By ANONYMOUS

On December 22, President Donald Trump issued a shutdown in the government. Normally, a shutdown would be needed in the case of something of importance – not a wall that is not even going to work.

Trump has been wanting to “build a wall” since before he was president, with his reason being that illegal immigrants are imposing on society and not paying their fair share of taxes. He called for around $5.7 billion for the wall, but the Democrats refused, leading to Trump having a fit for not getting his way and shutting down 25% of the government. This caused around 880,000 federal employees to not get their paychecks in which they were still being forced to work.

Trump claimed in his presidential address that the amount of illegal immigrants are at an all-time high which is completely false. As a matter of fact, the amount of arrests for illegal border crossings is the lowest it’s been in 46 years according to National Public Radio (NPR) , Inc. The illegal immigrants that are coming into America usually travel in by plane or stay after their green cards expire. According to BBC News, the immigrants who do travel in by foot do so because they are impoverished. Therefore, the wall would not be stopping all that many illegal immigrants who are imposing a threat on society.

Not all citizens think building this wall is a bad idea though, in fact many have donated some of their own money to a Go Fund Me page dedicated to the wall. The page has currently reached approximately $20,602,363 of its $1 billion goal. However, this page is just wasting those people’s money as it would take years to raise enough money. Maybe if people were actually serious about donating their money to a good cause, the country would have good foster care systems.

The greatest effect the wall would have is that it would waste all of our money. Spending over $5 billion on an ineffective wall is stupid if you think about the more important things the government could change. For example, the Flint River in Michigan was being treated improperly which caused lead from aging pipes to reach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin; twelve people have died from Legionnaires disease. Fixing this would cost approximately $55 million, which is something Trump was clearly willing to spend on something of less importance. We could give all 3.2 million public school teachers a $1,000 holiday bonus, which would cost $3.2 billion, since they are wildly underpaid for all of the work they do. Since the quality of the environment is going downhill, building three thousand acres of solar farms would cost approximately $1.5 billion. All of this together would cost a lot less than the wall and help a lot more people.