So what? He's just the President. He has no power to seize land and not pay for it.Originally Posted by Teacher Terry
So what? He's just the President. He has no power to seize land and not pay for it.
Just heard that the length is 2000 miles. Ridiculous.
I predict lawsuits to figure out the question of just compensation. And them taking a long time to work their way through the courts. He'll be able to tweet, "would have built the wall years ago but those losers living on the border don't care about America." He gets credit from his supporters for really wanting to build it without ever doing so.
There's typically a sorta-defined process for eminent domain proceedings, generally requiring paying fair market value and detailing the acceptable methods for value determination. The lawsuits aren't complex proceedings as a result if anyone complains. Counties, towns, states, and various other governmental entities often have the power of eminent domain, and use it for legitimate public purposes. The governmental entity I am an elected representative on has such power - we typically don't use it, we simply approach the land-owner and say "OK, we need this land for Legitimate Purpose XYZ. We have 3 appraisals here in-hand from certified independent appraisers. You are welcome to get another. We propose to pay you this as the market value - indeed, we are prohibited by state law from paying you a dollar less, or a dollar more, so there's no dickering really unless you think the appraisals are out-of-wack. In which case, see above - feel free to get your own appraisals. You won't be compensated for the cost of your own appraisal, and if we go to court, you will lose, and you won't get your court costs back. How do you wish to proceed?" It usually results in a quick deal, and no court time.
As a landowner here, I had the County try to take some of my land to straighten out a road. They wanted about a 40 foot strip, and proposed as above the appraised price. I told them their appraisal was clearly wrong, as the appraiser had missed the fact that several rows of 30 year old producing vines from our vineyard would be lost as a result, and that the road runoff would certainly kill off another few rows, and that the winery's organic certification would be lost from the runoff and the pesticides the county uses along roads, so the correct appraisal would be more like "the value of a 2000 case a year winery and about 15 acres of highly productive land". But that it would be far cheaper to straighten out the road on the *other* side of the road, where no crops were grown and where the runoff wouldn't hit a salmon stream.... They saw reason.
The wall will cost way too much money for way too little in return.
Why not spend the money working out some sort of plan to allow people into the country legally to work? With some money going directly to the areas most hard hit by the people walking over the border, for better border patrols or something that will actually help.
This, on top of everything else, has just left me numb today.
In an era where federal highway bridges are falling into rivers, deciding to build a lame and expensive wall is...idiotic.
For perhaps the first time ever, bae and I agree on something.
Trump truly is uniting the American people!
I think the immigration problem is so complex.........But I like to think in smaller terms........like if we had a decent house and our children had good education, and enough food, etc., and some in the neighborhood didn't.......But they constantly came to our house (even if it was big), wanting room and board, etc......How would we handle it? Yes, we might be very tempted to build a large fence around the property, with a locked gate.
How else should we handle the immigration problem from the southern border? I know a very liberal belief is that there's always room for more and we love everyone! The far right believes the opposite. How might we possibly find decent middle ground?
How do we stop drug trafficking along the border? How do we deal with all the problems connected with being a rich nation with a border, the south of which is poor?
I have truly come to believe in the pendulum theory about just about every action. We have been sooooo lax and accepting in the past, which has led us to many feeling the need to go far in the other direction.
We seem to be unable to make reasonable choices in this country. For example.......why can't we do what Canada does, in terms of bringing in Hispanics to work the farms, then having them go back home? I suppose it's made easier by the fact that Canada probably has a very defined growing season, whereas places in the U.S. has growing seasons all year round. But dang........can't we make some reasonable choices and have some logical/reasonable foresight when first thinking things through, instead of not thinking things through, and then having huge messes to deal with?
I agree that we can't leave the border unattended, and that we have some laws of acceptance that need to change.
Cathy, that IS an immigrant program. Thousands of Mexican people work in the green industry for a season. Their visas are good for the growing season. DH used to work with several men in a tree company where they came to St. Louis from April to October and went back to their home in Mexico for the winter.
Here, there was a historic restaurant, that the family had orchards. They had a large tenement complex for the seasonal immigrants under that program. The owner of that orchard, is a friend of mine who sold the whole thing to a home builder/developer, right before the 2008 crash for a nice chunk.
Besides work visa's we also have legal immigration.
Of course this won't stop tunneled drugs, drugs smuggled via plane or homebuilt submarines, built into vehicles, or people smuggling, etc. It will only slow down border crossings and cause hindrances in other area's (such as seasonal legal immigrants getting through to Canada, the water rights issues, etc). If there was a once size fits all answer, I would have hoped we would have implemented it by now.
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