As the 116th Congress takes their seats today, hundreds of thousands of federal employees continue working without pay as the government enters day 13 of a shutdown. This shutdown, which affects 25% of the U.S. government, stems from President Trump’s demand for an additional $5 billion to construct a wall along the southern U.S. border.

In recent weeks the president has intensified his anti-immigration rhetoric, calling the U.S.-Mexico border an “open wound” and claiming “there can be no REAL Border Security without the Wall!” Despite this political grandstanding however, it remains true that building a wall across the border is an unnecessary, if not fully xenophobic, remedy to a crisis of this administration’s own making.

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