Leadership Quote by Rick Perry

Rick Perry is doing two things at once here: inoculating himself against the charge of being soft on border security, and puncturing the cartoon version of “build the fence” politics without sounding like he’s mocking the crowd that loves it. The repeated “will work” is deliberate reassurance. He concedes the premise - fences can be useful - so he can reject the fantasy: a single, symbolic infrastructure project that turns a messy, human system into a solved problem.

The key subtext sits in his phrasing: “easily just stand up,” “be done with it,” “wipe our hands.” That’s not policy language; it’s moral language. He’s accusing fence-only advocates of performative cleanliness - the desire to treat immigration as a stain you can scrub away, rather than an ongoing management challenge involving labor markets, asylum law, cartels, and local communities. By describing the fence as something you “wipe our hands” with, Perry frames simplistic solutions as a kind of convenient absolution: vote for the prop, feel responsible, move on.

Context matters because Perry speaks as a border-state Republican who has to live in the collision zone between national rhetoric and practical governance. Texas knows fences are porous to ladders, tunnels, cutting tools, and legal ports of entry; it also knows enforcement is more than steel slats. “That’s not reality” is the closing hammer, a plainspoken appeal to expertise and lived experience, aimed at a party base increasingly tempted by slogans that fit on a bumper sticker and a budget line.