Welcome to Gaia! ::

Of course we like keeping money for ourselves. Who doesn't? Nothing inherently wrong with that...I get what you're saying about slave labor, but I'm not advocating that. One of the reasons Mexicans ARE exploited is agri-business owners know they're easily replaceable due to the flood of people trying to get away from the cartel violence in Mexico. If the cartels were weakened and the violence got better, we would have to (and SHOULD) offer competitive wages and incentives for guest worker visas, or competitive wages to get Americans to fill in the gap. Maybe we should just require all high school students to do these jobs for say, 10 hours a week instead of PE? At least then people would appreciate how hard these jobs are.

Hawaii is an Island, and the Canadian border is more or less covered.

The Cartels will smuggle stuff in to Mexico, but they won't be able to make enough money, which will severely stunt them. It will hopefully allow the Mexican military and the like to be able to pursue the cartels in their weakened state, allowing them to fight them off. Mexico makes far less money than the U.S., so it would severely cut in to their profits if they could only sell things to the poor people in those general areas.

A force field would be boss as hell, but unfortunately it would consume large volumes of energy. cry

A plasma window is thought to consume around 20 kilowatts per inch (8 kW/cm), which the average house consumes about 30 kilowatts per day, so for a whole border wall... it doesn't look practical. Not to mention the more practical versions seem fairly lethal (say, a bunch of floating magnetic balls that spin around quickly or what have you), likely to tear you up or electrocute you, so it would be a little bit less effective. A static wall seems like a better idea.

Human trafficking is also an important thing to keep in mind, along with natural resources and other things.


But essentially, I have no problem with the decriminalization of drugs, and particularly putting the focus on rehabilitation rather than imprisonment, unless the person is particularly bad, perhaps caught selling it, trying to sell it etc. Mandatory rehabilitation might be a thing for those who are the most extreme, and I don't think corporations and the like should be selling it in large volumes. There's already enough addictive poison on the market as is. xp

On the subject of things other than concrete, a ditch seems pretty nice, considering that cars and the like would just fall in to it and can't really move over them, and one filled with say, salt water would be cool, since people stuck in the bottom of the ditch would be forced to drown or come on land and surrender, meaning they couldn't just hide in a ditch 24/7. Falling in it would ruin a car engine, stop large vehicles, make a person's clothes and equipment soaking wet, but not outright kill them like a long fall or a spike pit would, and in many ways would be less-lethal AND more effective. Hesco barriers are basically giant metal-wire sandbags that can hold on to dirt and sand, so, you could stack those on each other and have something dozens of feet tall. They're used in military bases all the time!

Well, the problem was that it was illegal to leave the soviet union, and so the border wall was designed to stop, that. A wall designed to help with legal regulation isn't quite the same thing. ninja

Wut

How is restricting movement fascist? People are put in to prison's all around the world, in fascist and non-fascist societies, there's restricted areas, fences, all kinds of things, all other the place. Try going in to the white house, or several places in a police station, hell private property you don't own.

Not to mention, the objective is completely different, one is to stop drug dealers and organized crime, the other is to stop people from fleeing an oppressive government O.o

Rooted in racism, by who? Not all immigrants are Mexican, in fact a sizable number are Asian and the like. I think that's a pretty bold assumption.

Drugs only make up about 37% of the profit of these organizations, and Portugal never legalized drugs, they decriminalized possession under a certain amount. It's illegal to sale or have "more than 10 days" worth of any of the drugs. [1] No businesses or corporations are legally allowed to produce it, which means that organized crime is still responsible for most of the smuggling, and their violent crime rates have actually gone up, slightly. The emphasis they've had is on rehabilitation or community service instead of jail time, which has encouraged people to seek help for their drug addictions rather than hide it in fear of prosecution. Drug crime has gone down since the majority of convictions were small time offenders, and now they don't punish it as often, however other forms of crimes have generally remained unaffected.

But it's not "legal", and you can still be punished for possessing drugs under certain conditions, particularly if you don't adhere to the courts ruling.