Last week president Trump signed a bill which reopened the government temporarily without any funding for the border wall, the issue that started the shutdown back in December.
The government shutdown, which lasted for 35 days, was the longest in U.S. history during which hundreds of thousands of federal employees, roughly 40 percent of the federal workforce, were furloughed and forced to work without pay.
No matter which political party you identify with, everyone should agree that making federal employees work without pay is not only wrong but inhumane.
Many of the furloughed employees that were affected by the shutdown are living paycheck to paycheck and have to rely on friends, family and the community to make it through the shutdown.
The shutdown began Dec. 22 after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to give President Trump his requested $5.2 billion in funding for a border wall to be incorporated into the next federal budget.
The problem here is the message it sends to the international community and Mexican-American citizens.
Another issue that comes along with the construction of a border wall is how productive it will be once constructed.
Instead of building walls to protect our borders, most of our border protection funding goes to construct new technology to detect drugs and weapons at legal points of entry.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, 90 percent of heroin seized along the border, 88 percent of cocaine, 87 percent of methamphetamine and 80 percent of fentanyl in the first 11 months of the 2018 fiscal year was caught trying to be smuggled in at legal points of entry.
Building an ineffective border wall to reduce the amount of drugs and crime coming into the nation from Mexico would send messages of nationalism and separatism to our neighboring allies.
On top of everything else, Trump’s campaign promise was to make Mexico pay for the wall, not the American people.
Why didn’t Trump propose to pass funding for the border wall in the past two years when the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate?
The answer is simple: he knew it would never pass. So to maintain support among his base, he waited until Democrats took over the House to propose funding for the border-wall for his political advantage.
The United States was founded by immigrants and has always been a melting pot of cultures, accepting migrants and refugees from all across the world to offer them a better opportunity than they had in their home country.
Unless you’re the direct descendant of a Native American tribe, you had a distant or maybe not-so-distant relative that was an immigrant to this country.
Although immigration from Mexico is commonly perceived in a negative manner, why should we keep these people from the same opportunities our ancestors came here for?
Shouldn’t we be honored that groups of people from several different countries idolize and want to become a member of our society?
