The 1,954 Mile Mexico-American Border Wall

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 31, 10:15AM EDT

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It starts just south of Beaumont, Texas, and runs almost 2,000 miles to just south of San Diego. The hard part would be fencing the Rio Grande, which is almost 1,200 miles of the border demarcation.

A wall can be built. The Ming Great Wall, which is not the entire Great Wall of China but was the most well-built, was 5,500 miles long. Based on several sources, it took 200 years to build and may have involved 800,000 people. Building a wall between the United States and Mexico might be done in a few years and with many fewer people. The undertaking would be expensive, but no one knows how much. Some portion of the border is already walled. But much of it is not planted deeply enough to prevent tunneling.

Building the Second Avenue subway in New York City will cost $4.5 billion, and it will only be a few miles long. The project is late and has gone on for several years. A lot of rock, apparently, and a lot of expensive machines.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority plans to build a route about 600 miles long. The total cost will be $91 billion, and it will take until 2033. That is, if the state can get all the money.

The cost to build the Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River for a length of fewer than five miles will cost $6.4 billion, and another $2.9 billion for bus lanes.

Anyone who wants to submit an estimate: [email protected]

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.