Most of the border separating the United States and Mexico is the Rio Grande. The river accounts for 1260 of the 1954 miles of the international border.
If you want to build a wall at the Rio Grande you have three options: 1) Build it on our side, 2) Build it on Mexico’s side, or 3) Build it in the river. Putting it in the river is impractical for lots of reasons involving expense and science. That leaves us two options, our side or the Mexican side.
Clearly, we can’t put it on the Mexican side because, well, it’s in Mexico. As unlikely as it is that the Mexicans will buy us a wall they don’t want, they are even less likely to let us build our big, beautiful wall on their side of the river in their sovereign nation.
So that leaves one and only one option. If we want a wall on the longest stretch of our southern border, we have to build a wall on our side giving 100% of the river to Mexico. That seems like a damn shame given how hard we worked to gin up the Mexican-American War to take all of our southwest states from Mexico and negotiate to share the Rio Grande. The scenery and the water all gone because of one man’s moronic campaign jackassery. You own land on the Rio Grande? Too bad! The U.S. government will take a chunk of your land and put a wall on it.
Not to pile on, but there’s also the small matter of the Boundary Treaty of 1970 between U.S. and Mexico that prohibits the building of any structures that could exacerbate the regular and worsening flooding of the Rio Grande. Even the least intrusive types of barriers Trump has gone on about have been found to act as dams thereby increasing the potential of flooding. So, in the end, there is both international law and safety issues that make a wall anywhere, including on our side, problematic.
It should be noted that much of the remaining border west of the Rio Grande in Arizona and California already has some type of pedestrian and/or vehicle barrier. Much of what remains to be barricaded is, in fact, the Rio Grande portion.
So, Trumpies, do you really want to shut down our government in order to build, at great expense to our taxpayers, a wall that gives the Rio Grande to Mexico?