CandiedYams: Fence on the Border Definitely a Terrible Idea

While I don't always see eye-to-eye with Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, when it comes to the topic of the Mexico-America fence I completely agree with her. I'm on the fence, pun totally intended, when it comes to illegal immigration and whether we should grant them citizenship or kick them out, but I'll save that for my next post. For this post, let me bring to light some reasons as to why building a fence over the 2000-mile border is just plain silly. I use data from a post on Washingtonpost.com very liberally here, as well as some info from wikipedia at this page. The post can be found here.

• Its 2000 miles long.

And we're not talking about a nice long stretch of flat grassland here. The fence would go through Mexican and American cities, mountains, deserts, rivers, and even irrigation canals. In the plan's defense, it only mandates a fence along 700 miles. Keeping in mind that the plans involve 15 foot high fences, sometimes of double or triple thickness, one can imagine how much this would cost.

• It is going to cost somewhere along 2 billion dollars.

And that's just to build it. Anyone who owns a fence knows that it is very difficult to keep it in good condition. Weather animals really like to destroy fences, and when your fence is measured in the hundreds of miles, you are talking about a constant state of needing repair.

• It breaks laws.

Technically it doesn't break laws because of the 2005 Real ID Act which states, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section." So basically, the Secretary of Homeland Security can ignore any law he wants to build this thing, and no one has any discretion over breaking these laws except him. So much for checks and balances, a concept this country was built on. Laws that the proposed plan breaks include; the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. And all of those were broken just in the construction of a small stretch of fence just outside of San Diego in '05.

• It won't work.

Anyone who has watched espionage or action movies can tell you just how easy it is to get past a fence that has no guards. Considering the length of the fence, the majority of it will be unmanned, which means anyone with a ladder and maybe a leather coat can climb any fence with barbed wire at the top. A fence built at the border of San Diego in the 1990's was built to stop immigrants. This didn't stop immigrants from coming; it just made them try to get in somewhere else, like through the desert. To counter this, more border patrol units were sent to the surrounding area, which ironically left the fence itself vulnerable to penetration. What follows is a quote straight form the Washington Post.

"Tucson now has 2,600 agents. San Diego has lost 1,000 agents. Guess where the traffic is going? Back to San Diego." said T.J. Bonner, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, the main union for Border Patrol agents. "San Diego is the most heavily fortified border in the entire country, and yet it's not stopping people from coming across."

All these topics are just the tip of the iceberg. The ones I've discussed just happen to the most glaring issues, in my opinion at least. Hopefully this brings the idea of a fence into a different light, and stops anyone from thinking that Pelosi's lack of support for the fence is because of a lack of support for national security.