[Sabertooth]

You want a wall. Sabertooth said he crunched the numbers and he said it would take about $100 billion a year to maintain.

Yeah, and that's just for Mexico. We've also got over 4,000 miles of border with Canada, as well as the coasts.

Walls are idiotic. So are troops on the border.

Tom Ridge is still an idiot, though, and shouldn't be where he is, encouraging Illegals to hurry up and get here in time for an Amnesty.

By the way, did you notice that Ridge used the numbers "8 to 12 million" Illegals? 12 million is a big concession as to the consequences of the bipartisan malfeasance.

[Dane]

Tom Ridge is still an idiot, though, and shouldn't be where he is, encouraging Illegals to hurry up and get here in time for an Amnesty

I don't think he was saying hurry up illeagls. He was talking about the ones who are already here, non-violent and earning normal honorable livings such as working in menial jobs, such as housekeepers, dishwashers, etc. etc.

What do you do with them and from there a solution has to be found and stuck to.

[Poohbah]

I crunched some numbers for how much concrete a BFW (Big Frickin' Wall) would consume, and how much labor and materials would cost.

The baseline numbers I used were from the never-built MX Missile Mobile Protective Shelter (MPS) system from the late 1970s to early 1980s, when we were trying to build a survivable missile system in the Great Basin. The idea was not to do ultradense concrete pours to create missile silos of incredible hardness, but to construct MANY shelters for each missile. The idea was that each missile would operate in a 23-shelter complex and randomly move from shelter to shelter. Total force structure was 200 missiles--requiring 4,600 shelters, plus associated other structures.

Construction in Great Basin had some advantages over the proposed wall--the proposed missiles bases were to be located in relatively flat terrain, for example--but it would share some of the disadvantages (such as an abject lack of available water). The MX MPS project was killed because of these issues, and because of the sheer cost of the effort.

A rather modest-sized wall wound up taking up about three times as much concrete as the proposed MX MPS system. Construction and maintenance costs are roughly proportionate to the amount of concrete poured and the difficulty of getting the concrete to the pour site.

Once you prorate in inflation, the difficulty of performing heavy construction along the 2,000-mile-long border, and scale the project relative to the baseline, 100 gigabucks a year is right about where you land.