“A wall, in my view, is an immorality. It’s the least effective way to protect the border and the most costly. I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently explained. Many other Democrats — almost all of them, in fact — claim to have, in addition to other reasons, some moral qualm about a border wall.

Whether or not the United States needs a wall — or even a pointed, slanted steel fence, for that matter — is a legitimate point of debate. I’m pretty ambivalent about the prospects of a barrier myself, and I oppose any unilateral emergency measures that allow government to more easily take private land to make it happen. But the Democrats’ blanket opposition to any “wall” has a number of logical inconsistencies that expose a different kind of agenda.

For one thing, is a wall really the “least” effective way to protect the border? I keep hearing Democrats offering this talking point on cable news without pushback. I’m not sure our factchecking guardians have jumped on this debatable contention, but I suspect there are numerous less effective ways to secure the southern border than putting up a giant partition. No rational person really believes that high vertical structures wouldn’t, to some extent, inhibit the movement of people.