What's to stop Jose from buying a piece of land on the mexican border and putting up a big "ENTER HERE" sign?
Any HOA with gated entrance is going to have rules about that. You can't remove a section of the outer wall, you can't remove the gate, you can't change the gate-code, you may not loan your code to someone else, you may not tailgate others, you may not allow others to tailgate you, certain types of visitors may have to follow a sign-in procedure, and so on, and so forth.
I'm against open borders but I'm not sure we need a wall to close the border.
Sure, it may be possible to have a wall-less border (that is also secure). But the deeper issue is that if you want to achieve Goal X, you have to choose a tool from among the set of available tools that can actually
accomplish Goal X. If Goal X is to dig a powerline ditch but you choose Tool A which is a children's sandbox scoop, have fun trying to dig a ditch with that. You need to choose an appropriate tool, such as a proper steel shovel, or a Ditch-Witch, or whatever.
The government is the wrong tool for
almost everything that modern man wants to use it for. He says, "I will now dig a ditch (or seal the border)" and he proceeds to grab the plastic toy sand-shovel of the government. He does so with great ceremony and pomp, as though he were a priest performing some ancient liturgy. But no matter how deeply he believes in his heart that this plastic toy shovel will help him dig a 5-foot deep, mile-long trench, it will not help him at all. He would do just as well scratching at the dirt with his bare paws. If you want to dig a ditch, use a proper shovel. If you want to seal a border, have proper security. If your political apparatus makes it impossible to have public security agencies do the job, then contract it out. If the contractors are corruptible, then privatize the whole system. The root problem in almost all public policy failures is
tragedy of the commons... no one individual has any vested interest in the outcome, so the outcome is never achieved. Privatization is not magic pixie-dust. What makes it work is what economists call
internalization of costs and benefits. When I fix up my house, I am the beneficiary in two ways. First, I get to live in a nicer house, because I just fixed it up. And when I sell it, it will get a better price (because I fixed it up). So, almost all the benefits of fixing my house up go to me. For this reason, nobody needs to pass a law saying, "People need to fix up their houses. There need to be at least 10,000 remodels per year." Nobody needs to do that because the incentives are already aligned -- everyone who can benefit from fixing up their house has already done so, because it was the most beneficial thing they could do with their spare money. Therefore, everyone who
doesn't fix up their house must have had some other, more pressing thing to spend their money on.
When you collectivize resources (e.g. parks, roads, borders, etc.) you break internality. You make
both the costs and benefits of maintaining that resource into an externality. Since nobody in particular benefits, nobody in particular has an interest in seeing to it that that resource is maintained. And so you get blight. The US southern border is exactly such a blight. The Democrats are the main beneficiary of that particular blight, which is why the Republicans bitch and moan about it so much. But there are plenty of other blights that the Republicans benefit from (e.g. the MIC), and you will never hear them complain about those. And it is precisely because of this root hypocrisy (the desire to "keep the good thing going") that the Republicans will never take a principled stand on the border. They will not enforce it, neither will they allow local polities to enforce it in their place. They don't actually want change, they just want you to think they want change, so they make a big show of complaining about it. And nothing ever changes.
This is a MUST-WATCH video, it's just 2 minutes. Everyone go watch it!
