A Debate about the Not-So-Great Wall

In an earlier post on immigration policy, I called into question the efficacy (or perhaps even sanity) of an effort by Tom Narum to raise private funds in order to build a massive wall along our border with Mexico.  The blog-o-sphere being the remarkable vehicle that it is for circulating information, Mr. Narum himself found and read the post and proceeded to leave several very lengthy comments in his role as executive director of his wall funding project -- Citizens for a Secure Border. Each comment, for reasons that I think will be apparent upon reading them, warranted a reply by me.   

The result I have been told by some of our readers is an entertaining debate which touches on many of the critical issues around immigration policy and reform.   Because of the extent of the comments I am not going to reprint them here in this post, but I thought it worthwhile to call your attention to them and by going to the permalink for the earlier post you can read the entire exchange.

A few useful links to information referred to in the comments but which do not have functioning links in the comments themselves are as follows:

Comments which I think are illustrative of the mindset of at least some of Mr. Narum's supporters as published on his organization's website;

The Cato Institute article profiling the positions of former Colorado governor Dick Lamm whom Mr. Narum quotes at length as providing reasoned support for his own world view (if for some reason this link takes you to the Cato Institute's search page instead of to the article itself, type the title of the article "The World According to Dick Lamm" into the "Find results with all the words" box and the search will take you to the article).;

Rankings of countries by GDP (courtesy of Wikipedia) and rankings by GDP per capita (courtesy of World Facts and Figures).

As you will see by the end of the exchange of ideas, Mr. Narum has done nothing to convince me that his idea makes sense and has said much to heighten my concern about where our country and world is headed if this is the state of fear and loathing we're in.  But that's my opinion -- I encourage you to read the debate and let us know your conclusions.