Border Debate: Is it a ‘wall’ or ‘border security’?

It was started with a tweet.

On September 5, 2014, the U.S. president delivered a message: “SECURE THE BORDER! BUILD THE WALL!”

The U.S. president definition of “wall” was a moving target since then.

From the first day of this 2015 campaign, he explained the wall ought to be constructed of “precast concrete” with nothing at it, even windows. He says that he meant was steel and also “translucent” materials may work, also, and includes, from time to time, mused about festooning the walls using solar panels. Back in December, he tweeted a picture showing a perplexing representation of a picketed “Steel Slat Barrier.”

Shortly after taking office, the president commissioned eight prototypes of wall designs, wall mounted layouts and the rest. They ranged from 20 to 35 ft in height.

This past year the units were tested, and the results had been inconclusive, based on leaked documents revealing that they all could be breached with the ideal tools and a decided effort. However, his government officials state the testing supplied them with invaluable info, and lessons learned were integrated into an already constructed element of slatted 40-foot-high security fencing around Calexico, California.

So did its price as his picture of this wall shifted. He wants $6.8 billion to its wall but that amount has shrunk between $5 billion and $36 billion over the previous 3 decades. Throughout the shutdown struggle, he suggested he would take an unspecified “down payment”.

Even the White House advisor, lately dismissed as a “silly semantic argument” queries regarding the president’s usage of this phrase “wall”, which can it be brittle, steel, translucent a “smart wall,” slatted, piked, stainless, a chain-link weapon or merely a metaphor?

Even the semantics are anything but insignificant. In the event the White House and House Democrats are to achieve a deal to stop another government shutdown from the deadline, then they have to first achieve a demanding détente on what they’re speaking about specifically, the definition of this president’s “wall” and also of “border protection” that the Democrats’ broad description of the approach.

“There is no magical glossary telling you that the distinction between a wall and fence or an obstruction, they’re kind of synonymous,” stated by the former homeland security secretary from 2014 to 2016.

“There’s a distinction between political and regulatory rhetoric, and folks shouldn’t get trapped into the binary option,” he explained. “The moment once we achieve a compromise to the vocabulary is the time we achieve a compromise about the policy.”