Donald Trump Still Wants to Build a Wall, and Now He Has a Cost Estimate for Mexico Ana Campoy - Quartz
go to original February 11, 2016

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump enjoyed a first-place finish in Tuesday's primary in New Hampshire. He pledged to fight the United States' heroin crisis by building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. (PBS NewsHour)

Donald Trump, who came up with a big win this week in the New Hampshire Republican primary, has been getting more specific about his plans to build a border wall between the US and Mexico.

The real estate mogul envisions hundreds of miles of precast concrete rising between 35 feet and 40 feet into the air, he told MSNBC in a Feb. 9 interview. It will be attractive, “you know, as good as a wall is going to look,” he said. The total cost will be around $8 billion, which will be billable to Mexico, according to the presidential candidate.

That number correlated nicely with the past costs of installing border barriers. Here’s what the US government has put up so far and how much it cost, according to government data. (Currently about a third of the 1,933-mile land border between the two countries has fencing of some kind.)

Fence type 		Length 	
Pedestrian fence 	352.7 miles 	
Vehicle fence 		299 miles 	
Secondary fence 	36.3 miles 	
Estimated average cost  $1.7 million to
per mile 		$6.5 million

Trump’s estimate hits at the end of the $2.2 billion-$8.3 billion range it would cost to cover the rest of the border at those costs. (He told MSNBC that he arrived at that figure by multiplying the number of miles by the price per square foot.)

But his projection does not include a variety of other factors that would make a wall much more expensive.

Read the rest at Quartz

Related: Why Building a Wall Against Mexico Is an Expensive Farce (Daily News)

Related: Addicted to Heroin? Trump Says Blame the Mexicans. (The Daily Beast)

Related: Trump v. Sanders Is Becoming a Greater Possibility for the 2016 Presidential Election (KTAR News)

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