Trump won in the rust belt, but the most powerful voters are in New Hampshire.

Dicussions of the Electoral College have lately been all over the news and social media, even more so than in a normal election year, in the wake of Donald Trump's lopsided victory. Though the election of Trump has been the rallying cry behind hundreds of thinkpieces and desperate petitions, there are far more oddities to the system than the possibility of winning a majority in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, which has now happened four times in our history. Even in a "normal" election without an electoral split, the need for candidates to compete for electoral votes rather than an outright majority leads them to focus their time, money and attention on swing states, and modify their messaging and policy proposals to appeal to voters in those states. The process is also designed to give smaller states a mathematical advantage. The result is an election where some voters have far greater power than others, based on geography, to select the President.

None of this is news, but it is difficult to discuss the real extent of this power imbalance when we see it as an abstraction. Four years ago, I attempted to quantify these effects using a formula I developed, which I called the Vote Value Index. Today, I'm taking a look at the 2016 election using the same formula. I'll get into the mechanics of the formula later, but the upshot is that we're creating a list of values which we can use to compare states to each other, and easily find out how much power a state's voters have to influence the election, compared to voters in other states.

The Vote Value Index takes two factors into account that affects a voter's influence: the small-state advantage (which allows less populated states to punch above their weight in the Electoral College, and handicaps larger states), and the margin of victory (because a vote is more influential in a "swing state" with a small margin). It is important to note that we are not looking for the probability that a single voter will cast the "magic vote" that will tip the election. We are simply measuring how much power each voter has to move the needle in either direction. It's also important to note that the Vote Value Index is dynamic, and will change from one election to the next, based on the closeness of each contest as well as changes in population.

The states are listed below in order of their voters' individual power. The Vote Value Index is shown using the state with the least powerful voters (in this year's case, California) as a baseline. California's VVI is set to 1.00. All other states' VVI represents a multiple of the value of a California vote. In other words, a state with a VVI of 10.0 means that a voter in that state has ten times more influence than a voter in California. The Percent Value vs. Popular Vote is a comparison of a voter's influence under the current system to the same voter's influence if we simply used the nationwide popular vote to select the President. This is determined by dividing the state's VVI by the average VVI of all states. (Note: this data is based on unofficial returns, and may not include provisional ballots that are still being counted. The information is accurate as of November 14.)

Ranking	State	Vote Value Index	Percent value vs. popular vote	Rank in 2012	2012 value vs. popular vote
1	NH	247.39	1,826.95%	2	310.59%
2	MI	105.83	781.54%	30	55.85%
3	WI	36.62	270.43%	21	92.40%
4	ME	33.07	244.22%	18	107.38%
5	MN	26.17	193.26%	19	96.77%
6	NV	24.63	181.89%	6	189.95%
7	PA	24.43	180.41%	20	94.63%
8	FL	20.29	149.84%	1	598.73%
9	AK	14.14	104.42%	3	275.09%
10	RI	10.53	77.76%	17	109.68%
11	DE	10.23	75.55%	13	123.16%
12	NM	8.81	65.06%	12	133.48%
13	VT	8.65	63.88%	16	114.38%
14	AZ	8.58	63.36%	23	78.36%
15	CO	7.72	57.01%	14	122.76%
16	NC	6.96	51.40%	4	252.23%
17	WY	6.37	47.04%	10	137.20%
18	GA	6.26	46.23%	22	81.58%
19	VA	5.62	41.50%	9	143.85%
20	SD	4.73	34.93%	8	148.16%
21	ND	4.65	34.34%	7	179.60%
22	IA	4.50	33.23%	11	134.54%
23	MT	4.24	31.31%	15	122.64%
24	CT	3.40	25.11%	34	46.30%
25	NE	3.24	23.93%	25	72.37%
26	TX	3.23	23.85%	38	39.24%
27	OR	3.16	23.34%	29	57.01%
28	OH	3.10	22.89%	5	250.88%
29	UT	3.05	22.52%	49	24.96%
30	HI	2.94	21.71%	37	43.14%
31	SC	2.60	19.20%	26	71.41%
32	NJ	2.59	19.13%	41	37.21%
33	MS	2.55	18.83%	24	73.93%
34	KS	2.51	18.54%	36	44.09%
35	DC	2.43	17.95%	31	53.10%
36	ID	2.34	17.28%	33	46.57%
37	WA	1.99	14.70%	35	45.44%
38	IL	1.94	14.33%	42	33.25%
39	KY	1.90	14.03%	44	29.73%
40	WV	1.81	13.37%	32	49.50%
41	AR	1.81	13.37%	40	37.73%
42	LA	1.76	13.00%	39	37.94%
43	IN	1.68	12.41%	28	60.08%
44	MO	1.61	11.89%	27	60.53%
45	MD	1.42	10.49%	47	25.48%
46	AL	1.40	10.34%	43	32.66%
47	NY	1.32	9.75%	51	19.84%
48	TN	1.20	8.86%	45	29.71%
49	MA	1.12	8.27%	48	25.46%
50	OK	1.08	7.98%	50	22.04%
51	CA	1.00	7.38%	46	27.41%

