In an excellent comedic maneuver, John Oliver decided to take a serious look at GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump's proposed "[building] a great wall," which the entrepreneur and billionaire promises will keep undocumented workers (as well as "drugs" and "crime") from Mexico out of the U.S. While news sources like CNN have already discounted the viability of constructing a border wall, which will cost over $10 billion, take 5 billion pounds of steel and use 339 million cubic feet in concrete (and which Trump claims Mexico will somehow fully pay for), the comedian took a hard, long look at Trump's plan in a segment last episode on March 20 — and promptly eviscerated it.
Oliver did hold true to his world about taking a more or less objective look at the monolithic endeavor concocted by the man he calls Drumpf. "The border wall is one of the few policy proposals Trump has talked about in detail," began Oliver, "so instead of mocking or dismissing it out of hand, tonight let's take a serious proposal by a serious presidential candidate seriously."
The project, it seems, would also be a black hole of time and money. "The Congressional Budget Office estimates that wall maintenance costs will exceed the initial construction costs within seven years," Oliver went on, using statistics collected by the Sierra Club. "It's a big, dumb thing that only gets more expensive over time. It's like getting a pet walrus: You think it's stupid now, wait until you learn what a bucket of sea cucumbers costs. You've not prepared for that!"
Constructing a wall on the desired location (you know, on the border) is also an impossible feat, as Oliver further explained — one that has a basis in relatively recent current events.
"In 2006, George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act which called for 700 miles of fencing along the border - a project which, incidentally, then Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton voted for. That fence ran into a lot of problems, though. For instance, in large stretches of Texas, the border consists of the Rio Grande, and typically, you can't build a wall on the river, as a 1970 treaty prohibits building anything that may cause obstruction of normal flow of the river, and for that and other reasons, some parts of the border fence were built considerably inland."
Oliver continued on to name a number of important points, namely that the wall would be in violation of "the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act," and would hypothetically destroy wildlife and protected Native American burial sites. But his most salient argument was that most people who come from Mexico to the U.S. don't actually emigrate under illegal means, instead emigrating and staying after their visa expires.
"Nearly half of all the unauthorized migrants now living in the United States entered the country legally through a port of entry such as an airport or a border crossing point," exclaimed Oliver, citing a 2006 Pew Research study. "A wall can't stop that!"
Oliver also decided to flip the switch on Trump's impetus for building the wall in the first place — stating that statistics-wise, citizens born on American soil are more likely to commit crimes than undocumented workers.
"While, yes, individual undocumented immigrants have committed horrible crimes, so, obviously, have American citizens," Oliver stated. "And in fact, researchers consistently find that immigrants are less — not more — crime-prone than their native-born counterparts. The crime rates among immigrants once here are in relatively tiny digits, which is something Donald Trump should frankly understand given that he has 10 of them attached to his minuscule wrists."
Watch John Oliver smash through Donald #Drumpf's border wall in the video clip below.
Source: YouTube
