And I told you in my response what effective solutions look like, the very things that have brought today's numbers of crossings to lows not seen in years. I also posted multiple threads telling the truth about Kamala Harris' role in bringing about a number of these changes by her work with allies and governments in other countries that have ZERO to do with physically visiting our actual Southern border and building any more hyper-expensive walls that are ineffective and only cause migrants to chose other routes where walls don't exist.

Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration's new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access. - FTA

Early in the administration, Ms. Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fund-raiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.

Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Ms. Harris's work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.

She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.

"Not a huge amount, but it ain't chicken feed and that links to jobs," said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.

That isn't politics, it's policy in effect and working.

Three economists ran the numbers on Trump's border wall. They find it's a bad investment.

The U.S. border with Mexico is about 2,000 miles long, and a third of it (700 miles) has a wall or fence. Economists Treb Allen of Dartmouth College and Cau Dobbin and Melanie Morten of Stanford University modeled what would happen if Trump were able to cover two-thirds of the border (1,300 miles) with some sort of wall.

Their conclusion? It would hurt the U.S. economy because there would be fewer workers and lower output. It would also have a tiny impact on illegal immigration, and U.S. workers wouldn't be better off.

"Our research shows that building a wall was an ineffective way of reducing migration," Allen said after presenting the new research paper this weekend at the American Economic Association conference. "It was expensive to build, and it harmed U.S. workers."

On top of the cost to build the wall, the U.S. economy would lose more than $4 billion a year, the economists calculated, meaning the country would forfeit nearly $30,000 in lost economic output for each Mexican migrant the wall stops.

The Secure Fence Act - which Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Charles E. Schumer voted for - was a large expansion of barriers and checkpoints at the border that cost $2.3 billion (or $7 per person in the United States).

The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which triggered the construction of walls and fences along 548 miles of the border between 2007 and 2010.

The Secure Fence Act resulted in a 0.6 percent decline in migration (about 83,000 fewer Mexican workers), the economists found.

The Obama-Biden Administration Built More than 100 Miles of Border Wall.

In 2006 then-President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which called for the -------- of hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Bush Administration intended to build 700 miles by December of 2008, when his second term would come to an end. By April of 2008 then-Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff had issued waivers that swept aside dozens of federal laws and "all federal, state, or other laws, regulations and legal requirements of, deriving from, or related to the subject of" the named laws for all of the planned border walls.

By the end of President Bush's time in office the U.S.-Mexico border was lined with 278 miles of 15-to-18-foot-tall pedestrian fence and 248 miles of vehicle barrier, for a total of 526 miles. Of those, 135 miles had been built prior to the passage of the Secure Fence Act.

The Obama-Biden Administration would oversee construction of an additional 128 miles of border wall.

There were also numerous locations where pre-existing border walls were replaced under the Obama-Biden administration, including some in El Paso, Texas; near Naco, Arizona; and where the wall between San Diego and Tijuana enters the Pacific Ocean. Sections of border wall that were swept away by flooding at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, near Nogales, Arizona, and through Andrade, California, were rebuilt during those eight years as well.