As Trump makes border wall pitch, other countries say theirs work

As President Trump seeks to fulfill his promise to build a wall on the southern border, he is getting support from leaders in countries that have erected their own border barriers -- and who hail those projects as critical to battling illegal immigration. Trump, too, has cited countries like Israel -- which has a network of walls and fences on its borders -- as proof that barriers work as he seeks to convince Congress to fund a wall or steel barrier to the tune of $5.7 billion.But despite claims that such barriers are ineffective, in countries such as Israel and Hungary, top officials say they are a key mechanism in keeping a border secure and illegal migration flows down. “Since we built a fence, and since the police and army have been there, we basically have no illegal migrants on the territory of the country,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Fox News in an interview last week. “There are constant attempts to break through, but the infrastructure itself, namely the fence, and police and the army, make it impossible to get in.” "So that's a success," he said. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government built a wall in the West Bank as a counter-terrorism measure, as well as a "smart fence" on the southern border with Egypt -- Israel’s longest border -- to prevent migration from Africa. Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon told Fox News Thursday that the border once had a “flimsy wire fence” that allowed smugglers and traffickers in the Sinai Peninsula to enter Israel, but that was changed in 2010. “From 2010-2013, we built a system of two layers of fencing, with advanced surveillance equipment,” he said. “And the results speak for themselves: border crossings dropped by over 99 percent, from 9,570 in the first half of 2012 to 34 in the first half of 2013.”...MORE