How Not to Build a ‘Great, Great Wall’

Trump's promise of an insurmountable barrier between the U.S. and Mexico is an exercise in proven futility, writes Greg Grandin in this guided tour of fortification efforts over several decades. 

By Greg GrandinTomDispatch

The point was less to actually build "the wall" than to constantly announce the building of the wall. "We started building our wall. I'm so proud of it," Donald Trump tweeted. "What a thing of beauty." In fact, no wall, or certainly not the "big, fat, beautiful" one promised by Trump, is being built. True, miles of some kind of barrier —barbed wire, chain-link and steel-slat fencing, corrugated panels, and, yes, even lengths of what can only be described as concrete wall— have gone up along the U.S.-Mexico border, starting at least as far back as the administration of President William Taft, early in the last century. Trump has claimed repairs and expansions of these barriers as proof that he is fulfilling his signature campaign promise. Plaques have already been bolted onto upgrades in existing fencing, crediting him with work started and funded by previous administrations.

And yet Trump's phantasmagorical wall, whether it ever materializes or not, has become a central artifact in American politics. Think of his promise of a more than 1,000-mile-long, 30-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the southern border of the United States as America's new myth. It is a monument to the final closing of the frontier, a symbol of a nation that used to believe it had escaped history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to believe they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.

From Open to Closed Borders

Prior to World War I, the border—established in the late 1840s and early 1850s after the U.S. military invaded Mexico and took a significant part of that country's territory — was relatively unpoliced. As historian Mae Ngai has pointed out, before World War I the United States "had virtually open borders" in every sense of the term. The only exception: laws that explicitly excluded Chinese migrants. "You didn't need a passport," says Ngai. "You didn't need a visa. There was no such thing as a green card. If you showed up at Ellis Island, walked without a limp, had money in your pocket, and passed a very simple [IQ] test in your own language, you were admitted."

A similar openness existed at the border with Mexico. "There is no line to indicate the international boundary," reported Motor Age, a magazine devoted to promoting automobile tourism, in 1909. The only indication that you had crossed into a new country, heading south, was the way a well-graded road turned into a "rambling cross-country trail, full of chuck-holes and dust."

Memorial coffins on  U.S.-Mexico barrier for those killed crossing the border fence in Tijuana, México. (Tomas Castelazo, Wikimedia)

The next year, the State Department made plans to roll "great coils of barbed wire… in a straight line over the plain" across the open borderland range where Texans and Mexicans ran their cattle. The hope was to build "the finest barbed-wire boundary line in the history of the world." Not, though, to keep out people, as the border wasn't yet an obstacle for the Mexican migrant workers who traveled back and forth, daily or seasonally, to work in homes, factories, and fields in the United States. That barbed-wire barrier was meant to quarantine tick-infested longhorn cattle. Both Washington and Mexico City hoped that such a fence would help contain "Texas Fever," a parasitic disease decimating herds of cattle on both sides of the border and leading to a rapid rise in the cost of beef.

As far as I can tell, the first use of the word "wall" to describe an effort to close off the border came with the tumultuous Mexican Revolution. "American troops," announced the Department of War in March 1911 during Taft's presidency, "have been sent to form a solid military wall along the Rio Grande." Yes, Donald Trump was not the first to deploy the U.S. Army to the border. Twenty thousand soldiers, a large percentage of that military at the time, along with thousands of state militia volunteers, were dispatched to stop the movement of arms and men not out of, but into Mexico, in an effort to cut off supplies to revolutionary forces. Such a "wall" would "prove an object lesson to the world," claimed the Department of War. The point: to reassure European investors in Mexico that the U.S. had the situation south of the border under control. "The revolution in the republic to the south must end" was the lesson that the soldiers were disp atched to teach.

The revolution, however, raged on and borderland oil companies like Texaco began building their own private border walls to protect their holdings. Then, in April 1917, the month the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on immigration generally, including literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota restrictions. From that point on, the border sharpened — literally, as lengths of barbed wire were stretched ever further on either side of port-of-entry customs houses.

Border Crossing at San Isidro. (Josh Denmark/Flickr)

What follows is a chronology of both the physical fortification of the U.S.-Mexico boundary and the psychic investment in such a fortification— the fantasy, chased by both Democrats and Republicans for more than half a century, that with enough funds, technology, cement, steel, razor ribbon, barbed wire, and personnel, the border could be sealed. This timeline illustrates how some of the most outward-looking presidents, men who insisted that the prosperity of the nation was inseparable from the prosperity of the world, also presided over the erection of a deadly run of border barriers, be they called fences or walls, that would come to separate the United States from Mexico.

