The recently elected President Trump has had a tumultuous first few weeks in office. Trump has many campaign promises to honor, one being the promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep out unwanted illegal immigrants. Building a wall along the Mexican border is not a good solution to illegal immigration.
Building the wall would be an incredibly hard task. Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell says the 1,200 mile wall (700 miles already have some kind of physical barrier) will cost up to 15 billion dollars and that U.S. taxpayers will most likely have to pay for it. Trump would also have to temporarily employ thousands of American workers, who would work for minimum wage at the very least.
Trump’s wall seems like a primitive solution to a complex problem. A wall will not stop the illegal immigrants that Trump does not want entering the country. It might deter a few, but they could just create a tunnel underneath the wall and evade border patrol. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly half of all the unauthorized migrants living in the United States entered the country legally through a port of entry such as an airport or a border crossing point where they would be inspected by immigration officials. Also according to the Pew Hispanic Center, as much as 45 percent  of the total unauthorized migrant population entered the country with visas that allowed them to stay in the U.S. for a certain amount of time and overstayed their visas.
Studies have also shown that numbers of unauthorized immigrants have gone down in the last few years. There were 5.8 million Mexican unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2014, lower than the 6.4 million in 2009. While the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico decreased, the number of illegal immigrants from other nations grew by 325,000 since 2009.
Given this amount of information, it seems that building a massive wall along the United States/Mexico border is not in the best interest of the U.S. Instead of building a 15 billion dollar wall to keep out illegal immigrants, President Trump should invest the money he would spend on the wall and invest it in the public school system, or raising teacher pay. There are a lot of ways the U.S. government could spend 15 billion dollars to benefit the U.S. citizens, and a wall along the Mexican border is not one of them.