I think this talk about whether the wall is justified really misses the point. If there is a wall built, it will not stop illegal immigration. The immigrants will simply climb over it or go around it. Refusing to appropriate funds for this wall will not help immigrants who are kept out because of quotas and other irrational, unconstitutional policies. It will just keep the government shut down for no good reason.
I remember the first time I saw the government get shut down. It was in the mid-1990's. The reason? Republicans wanted to pass a budget that would balance within seven years according to CBO projections. President Clinton would not agree with this. He wanted to pass a fake balanced budget where the OMB could fudge the numbers. The Republicans refused to pass a budget that did not balance according to CBO projections, so the government shut down for several months.
Now, that was a legitimate reason. But this is just absurd. Give the guy his stupid wall. It doesn't matter anyway.
On some points I agree with you, the discussion of whether to build the wall or not does miss the point. My whole point in my post was that our government is too large and needs to me downsized. For a large part of the population, I won't say most but it is close, this government shutdown doesn't impact our lives on a day to day basis. We simply have too many people working in our government and if you take 15%, 20% or 25% of them out, it really doesn't impact many of us, so why do we need them?
Barriers at the border have been shown to be effective. Everywhere a border barrier has been built they have been effective. Israel is a great example but here in the U.S. the Yuma district is another. They are not and never will be 100% effective, but they help. If you go back and look at when illegal immigration started increasing and when wage stagnation started here in the U.S. you will see, we need some help. Adding something on the order of 1,000,000 workers a year to the workforce has held wages down for 40 years or so. By not doing anything to stem illegal immigration the government has been allowing the destruction of the middle class for that 40 years.
The federal government establishing guidelines for how many immigrants come into this country however is constitutional. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution assigns Congress with the responsibility "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization". This has been established by the Supreme Court to mean the federal government can control how many aliens are allowed into this country.
Regardless of how explicit it's called out in the Constitution, every country in the world controls the flow of people into and out of their country. Besides borders, it's one of the few other things that makes them a sovereign nation. Without that control, how does a country take care of it's citizens? Or even know who are the citizens?
That shutdown in the 1990's, the republicans held firm and won that battle. Through the press, history praises Clinton for generating a balanced budget that resulted from his loss to the republicans. The press is even worse now and if Trump wins this battle, the press will turn it around and the democrats will be credited for any barrier built at the southern border. In 10 or 20 years, history will be praising the democrats for saving the middle class by building a border wall.
For the main point of your comment I agree with you: