Readers, don’t forget that I’m traveling today, headed to Spain. A lot of the posts you will see over the day will have been written in advance, and scheduled to post. Please be patient about my approving comments. I’ll get to them as I can, between flights.

Here’s an interesting email from a conservative reader:

I agree with you (and Trump, and Cesar Chavez) about the need to reduce immigration and control the border. But the wall is an asinine idea. One of the things that ought to concern us most is its impact on the migration of wildlife.

Desert ecology is fragile to begin with, and man has enormously screwed up that country already, mostly through carelessness and ignorance. But we are getting better and better at understanding it an fixing the problems we created, but the wall will be a big barrier (pun intended) to those efforts (I moonlight as a professional ecologist and have helped with restoration projects for bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope in the transpecos — a wall would screw up both populations and many others). And I’m convinced it will have a negligible impact on smugglers willing to invest in a robust saw or a plasma torch.

The wall is just a dog whistle meant to rile up the base. The immigration solution has to do with better policy and more personnel / enforcement.