Midwest Opinion: Fence off Canada? Don’t even think about it

Grand Forks Herald
Forum News Service
Scott Walker’s plunge in the polls is worrying The Weekly Standard. But “is Walker’s dive a temporary blip or a sign of deeper problems with the candidate?”, the conservative newsmagazine asked last week.
Then it concluded, “The case for calm is fairly strong.”
Actually, the case for calm now has been slammed shut, while the case for panic is swinging open.
That’s what a headline like this one on CNN.com will do for you:
“Scott Walker: U.S.-Canada wall a ‘legitimate’ idea.”
Yes, in his rush to out-Trump Trump by taking ever-more-absurd anti-immigration stands, the governor of Wisconsin - who really should know better - said the U.S. government should study whether to build a wall along our 5,500-mile border with Canada.
Who cares that the Canadian border stretches three times as long as our border with Mexico, while causing 1/60th (!) the amount of problems?
In 2010, “U.S. agents are said to have arrested 450,000 migrants crossing from Mexico,” the Toronto Globe and Mail has reported.
“This compares to about 7,500 inadmissible people caught crossing the Canadian border.”
Walker probably doesn’t know the issue to that level of detail. But he doesn’t have to: While Wisconsin doesn’t have a land border with Canada, two of its neighbor states do. So, some share of the many thousands of people who enter Wisconsin every day from Minnesota and Michigan presumably come from Canada.
Now, Walker has been governor of Wisconsin since 2011.
In all of that time, has a single concern about an illegal immigrant from Canada ever crossed his desk?
And if the answer is no, then why on Earth did Walker say the following to a “Meet the Press” interviewer, who asked him whether he’d support building a wall along the Canadian border:
“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” Walker responded. “They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that’s a legitimate issue for us to look at.”
No, it’s not a legitimate issue at all. Fencing off Canada not only would waste a staggering amount of money, but it also would sledgehammer America’s national interests, by alienating our closest ally and throttling trade with our biggest trading partner by far.
U.S. goods and services trade with Canada totalled nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in 2012, the U.S. Trade Representative reports.
That trade already has been hurt by the “thickening” of the U.S.-Canadian border since 9/11. Tourism is not what it used to be as well.
Why worsen those situations for such pipsqueak gains?
Basically, a border fence with Canada would be all cost and no ben efit. Doesn’t the United States have smarter policies to pursue?
Americans who live in northern-border states go for months without fretting about the Canadian border, other than idly wondering whether their passport is up to date. Illegal crossings generate maybe one headline a year in northern newspapers. They almost certainly never trouble the president’s sleep.
We suspect they’ve likewise never bothered Scott Walker. And if that’s the case, then Walker should have known better than to imagine solving a nonexistent problem with a $100 billion fence.