Mollie Hemingway Breaks Down The Pros And Cons Of Shutting Down The Southern Border

Senior Editor for The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway, tackled the pros and cons of President Donald Trump’s proposal to close the southern border on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday.

“The idea behind shutting down the border, there would be two issues there. One, there are so many people flowing over the border — there are so many people flowing across the parts of border that are not currently guarded, that they need to shutdown the ports of entry to monitor those areas, and also the flow of drugs there,” she said.

Hemingway said people may be more inclined to help solve the border crisis if they are given an economic incentive to do so.

“The other issue is that sometimes you want to have a little bit of hurt so that people are incentivized to do something about the situation,” she continued. “That’s true not just in this country but in other countries. And facing economic consequences for not taking this problem seriously, or not doing enough to stop it, is one of the ways that you can make people care more about it.”

“In this country though, where we should be most concerned, there are things that our legislatures should be doing — closing loopholes. We have laws that incentivize trafficking children. They’re having children come as unaccompanied minors or knowing that if people come with children they kind of get a free entry into the country. These are things that our lawmakers should be worried about right now.”

Hemingway also said America’s elite is less effected by open border policies and then accused them of shirking their duties in favor of complacency.

“For a lot of people, a lot of elite people don’t face the negative consequences of a porous border the way that the rest of the country does. And this really is a bipartisan problem going back decades,” she said.

“We have known these problems were coming. We have known this crisis is looming. But we just don’t have very serious people who are willing to make tough decisions to enforce rule of law or spend the money or change the laws that are necessary to change the situation. And even the fact that there’s a humanitarian crisis or other problems does not seem to motivate people.”