A Chronology

1945: The first significant physical barrier, a chain-link fence about five miles long and 10 feet high, went up along the Mexican border near Calexico, California. Its posts and wire mesh were recycled from California's Crystal City Internment Camp, which had been used during World War II to hold Japanese-Americans.

1968: Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" famously played to the resentments of white southern Democrats who opposed civil rights. As it turned out, though, the president had another southern strategy in mind as well, a "border strategy." As historian Patrick Timmons has written, running for president in 1968, Nixon promised to get tough on illegal drugs from Mexico —the "marijuana problem," he called it. Shortly after winning the White House, he launched "Operation Intercept," a brief but prophetic military-style, highly theatrical crackdown along the border. That operation created three weeks of chaos, described by National Security Archive analyst Kate Doyle as an "unprecedented slow-down of all plane, truck, car and foot traffic— legitimate or not — flowing from Mexico into the southern United States." That it would be run by two right-wing figures, G. Gordon Liddy and Joe Arpaio, should be a reminder of the continuities between the N ixon era and the kind of demagoguery that now rules the country. Arpaio would become the racist sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who gratuitously imposed humiliating, brutal and often deadly conditions on his overwhelmingly Latino prisoners. He would also become an early supporter of Donald Trump and would receive the first pardon of Trump's presidency after a judge found him in criminal contempt in a racial-profiling case. Liddy, of course, went on to run Nixon's "Plumbers," the burglars who infamously broke into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, precipitating the president's downfall. In his 1996 memoir, Liddy said Operation Intercept primarily wasn't about stopping the flow of pot. Instead, its "true purpose" was "an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will" — to force that country to be more cooperative on a range of policies.

1973-1977: The United States had just lost a war in Vietnam largely because it proved impossible to control a border dividing the two parts of that country. In fact, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, desperate to keep North Vietnamese forces from infiltrating South Vietnam, had spent more than $500 million on 200,000 spools of barbed wire and 5 million fence posts, intending to build a "barrier" — dubbed the "McNamara Line" — running from the South China Sea to Laos. That line failed dismally. The first bulldozed six-mile strip quickly became overgrown with jungle, while its wooden watch towers were, the New York Times reported, "promptly burned down." It was as that war ended that, for the first time, rightwing activists began to call for a "wall" to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biologist Garrett Hardin, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was typical. In "Population and Immigration: Compassion or Responsibility?," an essay in the Ecologist, he wrote: "We might build a wall, literally." Hardin was an early exponent of what today is called "race realism," which holds that, in a world of limited resources and declining white birth rates, borders must be "hardened."

During these years, southern border conflicts were especially acute in California, where Ronald Reagan was then governor. As San Diego's sprawl began to push against agricultural fields where migrant workers from Mexico toiled, racist attacks on them increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickup trucks. Dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves.

Such anti-migrant violence was fueled, in part, by angry Vietnam veterans who began to carry out what they called "beaner raids" to break up migrant camps. Snipers also took aim at Mexicans crossing the border. Led by the 27-year-old David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan set up a "border watch" in 1977 at the San Ysidro point of entry and received significant support from local Border Patrol agents. Other KKK groups soon set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets stamped with skulls and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents. Around this time, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area that border vigilantes began calling "Little 'Nam," U.S. border agents reported finding pitfall traps modeled on the punji traps the Vietnamese had set for American soldiers.

1979: President Jimmy Carter's administration offered a plan to build a fence along heavily trafficked stretches of the border, but scuttled the idea as the 1980 presidential election approached.

1980-1984: "You don't build a 9-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations," Ronald Reagan said on a presidential campaign swing through Texas in September 1980. By taking a swipe at the Carter administration's plans, he was making a play for that state's Latino vote, 87 percent of which had gone to Carter four years earlier. "You document the undocumented workers and let them come in here with a visa," Reagan said, and let them stay "for whatever length of time they want to stay."

Gov. Reagan 1969. (Wikimedia Commons)

Then, four years later, President Reagan shifted gears. "Our borders are out of control," he insisted in October 1984. As he ran for reelection, his administration started pushing the idea that the border could indeed be "sealed" and that the deployment of "high tech" equipment — infrared scopes, spotter planes, night-vision goggles — might provide just such effective control. "New stuff," claimed a Border Patrol official, though some of the ground sensors being set out along that border were leftovers from Vietnam. In his second term, Reagan did get an immigration reform bill passed that helped more than 2 million undocumented residents obtain citizenship. But his administration, looking to appease a growing caucus of nativists in the Republican Party, also launched Operation Jobs, sending federal agents into workplaces to round up and deport undocumented workers. In 1984, the Border Patrol saw the largest staff increase in its 60-year history.< /p>

1989: In March 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, the new administration of President George H. W. Bush proposed building a 14-foot-wide, 5-foot-deep border trench south of San Diego. Some likened it to a "moat," since it would be filled with run-off rainwater. "The only thing they haven't tried is mining the area," quipped Robert Martinez, the director of San Diego's American Friends Service Committee. Opponents called it an "inverted Berlin Wall," while the White House claimed that the trench would solve both drainage and immigration problems. The idea was shelved.

