Fence isn’t a cure-all for America’s porous border - El Paso Times
NOGALES, Ariz. — The fence rises from the rock and hardscrabble of the desert floor, a formidable 15-foot-high curtain of corrugated metal that stretches into the mirage of heat and distance. Newer sections feature 20-foot high steel columns, deeply planted, narrowly spaced, so no human slips between.
The start-and-stop span - 646 miles long - has become a fierce polemic, a bumper sticker, a popular backdrop for campaign commercials during an election year with another sulfurous immigration debate.
The best known TV spot features Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain kicking along a dusty road in this hilly border city, fuming to his companion, the Pinal County sheriff, about drugs and immigrant smugglers and kidnappings. Wearing his Navy baseball cap and squinting into the sun, McCain could be rounding the corner to the gunfight at the OK Corral.
“Complete the danged fence,” he spits, his jaw drawing into a knot.
The government has spent $2.4 billion since 2005 to build the fence as it presently stands. And the prevailing political sentiment would appear to be, build it faster and higher.
But what McCain and other politicians often fail to point out is there’s no shortage of ways to get past the fence. Immigrants scale it with ladders. Smugglers use blowtorches and hacksaws to penetrate it. They use trucks with retractable vehicle ramps to roll pickups full of marijuana over the fence. They knock down vehicles barriers and erect lookalikes that are made out of cardboard and easy to move.
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In Nogales, the shoe stores, duty-free shops and other downtown businesses are just yards from the corrugated barricade, which has welding scars where breaches have been patched.
Forty border tunnels have been discovered in Nogales since the mid-1990s.
Surveillance cameras, sensors and trailers carrying stadium lights help Border Patrol agents who monitor the fence. Deeper into Nogales, layers of agents are placed to try to stop immigrants who slip past the border.
Mayor Octavio Garcia-von Borstel said the fence is essential to maintaining the quality of life in his city of 24,000. “With no fence, they would be free (to run through),” he said.
More than 100 miles away in the southeastern Arizona city of Douglas, Mayor Michael Gomez said the fence “is not going to work. They jump right over it.”
But he believes there aren’t enough Border Patrol agents there to back up the fence. At night, ultralight planes used by drug smugglers buzz right over.
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