Before the election, a friend of mine from high school learned that his absentee ballot had been lost in the mail. It was too close to election day to sort it out and get a replacement ballot, so he bought a last-minute plane ticket back to New Hampshire so that he could vote in person. It now seems that his beyond-the-call-of-duty trip home was quite meaningful, even if his candidate didn't win the Presidency. The state of New Hampshire had the highest VVI in the nation this year, and its voters had 247 times more influence over the election than voters in California.

Comparing the 2016 VVI with 2012 presents a bit of a challenge. I did not include the 2012 VVI in the above chart (though you can view them here), because directly comparing the VVI from two different elections is not very useful due to the changing baseline. However, looking at the top VVI for each year can show us how a very close election can widen the power imbalance. In 2012, the top VVI was Florida's 30.18 (compared to New York's 1.00, which was the 2012 baseline). This means that in 2012, the most powerful voter in the country had about 30 times more influence than the least powerful voter; in 2016, the most powerful had 247 times more than the least. This extreme imbalance comes mostly from how close the 2016 election was. In 2012, Florida was the only state with a margin of victory smaller than 1%, and only four states had margins smaller than 5%. In 2016, there were three states with margins under 1%, and a whopping eleven states were within 5%. This gave swing-state voters much greater power to influence the Electoral College, because it would have taken fewer voters to flip their state.

We can also compare the elections by the difference in a vote's value under the current system vs. a popular vote system. A percentage of more than 100% means that a state's voters have an advantage, gaining more influence through the Electoral College than they would have without it. States with less than 100% have diminished vote values due to the EC system. In 2012, there were 18 states with comparitive values over 100%; these states' voters punched above their weight, and everyone else was hamstrung. This year, only nine states held this advantage. And as this additional power narrowed into a smaller number of states this year, the magnitude of the disparity increased. The most advantaged voters in 2012 had about six times the power that they would have had under a national popular vote, while the most disadvantaged had about 20%, one-fifth, of what they would have in a popular-vote contest. This difference is nothing compared to 2016. This year, New Hampshire's voters had more than 18 times as much power as they would without the EC, while Californians had a miniscule 7% of their power under the alternative system.

I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of the VVI formula now, so those who aren't interested in the math can feel free to skip to the end. On the other hand, if you'd like to follow along or see how your own state's VVI was calculated, you can view the full data set as a Google spreadsheet. The formula itself has three parts, shown here:

These represent an Electoral College modifier (ECM), a Margin Index (MI), and a constant (n) which sets the baseline. The first part, ECM, reflects a state's advantage or disadvantage based on their voting-eligible population (VEP) and the number of electoral votes. This represents the "small-state advantage."

The voting-eligible population includes all of the state's residents who are U.S. citizens, at least 18 years old, and not disenfranchised due to a felony conviction or other reason. I used the 2016 estimates of VEP from the United States Elections Project. I use VEP, rather than total population or registered voters, because this is the true total number of people who could potentially cast a ballot. Ineligible residents, even though they affect the allocation of electoral votes, cannot affect the election outcome; and there is no effective difference between an eligible but unregistered person and a registered voter who doesn't show up to cast a ballot.

On average, there are 421,917 eligible voters for each electoral vote in the U.S., but because of the way the EVs are allocated, some states have more or less voters for each electoral vote. Wyoming has a population of 431,011 and three electoral votes, meaning there are only 143,670 Wyomingites per EV, giving them a far greater than average influence on the Electoral College. The formula assigns them an ECM of 8.81. Any state with an ECM higher than their number of electoral votes is a beneficiary of the small-state advantage.

Using my own home state, North Carolina, as an example, we find an ECM of 12.973, smaller than our 15 electoral votes. This electoral handicap befits our status as the 9th most populous state in the Union.