1992: Richard Nixon's former speechwriter Patrick Buchanan provided an unexpectedly strong challenge to a sitting president for the Republican nomination, calling, among other things, for a wall or a ditch —  a "Buchanan trench," as he put it — along the U.S.-Mexico border and for the Constitution to be amended so that migrant children born in the country couldn't claim citizenship. Bush won the nomination, but Buchanan managed to insert a pledge in the Republican platform to build a "structure" on the border. It proved an embarrassment at a moment when there was an emerging post-Cold War consensus among Republican and Democratic Party leaders that a free trade agreement with Mexico had to be encouraged and the border left open, at least for corporations and capital. Bush's campaign tried to fudge the issue by claiming that a "structure" didn't necessarily mean a wall, but Buchanan's people promptly shot back. "They don't put lighthouses on the border," his sister and spokesperson Bay Buchanan said.

1993: Having passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in Congress, President Bill Clinton immediately started to militarize the border, once again significantly increasing the budget and staff of the Border Patrol and supplying it with ever more technologically advanced equipment: infrared night scopes, thermal-imaging devices, motion detectors, in-ground sensors, and software that allowed biometric scanning of all apprehended migrants. Stadium lights went up, shining into Tijuana. Hundreds of miles of what the Clinton White House refused to call a "wall" went up as well. "We call it a fence," said one government official. "'Wall' has kind of a negative connotation."

The objective was to close off relatively safe urban border crossings and force migrants to use more treacherous places in their attempts to reach the United States, either the creosote flatlands of south Texas or the gulches and plateaus of the Arizona desert. Trips that used to take days now took weeks on arid sands and under a scorching sun. Clinton's Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner, Doris Meissner, claimed "geography" as an "ally" — meaning that desert torments would work wonders as a deterrent.

The Clinton White House was so eager to put up a set of barriers that it barely paid attention to the actual borderline, at one point mistakenly running a section of the structure into Mexico, prompting a protest from that country's government.

Another stretch, spanning 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean, would be built using Vietnam-era steel helicopter landing pads stood on end. Their edges were so sharp that migrants trying to climb over them often severed their fingers. As one observer noted, the use of the pads raised "the chilling possibility" that the U.S. might be able to "wall off the country" with leftover war matériel.

"Build that wall!" (Wikipedia)

2006: The Secure Fence Act, passed by President George W. Bush's administration with considerable Democratic support, appropriated billions of dollars to pay for drones, a "virtual wall," aerostat blimps, radar, helicopters, watchtowers, surveillance balloons, razor ribbon, landfill to block canyons, border berms, adjustable barriers to compensate for shifting dunes, and a lab (located at Texas A&M and run in partnership with Boeing) to test fence prototypes. The number of border agents doubled yet again and the length of border fencing quadrupled. Operation Streamline detained, prosecuted, and tried migrants en masse and then expedited their deportation (mostly using an immigration reform law Clinton had signed in 1996). Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (created after 9/11) seized children off school buses and tracked undocumented residents deep into liberal states, including in the exclusive Hamptons on New York's Long Island a nd in New Bedford, Massachusetts. All told, in his eight years in office, Bush deported 2 million people, at a rate roughly matched by his successor, Barack Obama.

2013: The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill in June 2013 that — in exchange for the promise of a one-time amnesty and a long-shot chance at citizenship for some of the millions of undocumented residents in the country — offered more billions of dollars for policing, fencing, and deportations. According to the New York Times, with a winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan (however brief it would prove to be), defense contractors like Lockheed Martin were betting on a "military-style buildup at the border zone," hoping to supply even more helicopters, heat-seeking cameras, radiation detectors, virtual fences, watchtowers, ships, Predator drones, and military-grade radar. The bill failed in the House, killed by nativists. But the Democratic Party would continue to fund "tough-as-nails" (in the phrase of New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer) border security programs that amounted to years of up-armoring the border in what was then referred to as a "border surge."

No one really knows how many people have died trying to get into the United States since Washington began to make the border tough as nails. Most die of dehydration, hyperthermia, or hypothermia. Others drown in the Rio Grande. Since about 1998, the Border Patrol has reported nearly 7,000 deaths, with groups like the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos estimating that the remains of at least 6,000 immigrants have been recovered. These numbers are, however, undoubtedly just a fraction of the actual toll.

