Rep. Steve King (R-IA) appeared Saturday on Eagle Forum Live with Phyllis Schlafly and criticized the Republican National Committee’s endorsement of comprehensive immigration reform. King said that the GOP instead should focus on pushing for a contiguous border fence along the US-Mexico border, saying that “our public policy people” have no excuse since the Chinese built the Great Wall of China.
Later, while speaking to a caller named Meryl who complained that undocumented immigrants have trespassed on her property in Missouri, King said that if the US gives up on the rule of law in favor of “open borders” then we will become like “Third World countries” where the rich will construct fences and walls around their houses and install panic rooms.
Of course I supported the fence and we heard the arguments against the fence, people said, ‘well you can’t build a 2,000 mile long fence,’ as if somehow that would be too much of an engineering marvel. Well we can do the Panama Canal 100 years-plus ago and I’ve been over there to take a look at the Great Wall of China that was built more than 2,000 years ago, and that’s 5,500 miles long and you can march armies down the top of it, the Japanese did that. So building a fence is not that hard; I’ll just show you how to do it if it’s too complicated for our public policy people to get their mind around.
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What occurs to me is that you say you need a fence around your own property, if you go to Third World countries and look around you see that is what they do. If they don’t have the rule of law, if they don’t have law and order, if lawlessness prevails then the more wealthy build a better, more effective barrier around their own compounds. In Mexico, there are plenty of fences that go around people’s homes to protect them from lawlessness, but if we’d line them up around the border we could easily build the border fence that we need. I’m thinking in places in the Caribbean or in Africa where there’s no law or very little law, they build a fence, sometimes a fence and a wall, and the wall will often have broken glass in the border on top and they’ll have an alarm system and inside that they’ll even have a safe room that they can go into to wait for people to rob them so maybe they don’t get killed. That’s what happens if you give up the rule of law and we have the rule of law still in this country but in these areas, in your neighborhood Meryl, that gives us a precursor, a look into what’s to come if we have a nation with open borders.