The next part of the formula is the Margin Index. This gives a boost to voters in states with close elections, particularly "swing states."

The Margin Index multiplies the VEP times the margin and then inverts it. The denominator represents the number of votes that it would take for the minority candidate to achieve a majority. The numerator of 1 represents the individual voter.

Naturally, this results in a very small number; we are measuring the influence of one voter to change the majority in an election with a large number of other voters. The MI may seem small in absolute terms, but it will be orders of magnitude higher in a close election than in a state with a runaway winner. In a moment, we'll shift these numbers into a range that we can more easily work with.

Revisiting North Carolina, we find that the MI looks like this:

The final part of the formula is a constant. The purpose of this constant is simply to apply a baseline for comparing the states. As I mentioned earlier, we want to set the state with the least powerful voters to have a VVI of 1.00. By multiplying the ECM and MI that we have so far, we find that California's presidential votes were the least influential in 2016. We get our constant by inverting California's preliminary numbers.

Finally, we multiply the ECM, MI, and the constant for all of the states to get the final VVI.

North Carolina's VVI is just under 7, which tells me that my vote is seven times more influential there than if I lived in California. My state dropped sharply in the rankings this year, from #4 to #16, mostly due to the change in margin; we were one of the closest states in 2012, but our margin nearly doubled in 2016. The change in value against a popular vote system was drastic, too. The Electoral College advantaged North Carolinians in 2012, making our vote roughly 2.5 times more powerful. In 2016, the EC instead handicapped us by about half.

Clearly, I am in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, regardless of where my own state stands in the rankings from year to year. You won't see me signing any petitions to try and convince 37 faithless electors to change this year's results, though. We knew the rules of this election when we started it, and for better or for worse, Donald Trump will be our next President. This doesn't mean that we need to maintain this antiquated system forever, though, and I strongly support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which could be enacted through state legislatures without amending the Constitution.

Of course, there are a number of arguments that are often made in favor of the Electoral College system. I find most of these arguments, however, to be weak.

One argument is that the Electoral College gives rural states a voice that they wouldn't have under a popular vote, which would benefit large cities. The problem with this argument is that cities are going to have an advantage no matter what system we use. Candidates will never have much incentive to hold a campaign event in Spivey's Corner, NC (pop. 448), even in a swing state, because their resources are finite and there aren't many votes to be had there. However, they do have an incentive to focus on swing-state cities like Cleveland, Raleigh and Orlando, and largely ignore safe-state cities like Dallas, Boston and Salt Lake City. Even moderately-sized cities in swing states, such as Wilmington, NC, get plenty of attention from candidates. Under a popular vote, candidates would be just as likely to visit Billings, MT, which is roughly the same size as Wilmington and would allow more rural voters to have their voices heard. Of course, the campaign is one thing and the election is another; but under a popular vote, the rural voter in Montana would have more than three times the influence that they had in 2016, and would not be taking a back seat to voters in New Hampshire and other states.

Some also argue that the Electoral College places a check on the "tyranny of the majority" and could prevent a dictator from taking office. I find this argument to be preposterous. The people who are chosen to be electors in the modern era are mostly insiders and loyalists, chosen by state parties to reward them for their service to the party. Occasionally one or two might change their vote, but these "faithless electors" have never influenced the outcome of an election. Furthermore, many states have laws that could penalize or even invalidate a faithless elector's vote. A majority of electors would only risk their positions and the nation's outrage if it was very clear that a "tyrant" was looming. The electors aren't clairvoyant; they can only judge a candidate on their statements and record, the same as the rest of us. It would be audacious and premature to predict that Donald Trump will become a literal tyrant, but if the things he's said on the campaign trail aren't enough to sway the electors, what would be?

Finally, there is the idea that the Electoral College is what the founders intended, so who are we to mess with it? Naturally, I have a great deal of respect for the founders of this nation. They were visionaries who created a modern democratic system, unheard of in their time, and defended it from the greatest powers of their contemporary world. They built a Constitution that has endured for 240 years, and served as a model for democracies throughout the world. They started a wave in which democracy and freedom are now the global norm, rather than the exception. But we in America have a tendency to treat the founders as almost Biblical figures. Even great men have flaws, and so do their works. The founders were, after all, politicians. They squabbled just as much as today's politicians; they were just better at looking at the bigger picture and finding a compromise. They were just as good at kicking cans down the road, too. Some of the founders opposed slavery, and saw no place for it in a society founded on the idea that all men are created equal. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough like-minded colleagues, and they needed the southern states to buy in to keep the newborn nation from falling apart. Of course, by delaying the issue, the nation nearly fell apart anyway, four score and seven years later.