June 16, 2015: Donald J. Trump descends an escalator in Trump Tower to the tune of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" to announce his presidential campaign and denounce "Mexican rapists."

"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border," he tells Americans. "And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."

Show Me a 50-Foot Wall…

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," poet Robert Frost once wrote.

Borders, not to mention walls, represent domination and exploitation. But they also symbolize the absurdity of political leaders taking the world as it is and trying to make it as they think it ought to be. However much people might curse border fortifications, they also enjoy subverting them -— even if the subversion only lasts a moment, as when citizens of Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, play an annual volleyball game over the border fence; or when an artist decides to paint "the world's longest mural" on border fencing; or when families come together to gossip, tell jokes, and pass tamales and sweets between the posts; or when couples get married through the spaces separating the slats. As long as the United States keeps coming up with new ways to fortify the border, people will keep coming up with new ways to beat the border, including tunnels, ramps, catapults and homemade cannons (to launch bales of marijuana to the other side), and GoFundMe  campaigns to pay for ladders.

As Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona and former director of Homeland Security, once said, "Show me a 50-foot wall, and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder."

Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University. His newest book, "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America" (Metropolitan Books), will be published in March. He is the author of "Fordlandia," shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, "The Empire of Necessity," which won the Bancroft Prize in American history, and "Kissinger's Shadow." 

Trump declaring national emergency to build wall could complicate matters for Republicans

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill - including key allies of President Donald Trump - are reportedly cautioning him against declaring a national emergency to build his desired border wall and could move to block him if he does so.

Interested in Donald Trump? Add Donald Trump as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Donald Trump news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

Trump warned on Sunday that if Democrats and Republicans can't strike a deal to fund the government by Feb. 15 with the inclusion of funds for his prized border wall, he could go it alone by declaring a national emergency.

"I don't take anything off the table," Trump said in an interview on CBS' Face the Nation that aired on Sunday.

Declaring a national emergency would give the president the power to redirect funds towards building a wall along the Mexican border.

In all likelihood, Trump would be immediately challenged in court if he declared a national emergency where his plans would end up languishing in legal proceedings.

The declaration could also force Republicans in both chambers to publicly split with the president.

A rare resolution of disapproval

Under the provisions of the National Emergencies Act, a presidential declaration can be terminated if lawmakers pass a joint resolution to do so.

According to the Washington Post members of Trump's own party are reportedly cautioning him that Congress may be forced to act should Trump declare a national emergency.

"I'm for whatever works, which means avoiding a shutdown and avoiding the president feeling he should declare a national emergency," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters during a press conference last Tuesday.

On that same day, McConnell in a face-to-face meeting reportedly warned Trump about the consequences of declaring a national emergency in a private meeting at the White House, according to the Washington Post. The consequences could include Congress passing a resolution disapproving the emergency declaration which would force Trump to consider issuing his first veto ever.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell leaves the chamber after speaking about his plan in the standoff between Trump and Democrats that has led to a partial government shutdown at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 22, 2019.

A McConnell spokesman declined to discuss the senator's private conversations with ABC News.

But the joint resolution is also being discussed over on the House side, which Democrats control.

"The President has failed to convince the American people and Congress that there is a crisis on our Southern border. The House of Representatives will vigorously challenge any declaration that seeks an end run around Congress's power of the purse," a Democratic House leadership aide told ABC News in a statement on Monday.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi holds a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, Jan. 31, 2019.

"A resolution of disapproval is likely should the President goes down this path, but no decisions have been made nor can be made until we see what the President does and how he does it," the aide said.

The president has previously reiterated his confidence in the administration's legal standing for declaring a national emergency, should he decide to declare one.

"We're in a very strong legal standing – we are doing it regardless. We haven't declared the national emergency yet and yet we're building a lot of wall," Trump told reporters last week.

But some GOP senators warn that if could set a new precedent for future Democratic presidents.

"We have a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with [an emergency declaration] for different reasons, some of which are constitutional and separation of powers," Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last week. "We prefer that not be the direction that the administration chooses to go. But the Democrats have to be willing to play ball here if we're going to get a deal."

Trump Mulls Emergency Declaration to Build Border Wall

By VOA News February 01, 2019

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that he would consider declaration of a national emergency as the path forward to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border because he didn't think lawmakers' negotiations would produce the necessary funds.

"We will be looking at a national emergency because I don't think anything is going to happen. I think Democrats don't want border security. And when I hear them talking about the fact that walls are immoral, walls don't work – they know they work," Trump said.

On Thursday, the president called bipartisan congressional talks over border wall funding a "waste of time."

'I've set the table'

In a White House interview with The New York Times on Thursday, Trump again hinted he might declare a national emergency in order to bypass Congress and build the wall without its approval.

"I'll continue to build the wall and we'll get the wall finished. Now, whether or not I declare a national emergency, that you'll see ... I've set the table, I've set the stage for doing what I'm going to do."

If within two weeks lawmakers can't reach a deal on border security that Trump would sign, there could be another government shutdown.

If Trump does declare a national emergency, Democrats who don't want any money for a border wall will probably immediately challenge Trump in court.

The president had strong words for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has repeatedly said she will not agree to give Trump the $5.7 billion he wants for a wall.

"I think Nancy Pelosi is hurting our country very badly by doing what she's doing," Trump said, adding that while he has always gotten along with her, "I don't think I will anymore."

Pelosi has said she is open to other kinds of barriers along the border, but Trump said alternatives were unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it was sending an additional 3,500 troops to the U.S. southern border with Mexico to assist with security measures.

Rep. Adam Smith, the Washington state Democrat who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, released the latest troop numbers after slamming the Pentagon's lack of transparency in a letter to acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

A defense official confirmed that the Pentagon was sending 3,500 additional active-duty troops to the border, for a total of 5,800 active-duty troops and 2,300 National Guard troops supporting the Department of Homeland Security's request for additional border security.

The official, who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity, added that this "initial pop" in the number of troops would not be sustained through September.

How they'll be used

Some of these 3,500 will be replacing troops who will be leaving soon, while others are being assigned to the border for only 30 or 60 days in order to set up large coils of barbed wire in specific areas, according to the official.

Without giving details, Trump tweeted Thursday: "More troops being sent to the Southern Border to stop the attempted Invasion of Illegals, through large caravans, into our Country. We have stopped the previous Caravans, and we will stop these also. With a Wall it would be soooo much easier and less expensive."

Trump, as he often has, claimed erroneously that "Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go." The U.S. has been repairing existing barriers, which Trump called "a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!"

At various times, Trump has called the barriers at the border an impenetrable concrete wall, and other times "steel slats," or a see-through barrier.

On Thursday, though, Trump said, "Let's just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!"

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Maybe We Should Build A Wall To Keep Immigrants In

It wouldn't be much of a stretch to rewrite the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty to read: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to . . . become entrepreneurs."

Hamdi Ulukaya, a billionaire and founder, president and chief executive officer of Chobani Inc.. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergBLOOMBERG NEWS

In the midst of overheated debates about immigration and an ugly upsurge in nativism, it's worth reminding ourselves that entrepreneurial immigrants make an outsized contribution to new business creation. And new and young companies are the primary source of job creation in the American economy.

The contributions of entrepreneurial immigrants have been well documented:

Immigrants are twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.

As of 2016, first generation immigrant entrepreneurs represented 30% of all new entrepreneurs in 2016, up substantially from 13% in 1996.

Forty-three percent of founders of the 2017 Fortune 500 are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Immigrants constitute 15% of the general U.S. workforce, but they account for around a quarter of U.S. entrepreneurs (defined as the top three initial earners in a new business) and account for a about a quarter of U.S. inventors.

Immigrants account for more than 90% of the growth in self-employment since 2000, with particularly significant contributions since the Great Recession.

Firms founded by immigrants close at a faster rate than firms founded by natives, but those that survive grow at a faster rate in terms of employment, payroll, and establishments, a phenomenon called "up or out," which is how young firms create more jobs.

Half of America's startup companies valued at $1 billion or more (as of January 1, 2016) were started by immigrants.

Despite those contributions, our inadequate HB-1 visa system coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric and attempts to further limit legal immigration are driving many foreign students to return home when they've completed their education, driven away many other skilled immigrants who have tired of the interminable and uncertain wait for a green card and discouraged talented people abroad to seek more hospitable countries like Canada.

But the real flashpoint in the immigration debate has been around Latin American immigrants, fueled by baseless claims of an "invasion" on our southern border. (From the end of the Great Recession, more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico from the U.S. than migrated here, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study.) Meanwhile, Hispanics have made significant contributions to the entrepreneurial economy:

The five areas with the highest startup activity in the 2017 Kauffman Startup Activity Index were, in order, the metropolitan areas centered on the cities of Miami, Austin, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas—all cities with heavy concentrations of Latinos.

Among minority ethnic and racial groups, Latinos have the highest rate of new entrepreneurs.

The Latino share of all new entrepreneurs rose from 10% in 1996 to 24% in 2016.

