Trump's 'beautiful' wall both a dream and nightmare

This is the stuff of Donald Trump's dreams, only his wall would be bigger and better of course, not to mention longer, stronger and vastly more expensive.

Between the fortifications, in what is effectively no-man's land, a yellow line painted on the concrete marks the end of the mainland United States and the beginning of Mexico.

The border here owes its defences to Operation Gatekeeper, a controversial programme enacted in 1994 under President Bill Clinton which built barriers, added patrols and spruced up technology such as movement sensors.

All these years on, it appears to have worked, up to a point.

"It's like water," says border agent Shawn Moran as he drives the route near San Diego which he has patrolled for two decades. "They're going to take the path of least resistance and right now there's a lot of resistance out here."

Elsewhere the frontier looks very different. In Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, says Mr Moran, "you still have wide open areas of wilderness and desert where people are able to get across".

That is if they don't die trying.

Donald Trump reckons he has the answer - a "beautiful" wall spanning all four states which abut Mexico. It is a plan which goes down well with the men and women on the front line.

As vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, Mr Moran is union spokesman for 17,000 border agents who are, collectively, supporting the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States.

"Mr Trump seems to be the only candidate that's actually talking about border enforcement and fixing the immigration laws of the United States," says Mr Moran.

"This is a country built on the rule of law and over the past few decades we have carved out entire sections of our immigration laws and just ignored them. President Obama has just thrown out enforcement."

It is certainly true that the United States has looked the other way for many years as millions of illegal migrants set up home, although the question of enforcement is complex.

Any Mexican you ask in California will tell you they are there to work - often as builders, nannies, farmhands and cleaners, propping up the American economy, they say.

Mr Trump, in contrast, accuses immigrants of costing the US billions of dollars in education, healthcare, housing and welfare as well as of committing crimes and putting Americans out of work.

It is this potent mix of nationalism and protectionism which is animating his supporters in this angriest of elections.

And so Mr Trump wants to throw out every single undocumented immigrant. They would later be allowed to reapply for legal entry, he says, as long as they paid a hefty fee.

It is, by definition, difficult to count people living in the shadows and the numbers are therefore contested, but research estimated the number of unauthorised immigrants inside the United States in 2014, from all countries, at 11.3 million.

Exactly how they would be expelled and how much it would cost is, as with so much of Mr Trump's policy platform, not at all clear.

The tycoon-turned-politician has though given a sliver of detail about the "beautiful" wall he says he would build along the 1,989 mile border.

Mexico, he says, would pay for its construction or else Mexicans in the US would be prevented from sending money back to their families.

A Trump White House would "impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages," according to the presidential contender's website.

That is no small threat - remittances from all Mexicans abroad were worth $24.8bn in 2015 according to the Bank of Mexico, more than the country's oil revenues - but could it be done?

"Is Trump going to steal the money," asks the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada, incredulously. "How can any human being think like that? It's incredible!

"It's not going to happen," he tells the BBC. "Forget it. We're not going to pay for that [expletive] wall!"

(BBC)