Really? Singapore finds kilograms of smuggled heroin every month or so inside the country, not at border checks.
And it’s an island country with only a single airport, a couple ports and 2 bridges into the country and the death penalty for smuggling. They throw a ton of resources at trying to stop it from coming in in the first place.
If they cant stop it, i dont know how a country like the US with thousands of miles of undefended borders can.
If Singapore is only finding kilograms of smuggled heroin every month, then they are very, very successful even for a single city. Hell, thats an extraordinary achievement. Likely the best in the whole world I think by a wide margin.
The U.S. is failing to stop multiple TONNES of drugs. (actually >100 tonnes if you look at DEA extrapolated figures). Border policy is clearly non-existent.
You're missing the point. If even Singapore, where the problem of opiates being imported should be way easier to solve; if even they can't actually fix their problem and get that number to zero, what hope does the US have of fixing the problem? The US would end up spending trillions on border control and not actually fix the problem either, with less than nothing to show for it - several orders of magnitude increase in cost and wait times aren't going to be good for business or the county, and would end up costing us more money in lost business on top of the money spent on pointless expensive border upgrades, like a wall thats easily defeated.
"if even they can't actually fix their problem and get that number to zero"
This is silly nonsense. There is no crime that can be made to zero. There is definitely crime that can be severely mitigated. You are throwing the towel on border security. Please don't make up stupid figures like trillions of dollars.
Our border security budget is a fraction of the "Ukrainian War" budget. Exceed that first and you are free to complain.
You don't understand the scope of the problem and want to throw money down the drain in the name of border security. In order to meaningfully make a dent in the problem, given the size of the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders, and the East and West coastlines, and all of the international airports, and not just shift the problem around from one location to another, all of the border needs to be made more secure. I have no idea why you keep bringing up Ukraine either. You know we're shipping military hardware to them and not pallets of dollar bills right? What are we going to do instead of help Ukraine with that? Line up artillery shells on the border with Mexico and somehow that'll help the war on drugs? Talk about silly nonsense!
Understand the scope of the problem first and you'll be free to think about how to meaningfully address the border situation.
I know the amount the U.S govt is spending on border security vs the amount of money being spent on Ukrainian aid. One dwarves the other by a full order of magnitude - showing exactly where the real priorities lie - NOT for the U.S. citizen.
No need for additional drug scanners at our ports or a border wall to reduce cartel trafficking. Who cares if tens-of-thousands of bright teenagers die of drugs being sent across the southern border ? We need Ukraine to crush Russia. RAWR.
"You know we're shipping military hardware to them and not pallets of dollar bills right?"
Ah.. but you are quite mistaken there. We are not just shipping military hardware. There is $30 billion in financial aid alone - and even far more being planned this year. Wow - thats more generous than many U.S. states receive for disasters.
You clearly have no idea how much money is spent on border security, given that the DHS budget is $50 billion, the Coast Guard another $10-15 billion, etc. every year.
But I believe he claims rightly, since the statistics match for Singapore's population and drug abusers. Please note that Singapore also considers cannabis as drug abuse.
Hah, if the U.S. spent a tiny fraction of the money being spent on the Ukraine war on border security, one would get far better outcomes. No fear of inflation at all of-course - to print endless money to wage more war. But spending on the border ? Oooh - that's bad!
"The United States has appropriated approximately $115 billion in emergency funding to support Ukraine since February 24, 2022."
The Trump border wall cost is $12 billion. I think ~1/9th is a tiny fraction right ? I don't mean milli-fractions or micro-fractions, just tiny.
And btw, that $115 billion towards Ukraine is expected to grow quite a bit further in 2023/24. Who knows - it might become a milli-fraction or micro-fraction eventually.
This by itself $76.8 billion in committed aid and does not include all U.S. spending related to the war. And newer appropriations made just after Jan 2023
So ? You are looking at one sub-component of the aid in flight in 2022 encapsulated in one bill. Your link itself takes the upper value of the allocated aid: "The nation has allocated $114.9 billion in aid over the last year, contained in four separate bills".
Please do that for border security in the U.S. Like Ukraine, there is utterly NO need to transfer all the money in ONE big bang - can do the same in chunks. As long as the "border aid" is allocated in chunks - we can have better drug scanners at ports, more personnel and patrols, more funds to care for actual migrants (as opposed to drug camels), investigative teams to track down drug-routes and personnel involved, etc
Except "The United States has appropriated approximately $115 billion" is a horseshit lie. The vast majority of the money that news casters tell you we "spent" on Ukraine was spent in the previous decades, designing, testing, and building the war machines that we put into storage since then, waiting for the soviets attacked. These are machines that have already been paid off, and would otherwise take money to get rid off.
The M113s we sent to Ukraine, we have been trying to dump them on ANYONE who will take them because shipping them across the world is literally cheaper than cutting them up and making them not a weapon anymore. The stryker program is done, and the vehicles will be replaced. We don't want to keep any of these vehicles, because unlike Russia, we think using 20 year old machines to fight a modern war would be extremely embarrassing and pathetic.
We haven't spent a hundred billion dollars helping Ukraine. We spent trillions of dollars over the past many decades buying stuff to kill the soviets and blow up the desert and we have nothing better to do with them. We literally have thousands of Abrams and Bradleys sitting all over the world, being worked on every week to keep them in tip top shape, that we would rather replace before we think we have to fight China.
Russia's best is being torched by our TABLE SCRAPS.
Quit parroting the narrative of people trying to deceive you.
controlling the border is a hot button political issue in the US. It comes up constantly in election season. The right wants more the left therefore wants less.
It would be better if the state's were allowed to do more on their own borders but it's a federal thing and therefore impossible. Texas has the money and will to do a lot of border enforcement on its own but it's prohibited by law.