Far from the hothouse of Silicon Valley and its venture capital-backed startups, the vast majority of Latino entrepreneurs, like 99% of all entrepreneurs, are what I call bedrock entrepreneurs. Typically, they start modest businesses (sometimes with themselves as the only employee), largely fund those businesses out of their own pockets and the pockets of their family and friends. They start small; they try to minimize losses and avoid failure, and methodically grow their businesses over the long haul.

Although there are no definitive studies, many observers ascribe higher rates of entrepreneurship among immigrants to personal characteristics like a willingness to take risks (as they did when they moved to an unfamiliar country), a strong sense of identity and intrinsic motivation. Many Latino immigrants, facing discrimination and lacking good English skills, have little choice but to be entrepreneurial. As a result, they are likely to perceive opportunities that other people miss, possess an ability to persist through the myriad difficulties of entrepreneurship and draw on deep reserves of motivation to succeed.

In addition, as politicians debate the ultimate fate of people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, they might want to remember this: Immigrants that came to the U.S. as children are more likely to start larger firms than immigrants who arrived as adults and have lower closure rates. Moreover, a 2017 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress found that among the DREAMers under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) some 5% of respondents started their own business after receiving DACA. Among respondents 25 years and older, that figure rises to 8%. Meanwhile, among the American public as a whole the rate of starting a business is only about 3.1%. According to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which represents the interests of more than 4.37 million Hispanic-owned businesses, if both the DREAMers and recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) were forced to leave the United States, the U.S. economy would experience a $597 billion reduction in gross domestic product (GDP) over the next decade.

With entrepreneurship in long-term decline, we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. Thirtyyears ago, about 800,000 new companies in the US were being formed per year, and in some years there have been as many as 13 million people aspiring to start their own businesses. Today only about 600,000 businesses are being formed per year and the number of aspiring entrepreneurs has dropped to about 10 million. Immigrants, with their strong propensity for new business creation, can help reverse that decline, create jobs, help lift our economy and contribute to the general well-being of the country—but not if we drive them away.

If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my latest book: Building On Bedrock.

How to make a design statement with the ‘fifth wall’: Your ceiling

By Kristina Orrego

January 31

What does the Sistine Chapel have in common with a house for a family of eight in Lutherville, Md.? The ceilings in these spaces demand that you look up.

"Statement ceiling" is a term designers use to describe a ceiling that's been given extra attention, sometimes even making it a focal point of a room. And Elizabeth Reich of Jenkins Baer Associates, an interior design company in Baltimore, said that "statement" can be anything a person wants it to be.

"The ceiling is a huge part of the overall impact on how you're going to feel in the space," she said. "There's a lot of different ways you can make it stand out and give the space a lot more character."

Reich recently posted an Instagram photo of an ornate ceiling at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In the picture, a wooden staircase winds around a light-blue stained-glass statement ceiling.

[Are ceiling fans the kiss of death for design? Not necessarily.]

"That was just a gorgeous feeling in the stairwell," she said. "Historically, when they built these, they paid a lot of attention to those kinds of architectural details, and they had these amazing craftsmen who turned your plain ceiling into a masterpiece."

Although what Reich saw in the museum isn't realistic to replicate in the average home, she believes ceilings in any kind of room — livings rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, powder rooms — can be enhanced.

So what's the best way to maximize a ceiling's potential? Reich and other designers shared their favorites.

Wallpaper

Quintece Hill-Mattauszek, an Alexandria, Va., designer, said a lot of people forget about their vertical real estate. She's a self-proclaimed "pattern fanatic" and is unafraid of using vibrant, bold patterns to liven up a ceiling.

"A lot of times when you're in a bedroom, you're on your back" when you wake up, Hill-Mattauszek said. "So, it's really nice to see something really cool."

Reich says interesting wallpaper is particularly smart for powder rooms because their small size means not much is needed to make a big impact.

"You can also do a contrast wallpaper on the ceiling to add texture or graphic interest," she wrote in an email. "It's always fun to do something unexpected in a powder room."

For wallpaper on a bedroom ceiling, she said she's used grass cloth for a calming effect.

"I tend to like the ceilings in bedrooms to be beautiful and serene, since this is your place to relax and unwind," she wrote. "I prefer texture to graphics in a bedroom."

Molding

Coffered ceilings can provide a timeless look, and beams or planks can add character that will complement many different styles. One of Reich's favorite projects was a Lutherville home that she says exemplifies the way changing the ceiling can transform a space.

"We decided to eliminate the sky lights that were in the original ceiling because the room gets a ton of natural light, and they weren't symmetrical to the room," Reich wrote. "We took out the high peak and added a flat section to the ceiling, which made the room feel more intimate," and added planks, crossbeams and arches."

