall of China was not built 2,000 years ago.  It was built, rebuilt and repaired over a period stretching from around 700 BC into the 1500s AD, so Rep. King's Great Wall of the Americas would presumably be a rather lengthy project too, under the best of circumstances.

The Chinese wall is not of uniform quality along its entire extension, but the more solid parts of it is on the average some 20 ft high, 20 ft across at the bottom and 16ft at the top.  I assume Rep. King would not wish the United States government to be shamed into executing a project of lesser quality.  For the 2,000 mile border with Mexico, that would mean a bit short of 34 billion cu.ft. (957 million m3) of construction material.

Let us compare the Great Wall of the Americas to another more recent Chinese mega-project, the Three Gorges hydro-power dam, which consumed 27.2 million m3 of concrete, 463,000 metric tons steel and 136 million manhours.  Completed in 2006 the cost was $26 billion, with only a small fraction attributable to labor cost at Chinese wage levels.

Our Great Wall of the Americas would be equal to 35 Three Gorges dams in magnitude.  In other words, 1.25 billion cu.yd of concrete, 18 million tons steel and 4.8 billion manhours.  With Three Gorges cost equivalents brought current to 2013 as a yard stick, this should work out to $1,2 trillion for materials and equipment plus another $70 billion in (U.S.) labor for a total cost of, say, $1.5 trillion, without factoring in cost escalation during what presumably would be a rather lengthy construction period.

But asides from the massive misallocation of funds such a project would represent, why be anti-immigration at all in a country where 99.2% of the population is made up of immigrants?  It is written thus on the New York harbor Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Those "huddled masses" of yore were indeed a mostly rag-tag collection of human beings, but I think we can all agree that they in time made their new home into a pretty successful nation.  So why mess with a formula with such a splendid track record?  The United States has the space and natural resources for further population growth and still has the good fortune to attract immigrants who wish to come here in order to improve their lot through hard work.

Instead of spending $1.5 trillion-plus on the Great Wall of the Americas, Target advertises 18"x30 welcome doormats for $12.99.  I am sure we can get them wholesale (from China) at $5.00, at which price we could string them out edge-to-edge along the 2,000 mile border for a mere $20 million.