Border fence in Israel cut illegal immigration by 99 percent, GOP senator says
Posted by M. C. on March 6, 2019
We support walls for Israel, why not walls for US?
Israel is always right-just ask anyone bending over for AIPAC congress.
Need an example of a border wall that works? Look to Israel, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., echoed the idea during a Feb. 3 CNN interview, claiming that a border fence in Israel has drastically cut illegal immigration along its southern border.
“Israel … had a real problem with illegal immigrants coming in from the southern border, about 16,000 in one year. In two years, they constructed 143-mile fence, about $2.9 million per mile, and it cut that illegal immigration rate from about 16,000 to I think 18. Cut it by 99 percent,” Johnson said.
The United States needs to pay attention to Israel and how it has handled security issues, Johnson said.
“They are under a constant state of threat. Threat of terrorism. They’ve dealt with it pretty effectively. We need to learn those lessons,” Johnson added.
Since Trump has signed an executive order to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, we were curious about references to Israel’s border efforts and their success, as described by Johnson.
Here’s what we found.
Israel-Egypt border fence
Israel has built multiple barriers along its borders with Egypt, Lebanon, Gaza Stripand West Bank, all as safeguards against terrorism and illegal immigration.
In 2015, we looked into a claim from another Wisconsin official, Gov. Scott Walker, when he said that a 500-mile fence between Israel and the West Bank was to thank for a 90 percent reduction in terrorist attacks in Israel. Experts then told us that even though there had been a drop in terrorism, the data used for Walker’s analysis was outdated and the fence was only one reason for the decline.
Johnson was specifically talking about a fence along the Israeli-Egyptian border.
Johnson’s team referred us to a January 2013 article in the Jerusalem Post about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu touring a completed 143-mile fence along the Sinai border. The article noted that an additional 8 miles of fencing was still to be completed along mountainous terrain near Eilat. When fully completed, the fence would run from Kerem Shalom (where Sinai and Israel meet the Gaza Strip) to Taba on the Red Sea, according to the article.
Fence construction started in November 2010 and came with a price tag of 1.6 billion Israeli shekels, the Jerusalem Post reported. The senator’s office said an Israeli official told Johnson that the fence cost $415 million during a tour while Johnson was in Israel. (The Wall Street Journal in January 2013 pegged the fence’s cost at $416 million.)
To determine a $2.9 million cost per mile, Johnson divided $415 million into the 143 completed miles cited in the 2013 article. (The cost per mile goes down to about $2.7 million when factoring in the total project of about 150 miles.)
So Johnson appears largely correct about the cost of the wall. How about its success in keeping people trying to cross the border illegally out?
That number checks out, too.
This month, Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, released a report titled “Securing Israel: Lessons learned from a nation under constant threat of attack.” The report came after a trip Johnson made to Israel where he met the Israeli prime minister and other security officials.
The report notes that the number of people illegally crossing the Israel-Egypt border was more than 16,000 in 2011 and less than 20 in 2016, a 99 percent decrease.
Netanyahu recently touted his country’s southern barrier and gave a nod to Trump, tweeting on Jan. 28, “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”..
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