Kelly Walker, a Baltimore artist, faux-painted the entire ceiling in a weathered teak finish, which allowed some of the natural knots to show through.

Paint

Andrea Houck, an interior designer based in Arlington, Va., loves statement ceilings — especially in dining rooms, powder rooms and master bedrooms — and is working on a silver ceiling in McLean.

She recently dedicated a blog post to the design element, calling the ceiling a "fifth wall." She described ceilings she'd painted in verdant green and soft blue, and highlighted some of her favorite rooms by other designers, including a bathroom by designer Amanda Nisbet with white walls and a lavender ceiling.

Without the unexpected ceiling color, she said, Nisbet's white bathroom "would be a little bit predictable and mundane." And the finishes — high-gloss on the walls and matte on the ceiling — provide contrast.

Alternately, a high-gloss ceiling could formalize a space, Reich said. Any colors can be used to create lacquer, or high-gloss, finish, but dark colors, such as blue, work particularly well, she said.

"I think a ceiling is another piece that people just can't forget about," Houck said. "It's so important. You can just tweak the color ever so slightly and totally change the feeling in the room."

Can Trump Declare Emergency to Build His Wall? It's Complicated

The Trump administration is weighing using a national emergency declaration to circumvent Congress and the budget stalemate and force construction of the president's long-promised southern border wall.

"We're looking at a national emergency because we have a national emergency," President Donald Trump told reporters Sunday amid stalled negotiations. He said during a press conference Friday that he would prefer to win the money he's demanding via Congress, but could "absolutely" call an emergency "and build it very quickly."

Vice President Mike Pence told NBC News in an interview that aired Tuesday that Trump hasn't yet determined if he would declare the emergency

Such a move would be a dramatic escalation of the current showdown, which has forced a partial government shutdown that's now in its third week. Here's what we know:

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WHY AN EMERGENCY DECLARATION?The administration has spent months trying to figure out how the president might be able to move forward with the wall — the central promise of his 2016 campaign — if Congress refuses to give him the money.

As early as last March, Trump was publicly floating the idea of using the military for the task. "Building a great Border Wall, with drugs (poison) and enemy combatants pouring into our Country, is all about National Defense. Build WALL through M!" he tweeted then.

But it's Congress — not the president — that controls the country's purse strings and must appropriate money he wants to spend.

Enter the emergency declaration, an option the White House counsel's office is currently reviewing. Among the laws Trump could turn to is Section 2808 of the Title 10 U.S. Code pertaining to military construction.

According to the statute, if the president declares an emergency "that requires use of the armed forces," the defense secretary "may undertake military construction projects, and may authorize the Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects, not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces."

Pentagon budget officials are analyzing the 2019 construction budget to determine how many unobligated dollars would be available to use for the wall if Trump settles on a declaration. Under the provision, only those construction budget funds that are not already obligated to other construction projects could be used for the wall.

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There are more than 100 such provisions giving the president access to special powers in emergencies. And Congress has typically afforded the president broad authority to determine what constitutes an emergency and what does not, said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

"Absolutely it's an abuse of power for the president to declare a national emergency when none exists and to use it to try to get around the democratic process," she said. "But we are in a situation where our legal system for emergency powers almost invites that kind of abuse."

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN THEN?Such a move is sure to spark a flood of legal challenges questioning the president's authority as well as whether the situation at the border really constitutes an emergency. Trump has been trying to press that case in recent days, insisting the situation qualifies as a security and humanitarian "crisis."

He'll also run into other questions.

"The problem for the Trump administration is that border security is fundamentally a law enforcement issue that does not require the use of the military," said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, via email. "So I think they would be on shaking legal ground trying to use emergency authorities this way, and it is almost certain that they would end up in court."

Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it would be inappropriate for Trump to use Section 2808.

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"We are not at war with Mexico, and the proposed border wall has no core (Defense Department) function. Indeed, the Pentagon's most recent National Defense Strategy doesn't mention the southern border as a national defense priority," said Reed, D-R.I.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, speaking on CNN, said that even if Trump could declare an emergency, it would be a "huge mistake."

"There clearly is no national emergency. But they asked me, 'Can he do it?' Yeah he can. It would be wrong, it would be horrible policy and I'm totally and completely against it. But from a legal standpoint he can do it," said Smith, D-Wash.

He and others agreed that any declaration would surely be challenged in court.

SO WILL HE DO IT?It's unclear. Back when Trump dispatched active-duty troops to the southern border ahead of the midterm elections in what critics panned as a politically-motivated abuse of power, he described the situation as a "national emergency," but never signed an official proclamation.

But Trump is now under growing pressure to find a way to end the shutdown without appearing as though he's caved on the wall.