We've learned a lot in 240 years, and we value different things. In many ways, the founders prioritized the concerns of the states over the concerns of the people living in them. In the first election, only one state, Virginia, even held a popular ballot for President. The rest of the electors were chosen by state legislatures, leaving the people out of the process entirely. We didn't hold a popular vote in every state until after the Civil War.

The founders knew that they wouldn't get everything right on the first go. In fact, they called a mulligan on the original Articles of Confederation only eight years after it was ratified, and started over with a Constitution that would work better. We've made many changes since then to improve the way the nation operates. All of this follows my favorite line of the Constitution, from the Preamble: "to form a more perfect Union." Not a perfect Union; true perfection is impossible, and we can't know the needs of future Americans any more than the founders could have known ours. But a more perfect Union, one that forever strives to improve itself, never satisfied to stay ossified when there is a better way.

Unpopular Opinion: Why Congressional Term Limits are a Bad Idea

On October 22, Presidential candidate Donald Trump announced a new set of policy proposals that he hoped to accomplish in his first 100 days if elected. One of the proposals was to push a Constitutional amendment that would enact term limits for members of Congress. This idea, unlike many of Trump's controversial proposals, is one with a history of broad support among voters on both sides of the political divide. It appeals to people who feel, justifiably, that Congress is not working, and that career politicians are focused more on preserving their jobs than solving the problems facing the country. However, there are better ways to address this problem than imposing term limits; and furthermore, term-limiting members of Congress could do more harm than good.

It is easy to be cynical about Congress, especially when the last few sessions have been the least productive in history, and Congressional approval ratings are at all-time lows. However, I believe that most people who run for office do so, at least initially, out of a genuine desire to serve the public and make the nation a better place. It is true that many elected officials end up cycling out of politics and into lucrative positions in business, finance, and lobbying; however, this is not often their goal when they first decide to run. Anyone who has the skill set needed to serve in Congress can undoubtedly find a shorter and less painful path to making that kind of money. After all, serving in Congress is utterly thankless; it requires relocation or constant travel from home; the pay is not that great compared to others requiring similar skills; there's no job security; and you can expect your name to be dragged through the mud on television during each election.

In spite of this, people run for office because they feel strongly about the issues they represent, and wish to advocate for their constituents. However, no matter how idealistic they may be when they are sworn in on Day One, they find themselves on Day Two already running for reelection, and end up spending half of their time fundraising instead of working on the business of state. In order to maintain their position, eke out some influence and political space to push their agenda, and get assigned to a committee where they can sponsor some legislation, they need the support of their party's senior leadership; and that means, among other things, more fundraising - for your colleagues as well as for yourself. The more you hope to accomplish, the more time you spend on the phone with donors and bundlers, as well as lobbyists who want some consideration in return.

This is often an argument used in favor of term limits, but that won't solve the problem. If you were to limit members of the House of Representatives to, say, three terms, you would still have around two-thirds of the members running for reelection every two years. The senior members, in their third term and ineligible for reelection, would likely still spend a lot of their time campaigning for their chosen successors, as well as their party's junior members, and often for a new office for themselves elsewhere.

Trump did not mention how many terms he thinks is the proper limit, nor have most term-limit advocates, prefering to leave that decision to be negotiated in bill-drafting. The last proposal to gain traction in Congress, put forth by Rep. Bill McCollum in 1995, would limit Representatives to six terms and Senators to two terms - essentially, limiting both houses to 12 years in total. This bill did not get much support among the strongest term-limit advocates, mostly because the 12-year limit was seen as too long to make much of a difference. Most members of Congress do not serve for that long anyway; in 2015, the average length of service was 8.8 years for Representatives and 9.7 years for Senators.

What if we went whole-hog and limited members to a single term? This would solve the reelection conundrum, as no member of Congress would be eligible to run again. However, this would have a severe impact on the running of Congress. With the entire House of Representatives filled with 435 incoming freshman, there would be zero continuity of government, no momentum on issues not resolved in the previous session, and each incoming Congress would have to reinvent the wheel in terms of how they conduct business. The seniority system would be busted at last; but as imperfect as that system is, at least it is a system. Without it, each session would spend precious months determining who the leadership would be and how committees would be assigned. (Some people may even advocate for the abolition of committees, giving each member equal power to push legislation on any subject. As egalitarian as that sounds, it would result in utter chaos, given the amount of business that needs to be covered in the complex modern era.)

