What if, instead of a wall, we were to build, along the southern border, a cargo shipping canal?
The U.S.-Mexico border is 1,989 miles long; of that, 1,255 is the Rio Grande river. The Rio Grande is, at its deepest, 60 feet, but much is much shallower. The rest of the border, including a small stretch of the Colorado river, changes elevation substantially, and crosses the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains. For scale, the Panama Canal is only 48 miles long, and cuts through only one little 312 foot mountain. The Suez Canal is just 121 miles long, and crosses flat ground. This would be a much, much bigger undertaking.
Construction of the Suez Canal started in 1859 and finished ten years later. The Panama Canal was begun in 1881; the French, who were digging it, gave up in 1884; the Americans took over in 1904 and finished ten years later in 1914–thirteen years total work. A canal along our Southern border would be 16 times longer than the Suez Canal and 41 times longer than the Panama Canal. Would construction, therefore, take between 160 and 533 years?
The right question is, how much has construction improved in the last 100 or 150 years? I would say, enormously. The Panama Canal was dug with steam shovels and regular shovels; now, we live in a post-chunnel world. We have GPS, unfathomably gigantic diesel digging machines and heavy-lift helicopters. (No doubt soon there will be heavy-lift drones as well.) Blasting-wise, we could reduce every bump and mole-hill on the U.S.-Mexico border to glass and rubble in a week (though I suggest we don’t).
As of 2017, other canal projects are afoot. A Chinese company has just started construction of a canal across Nicaragua. It will be 170 miles long, and cross Lake Nicaragua, which—while only half as deep as the canal will ultimately be— accounts for about a third of its total distance.
It is estimated that the Canal will cost $40 billion to build. The Southern Border Canal will be more than 10 times longer, so lets say it will cost somewhat more than $400 Billion. It will be harder to build too, so let’s say $500 billion. In other words, half the trillion dollar stimulus just proposed by Senate Democrats.
Like President Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus, most of the Democrats’ stimulus money is likely, if spent, to simply seep into the cracks of American bureaucracy, never to be seen again. The same would probably happen with President Trump’s planned infrastructure spending: when you spend enormous sums of money on an enormous quantity of different projects, no one has any sense of their success or failure; there are too many to keep track of.
But a Southern Border Canal would have its progress tracked by the entire nation, and its finances too. It would be an enormous—enormous—source of jobs. It would create entire new industries in the southwest—it would make El Paso a port city—and produce tremendous economic benefit for the whole country (through our direct interest in it, and taxable private enterprises who would build it and lease its management). And with the exception of the Apollo Program, it would be the most ambitious and impressive engineering feat in the history of man.
It would also make a southern border wall unnecessary: How much better is a moat? And no doubt Mexico would be happy to pay for part of it, eager to join in reaping the economic benefits.
The idea is a tricky sell. Even if the Rio Grande were currently navigable, our southern border would be a non-obvious location for a canal. Nevertheless, its construction would kill several birds with one stone—and its completion would really be something to behold: a true wonder of the world. Considering the trillions our government is prone to waste on all sorts of nonsense (once again, I’m thinking of the Obama non-stimulus stimulus) isn’t this worth a closer look?
Write your congressman.