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Trump "needs to use every tool available to him as the commander-in-chief of our armed services to go and enforce our laws by putting the military on our southern border, by having them build the wall if they need to," his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski urged on Fox News.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president remains "prepared to do what it takes to protect our borders, to protect the people of this country."

"We're looking and exploring every option available that the president has," she said.

Associated Press National Security Writer Robert Burns contributed to this report.

Copyright Associated Press / NBC Bay Area

Trump's Threat to Declare a National Emergency to Build the Wall: What Does History Say?

"I have an absolute right to declare a national emergency, the lawyers have so advised me. I'm not prepared to do that yet, but if I have to I will. I have no doubt about it, I will," said President Trump to a gaggle of reporters on Thursday morning. But Trump's possible move to build a border wall is arousing controversy not only on the left, but also the right. The Wall Street Journal editorial page warned on Friday that "appellate courts might establish new constraints on executive power that circumscribe a president's response to future crises." Members of the House Freedom Caucus are concerned that an emergency declaration might set a sweeping precedent for a future Democratic president to bypass Congress on issues of national importance.

How far-reaching would a move to invoke emergency powers be? What are the historical precursors for Trump's possible action?

Presidents have used emergency powers multiple times in the past century to bypass explicit congressional law. In March 1933 during the nadir of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a state of emergency to enact broad, sweeping economic reforms. "I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe," Roosevelt said during his inaugural address. Roosevelt declared a banking holiday, thereby ending the rush on banks. He went on to sign Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for U.S. citizens to hold gold bullion and requiring everyone to forfeit such assets to the Federal Reserve. This executive order remained in effect until Congressional action was taken in 1974.

In 1950, President Harry Truman involved the United States in the Korean War, declaring it a national emergency. Korea was the first of the modern wars to be fought without a congressional declaration, with the president referring to it as a "police action." By 1976, both national emergencies were still in existence, along with two others invoked under Richard Nixon in 1970 and 1971.

In September 1976, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act to restrain and guide presidential prerogative. The act required that presidents keep records of all significant orders made during a national emergency; that they track expenditures arising from these orders, instead of being never-ending they must be renewed annually; and most importantly, that any national emergency declared by a president could be ended by a concurrent resolution by Congress. A concurrent resolution is an action taken by Congress that bypasses the presidential veto, and only requires a simple majority of both chambers. The practice of the concurrent resolution was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1983 under INS v. Chadha, removing the enforcement mechanism from the National Emergencies Act.

Between the act's 1976 passage and now, fifty-eight national emergencies have been declared by presidents. Most of these are minor, a way to impose sanctions on foreigners and freeze overseas assets. Others were major extensions of presidential authority. George W. Bush declared separate states of emergency in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on September 14 and September 23, 2001. And that November, Bush invoked 10 U.S.C. 2808 under his emergency authority.

That part of the U.S. code, when invoked under a national emergency, "authorizes the Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law" to "undertake military construction projects…not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces." This is the law Trump would cite to authorize construction of a border wall.

The situation is complicated, however, since immigration is handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Defense Department.

Many legal experts are arguing that the president does have the authority to build the wall under a national emergency. This viewpoint does not accord with a view of limited governmental powers. "It's fair to say our culture, not only the legal culture…although it's counter-constitutional, they believe the president has limitless power. He can go to war when he wants to, he can spy on us when he wants to, he can spend money when he wants to.

There's no limit on his authority," says former Reagan administration Justice Department official Bruce Fein. According to Fein, "If the concurrent resolutions are unconstitutional, then it's quite clear that Congress would never have enacted these emergency powers if it didn't believe it reserved the right through concurrent resolution to end them," he says. "The Supreme Court has held that you cannot delegate legislative power without some kind of restrictive principles that guide its exercise. And if the president can do whatever he wants, there's no restraint on the exercise of his power."

While some Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham are encouraging Trump to declare the emergency and move with full force, others are encouraging restraint. Senator Chuck Grassley called it "a bad precedent." Presidential counselors Jared Kushner and Kellyanne Conway are apparently advising alternatives to the emergency declaration.

If Trump does go forward, it would almost certainly be challenged in the courts. "I don't think there's any case that has ever been decided, certainly not in the U.S. Supreme Court, that has endorsed the idea that the president on his own has emergency powers," said Fein.

Beyond that, the situation changes from a legal challenge to a political one. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has quieted down talk of impeachment among her colleagues recently, but if Trump were to impose his most iconic policy objective through legally weak procedure, the Democrats could take action.

Whatever actions Donald Trump adopts, and how the opposition party responds, could have permanent repercussions affecting not just this presidency, but American law and executive authority itself.

Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at The National Interest.

Image: Reuters.