Fighting the fence

Fighting the fence
Jun 12th 2008 | EL CALABOZ, TEXAS
From The Economist print edition

Texans and owls take on the federal government

NO SOONER has Eloisa Tamez parked on the dirt road that runs through her backyard in El Calaboz than a big car trundles up to investigate. “And here comes the famous Border Patrol. They're curious,” she says drily. The agent behind the wheel has recently moved down from Oklahoma, and she chides him for not knowing the history of this little stretch of the border. It was given to her family in 1767 as part of the Spanish land-grant programme. Although it has been nibbled away over the years, she still has several acres, and she does not want the Border Patrol tramping around on it.

Ms Tamez, 72, seems mostly amused by the encounter. But she has a bigger problem than greenhorn agents. Last year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked to survey her land. It plans to put some 700 miles (1,100km) of fencing along the border between the United States and Mexico by the end of George Bush's term, and wants a bit of it to go through her land. Ms Tamez declined. The department sued for access. She countersued, saying that the department had not tried to negotiate with her in good faith. She says that she wants to make the DHS follow the constitutional procedures, but she is not very optimistic.

Ms Tamez's situation is unusual, but she is far from alone. Opposition to the fence is running high in Texas, partly because heavy-handedness from the DHS has inflamed the situation. In April Michael Chertoff, the cabinet-level secretary of the department, announced that he would use his powers of waiver to brush aside more than 30 laws in order to begin building this July. In May a group of mayors, judges and other officials calling themselves the Texas Border Coalition (TBC) filed a class-action lawsuit, saying that the DHS has trampled on people's property rights. Several environmental groups have also sued, contending that the fence will cut through a wildlife corridor.

It is a lot of commotion over a relatively small amount of wire. The Texas part of the border is 1,200 miles long, but plans call for only 70 miles of it to be fenced. Consider the Del Rio sector, which is about 200 miles long. It is mostly deeply inhospitable brush and canyon country. Alan Langford, the assistant chief patrol officer of the sector, says that the DHS wants to put less than five miles of fencing around two cities, Del Rio and Eagle Pass. “Just to get people away from crossing in the urban areas,” he explains. When someone crosses the border into a city, they can quickly blend into the crowd.

Chad Foster, the head of the Texas Border Coalition and the mayor of Eagle Pass, questions the need. He says that his city has a happy relationship with Piedras Negras, its larger counterpart across the river. He thinks the DHS would do better to clear the city's riverbanks of corrizo cane, which offers effective cover to anyone in need of a hiding-spot. “There's a misconception in mid-America that Mexico is overrunning the borders,” says Mr Foster. He suggests that the rest of America fence their own communities if they feel insecure.

The idea that the fence will be pointless is a common objection in the Rio Grande valley. Most border crossings there are legal and normal, and locals doubt that would-be illegal immigrants will be discouraged by the idea of walking around a fence. The project will certainly be expensive. A 2006 report put the cost of building and maintaining the entire border fence at $49 billion over 25 years. That money could be spent on more sophisticated technology, such as sensors or drones.

Fence-building strikes many people as paranoid. There are frequent comparisons to the Berlin Wall. Some people point out that Texas, unlike New Mexico, Arizona or California, already has a well-defined physical border with Mexico—the Rio Grande. The fence would be built a bit north of the river, and that might look like the state is ceding strips of land back to Mexico. A fence would also block access to the water. “It's hard for us to imagine a wall separating us from the river,” says Rick Villareal of Laredo, who grew up swimming in it.

Mr Chertoff may be taken aback by all the complaints. There was not nearly such a loud outcry in the other border states. But he has vowed to press on and seems particularly annoyed by the environmentalists. He says he has attended too many memorial services for Border Patrol agents to muster much sympathy for “the sensitivity of an owl”. Owls are one thing. Property owners are a lot harder to dismiss.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11553857