Most importantly, though, it would mean that 435 complete strangers would be put into a room and asked to work together to solve the most important and difficult problems in the country. Politics is a profession that is based on personal relationships. Nobody can go it alone; in order to get a bill passed, you have to negotiate and compromise, and come up with something that can get the support of more than half of Congress. That can only come by forming professional relationships with fellow members, both within your own party and across the aisle, knowing where they stand, what they want and need, and how you can convince them to support your position. It also takes the expertise of people who spend years researching and advocating for the issues they care about.

A single-term limit, of course, is an extreme case, and beyond what any serious person is advocating for. As I described earlier, however, nothing less will solve the problem that we're trying to address. If we want to get members of Congress off of the phones and back to work, our best option is to get serious about campaign finance reform, and change the lobbying rules.

Another important problem with term limits is that it can harm accountability. Voters, ideally, judge their legislators on their record, and ultimately, the voters will decide whether they deserve to be reelected. A long-serving member of Congress does not get to that point without broad support within their own district. Frequent elections are how we ensure that our Representatives are truly representing their constituents. A term-limited member, however, has no accountability to those who voted them into power, because they will never face those voters again. On the other hand, voters may be denied the right to keep a popular Representative, who has done good work for them and advocated well for the issues they care about, due to term limits.

Of course, if accountability were that easy, the approval rating of Congress would be higher than 18%. Voting out an unproductive or intransigent member, unfortunately, is more difficult than it ought to be. There has always been an incumbency advantage, but that advantage is made much stronger due to gerrymandering. By drawing district lines to favor one party over the other, and packing most of the opposing party's voters into the smallest possible number of districts, all of a state's districts are made uncompetitive. The practice is rampant, used by both parties, and has become all the more egregious in recent years. As a result, the voter advocacy organization FairVote has estimated that only 27 of the nation's 435 House seats are truly competitive this year.

Source: FairVote

Not only does this protect incumbents from being ousted, it also encourages members of Congress to be more extreme and less willing to compromise. With the general election largely a formality in many districts, an incumbent's party primary is the only real contest they will face. Thus, their party's base of primary voters is the only constituency they will be accountable to. This makes members unwilling to compromise on important issues and more likely to focus on partisan fringe issues, lest they be replaced by someone else who will. They become deaf to the concerns of their district's citizenry as a whole.

Term limits won't solve these issues, either. A party-line representative who is barred from reelection can just be replaced by another. The only way to make Congress truly accountable is to reform our redistricting process. By shifting the authority to draw district lines away from state legislatures, and into independent, bipartisan commissions, legislators would no longer be able to choose their own voters when it should be the other way around. In an ideal world, we would adopt FairVote's Fair Representation Act, forming independently-drawn, multi-member competitive districts, with Representatives selected by ranked choice voting.

Congressional term limits are simply another populist-minded, sound-bite-oriented proposal that sounds good on the surface. In practice, it doesn't address the problem it's meant to solve, and distracts from the true reforms that we need.

The Lazy Coup: A Modest Proposal for the Obstructionist Endgame

Dear Senate Republicans:

You are no doubt being flooded with messages urging you to "do your job" and grant a hearing and vote to Judge Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination. I am not going to do that. As far as I can tell, your reading of the Constitution is correct. There is nothing in the "advice and consent" clause that mandates the Senate to provide that consent, or even consider it.

Of course, there is very little that the Constitution does mandate from the Senate; it enumerates powers, but does not generally say that these powers must be exercised. There is a smattering of "the Senate shall" clauses, which imply that these are mandatory. Even in these cases, however, full attendance is not required, so these mandates cannot be said to apply to any individual Senator. Furthermore, no deadlines are stated for any of these duties.

Indeed, the Senate could decide not to undertake any business at all, for the entirety of its session. This may appeal to some limited-government voters as the ultimate ideal. And if any seemingly necessary business was neglected, the Constitution does not outline any method to force the Senate's hand. The power to remove or censure a Senator rests entirely with the Senate itself.

This logic leads us to a solution to another problem you are facing. It appears that your party will soon be caught between a rock and a hard place in this year's Presidential election, with voters choosing between a Republican nominee that the GOP leadership wants nothing to do with, and a Democratic nominee that it has been trying to vilify for nearly a quarter century.

