I'm from Arizona too and lived in Tucson for four years :)

I'm genuinely surprised by your experience. Maybe I was simply lucky enough to only talk about border issues with more educated than average people. I guess it's because I was in college when I lived there, and mostly hung out with Latino college students.

I visited a couple of locals on the US side of the Nogales border, and they showed me the sights. "Here is the border fence... and 8 miles further (drive drive) here is where it runs out, and they come over those hills there (drive drive) these houses being built are where the immigrants spend their first nights before heading inland...".

We drove past a border patrol depot, and there were literally hundreds of vehicles. "Wow, the border patrol must have a huge number of staff to keep most of those active at once" > "No, those are just for the TV cameras - border patrol doesn't have anywhere near that number of staff"

Other oddities that stuck out for me in the area were that the border ingress to Mexico was literally just a turnstile, and that the distance markers about 20km short of the border on the US side were, indeed, in km instead of miles.

Aren't borders such silly concepts?

You don't understand what I meant by "incoherent". I am very pro free movement. I consider my homeland to be the multi-ethnic region consisting of the SW USA and northern Mexico and viscerally hate the idea of some man made wall dividing it.

However, it's a perfectly coherent idea: it has a concrete meaning that is easy to understand.

The desire to "build a wall" is a reaction of locals along the border to the realities there, and that reaction diffuses through the rest of the population who aren't on the border but who see problems that they perceive (or are persuaded to perceive) might be solved by curtailing illegal immigration. They may be wrong about, or miscalculating, the ultimate consequences of a wall, but the perceived need for some kind of "wall" is coherent in an immediate sense.

What do you think is incoherent? A plan to build some kind of physical wall (barrier), or a serious plan to keep people from crossing the border outside of the normal immigration process, or both?

His desire is coherent and certainly appeals to millions of Americans.

Whether it is realistic, plausable, beneficial, cost effective, or just plain stupid is another question.

It may be unrealistic, but it seems coherent enough to me. What's so crazy about border control?

I think you are getting brow-beaten by a kind of pedantry here, sorry for that. I'm taking you to mean that his statements are those of a buffoon that no one in intellectual society should take seriously. I agree with you.

Donald Trump's incoherent.