House approves 5 billion for Trump’s wall

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i really hope you never honestly believed that.

It's still not gonna happen because the bill has to pass the Senate with a filibuster proof majority. The wall will be completely ineffective, this is just one giant waste of money for symbolism's sake. As I said it's not a huge issue for me, mainly because the politicians waste a good amount of our money already so this is just the status quo really, but issue is that it won't actually solve the problem, and I'm skeptical it'll even dent the numbers. As long as there is an incentive to be here (job/benefits) they'll find a way around the wall.

I read that someone had set up a GoFundMe account to pay for the border wall. So far, $12 million has been raised.

Too complex to calculate really. There have been literally 100's of reports on the issue and there's no consensus because it's such a complex issue. Virtually any information you find will be partisan in nature, so I'll drop the wikipedia article that gives an overview of the popular ones. Economic impact of illegal immigration in the United States

Edit: part of what makes it hard to calculate where other large/complex issues are not (think healthcare) is the undocumented nature of it-- there's a lot of uncertainty because most of the numbers used as the basis for the calculations are estimates.

Example: we're not sure exactly how much money is earned by illegal immigrants in their jobs, we estimate there are between 10.5 and 12.5 million illegal immigrants currently, we don't know what they're getting paid because they don't have to file taxes (obviously, being undocumented), so we estimate it's slightly lower than minimum wage. That's a lot of uncertainty. Compare that for average personal expenditure on healthcare-- we've got a fairly good idea there were 3.5 trillion dollars spent last year due to tax documentation, and from social security audits and the census we're fairly certain there are 325 million citizens here thus average healthcare expenditure is a little over 10k per person. The underlying variables on illegal immigration are not so certain, which makes virtually every estimate unreliable.

I see what you mean about partisan. I did look at the wiki article. It seems proponents for illegal immigration posit that the sales tax illegal immigrants pay buying products while they're in the U.S. more than offsets any costs involved in providing them housing, healthcare, food assistance and education and other public services. Unless I'm understanding it incorrectly part of the wiki made it seem like taxpayers actually financially benefit from every person who enters the U.S. illegally and resides here.

I bet these people don't want me in their country either. I should start a bogus crowd funding campaign to wall in my house.

No, I was being sarcastic. We all knew pre election that Mexico would not pay for a wall, and that a wall my well not even be built.

As I recall trump had some sort of business plan to extract wall money from Mexico in a round about way over a period of time. Rather than it being Mexico writing a check in full that said 'for the wall' before construction began.

As I recall trump had some sort of business plan to extract wall money from Mexico in a round about way over a period of time. Rather than it being Mexico writing a check in full that said 'for the wall' before construction began.

Plan? No, he was just feeding you BS to placate you so no one would question the cost. Anybody with half a brain knew it would be the U.S. tax payer funding the wall.