It doesn't have to be this way. The Constitution tasks the Senate with opening, tallying and certifying the electoral votes that are sent by the states. It does not, however, specifically state that this must be done before Inauguration Day. You could simply put the sealed certificates in a file drawer and sit on them for a couple of months. Come January 20th, there will officially be nobody to swear in.

Then, you simply declare a vacancy, clearing the way for Speaker Ryan to take the oath. Piece of cake.

So what if the word "coup" starts flying around in the liberal media?

What does it take to "secure the border?" Ask East Germany.

Immigration policy in the United States is like the weather: everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. For years, Democrats and Republicans alike have floated proposals for fixing our broken system; in a few cases, they've even attempted compromise proposals that could, in a sensible democracy, be accepted begrudgingly by both sides. Of course, these proposals have all gone nowhere. Many of those who have stood in the way of progress on this issue have said that certain border-security conditions must be met before real reform could be tackled. These conditions range from the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants to a steeply increased presence of border control in order to stop the incoming traffic. Yet no one who has declared that the border must be secured before reforming our immigration system has actually described what a secured border ought to look like. Perhaps we must cut illegal immigration to half its current level, or perhaps even a quarter (never mind that this has already happened). Maybe even a single illegal border crossing is unacceptable.

The most colorful precondition of the obstructionists is that a wall should be constructed on our border with Mexico. This wall (paid for by the Mexican government, no less, according to some) would be an impassible barrier that would put a definitive stop to any attempts to enter the United States without authorization.

Pictured here is probably the most secure border in history: the Berlin Wall. This wall, 96 miles long, surrounded the city of West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The twelve-foot wall was constructed of reinforced concrete and barbed wire, and was further secured by trenches, floodlights, anti-vehicle caltrops, attack dogs, and over 300 watchtowers. Parts of the wall were built in parallel, separated by an empty hundred-meter zone known as the "death strip," where guards had a clear field of fire and would-be escapees had no opportunity for cover. The border was patrolled by ten regiments of troops.

Despite all of this security, concentrated in a relatively small area, about 5,000 people managed to escape to West Berlin over the years that the wall was in place.

In contrast, the border between the United States and Mexico is 1,954 miles long, more than twenty times the length of the West Berlin perimiter. What would it take to secure this border at an equivalent level to the Berlin Wall?

We could begin by estimating the construction cost. According to the Milwaukee Journal in 1963, the cost of building the Berlin Wall was estimated as US$25,000,000, which works out to $193.5 million in 2016 dollars. This was in one of the earlier phases of the wall; several stages of upgrades followed before it reached its peak of physical security, at additional expense. But let's assume that we built the U.S.-Mexico border wall to 1963 standards, and had a similar construction cost per mile. This would cost over $3.9 billion. Good luck sending that bill to the Mexican government.

The initial cost to build the wall, however, pales in comparison to the cost of patrolling it. To maintain troop levels equal to the East German patrols, ten regiments strong over 96 miles, I estimate that around 300,000 personnel would be required, or almost one-quarter of the active-duty U.S. Army. This troop level is equivalent to 75 modern-day Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, at a total maintenance cost of nearly $20.8 billion annually (mostly personnel costs), based on numbers from the Department of Defense's 2013 Unit Cost and Readiness report to the U.S. Congress.

Of course, none of this speaks to the moral cost of emulating the emigration policies of Cold War-era East Germany. And yet, in spite of all of our effort, an unguessable amount of people would still find a way to cross the border.

Certainly we should enforce our laws, to the extent of our reasonable ability. But perhaps we'd get better results by addressing the reasons why so many people attempt to enter the United States, even if unable to obtain legal authorization. Certainly many come to escape rampant poverty and seek economic opportunity; yet many of those who decry illegal immigration also favor isolationist trade policies, blocking changes that could improve both our own economy and those of our neighbors. Others wish to avoid the violence of drug cartels and gangs, which are propped up by a failed war on drugs. Still more are refugees from political turmoil, particularly those who pass through Mexico on their way from other nations in Central and South America, some of whose governments we have had dubious relationships with.

But never mind all of that, right? Those are all complex problems with difficult solutions, requiring nuanced policy proposals and cooperation with other countries. Much easier to just yell stuff about walls. While we're at it, we may as well build one on our border with Canada, too. We've already cleared the land for the death strips.