The situation in Mexico has serious consequences for our Rights, and even our lives here in AZ and all along the Mexican border. We cannot emphasize enough how much it is in our interest to have a free, safe and prosperous Mexico as our neighbor. Many of us have family, friends there and they are our neighbor.

We strongly support the Human Rights of the Mexican people to be able to defend themselves. That means the Mexican people should once again have the rights and resources to possess, bear and use modern and effective firearms. As over 70 years of corrupt federal government and it's attending gun control have shown, the bumper sticker is so true. "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". Mexico is a textbook example of the failures of gun control. While some very limited firearms are permitted on paper, and in practice, the real effect has been to disarm the good people of Mexico.
That was done by the very corrupt political party that ran a country rich in natural resources and people, into the ground to prevent a revolution, not to "control crime" as was the pretense.

As the archived reports will show, the defenseless people of Mexico have suffered way too much. They deserve much better. We need to help.

Given the gravity of the ongoing drug war in Mexico our neighbor to the south, ASR&PA has been working to monitor the border situation and it's many effects on our state and our members:

Including drug and human trafficking, with related issues of murders, kidnappings, home invasions, extortion, destruction of wildlife habitat, illegal immigration, white slavery, money laundering, expenses of incarceration and medical treatments, the list goes on and on. Also de facto cession of areas of the state to the DTO's; fugitives, cash, firearms and ammunition running south. Most of these issues could be significantly reduced by simply securing the border.

To get it out of the way, ASR&PA does support legal immigration, trade, and travel between our countries. Especially so that we and our Mexican neighbors can once again freely and safely travel to our neighboring countries for competition, training, hunting and just enjoy good company.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

AZMEX WALL 19-6-08

PUBLISHED ON JUNE 19, 2008:
Let's Climb the Wall
The feds want you to think they're finally controlling the border.
Think again.
By LEO W. BANKS


Leo W. Banks
The border wall along John Ladd's San Jose Ranch
Leo W. Banks
Ranger Marshall Goodwin spies the border from the main ranch house at
San Rafael State Park.
Leo W. Banks
At the approach of a Tucson Weekly photographer and two state park
rangers, six illegal aliens spring from the grass in the San Rafael
Valley and bolt back into Mexico, jumping over the vehicle barrier
lining the border.
Leo W. Banks
These Normandy-style vehicle barriers stretch as far as the eye can
see across the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley.
Leo W. Banks
John Ladd describes how illegal aliens defeat the border wall along
his ranch.
Leo W. Banks
A white-tailed buck and two mule-deer does stand confounded by the
new border wall near Naco, which alters normal wildlife-migration
patterns.


One morning recently, rancher John Ladd was awakened by a phone call
from a Department of Public Safety dispatcher. It seems that horses
had wandered through some fencing that had been trampled by illegal
aliens, and the animals were running loose on Highway 92, two miles
north of Ladd's San Jose Ranch near Bisbee.
DPS thought the horses were Ladd's. But Ladd knew they belonged to
his neighbor, an older man. Instead of waking the neighbor, Ladd went
to gather the horses for him. While doing so, he encountered a
friendly Border Patrol agent and learned it had been a busy night
indeed.

The agent, using night-vision gear to scan Ladd's land from a hill
just north of 92, had spotted 11 groups of illegals, each numbering
about 10 people.

On it goes, every day and night on our open border.

But this is more than the same old business: It's a sure bet that
every one of those 110-plus illegal aliens got into our country by
climbing the government's spanking-new, holy-smokes, don't-even-think-
about-it border wall.

The wall extends along about 13 miles of the international line
between Naco and the San Pedro River. Some of the fence stands 10
feet high, most 13. The biggest share was completed last October,
with workers finishing the final 1,200 feet in March.

Ladd owns 10 1/2 miles of land along the wall and regularly sees
illegals climbing it, including kids, old men and even two pregnant
women who were hoisted over by accomplices. In the two years prior to
its construction, he says, Border Patrol was arresting 50 to 100
people on his land every day. Shortly after the wall's completion,
the number had soared to 300 a day.

Arrests have fallen back to about 150 a day from the Ladd ranch west
to the San Pedro, but it's still a 24/7 nightmare. If you talk to
Ladd on the phone, chances are good that in a chat of, say, 20
minutes, you'll hear him say, "I'm looking out the window, and
there's a group now. Let's see, there's one, two ... nine, 10," and
so on.

That picture you see on the cover of this newspaper is Ladd himself,
53, scaling the wall from the hood of his truck.

"If you stand next to it, you say, 'Hey, this is going to work,'" he
says. "But then you watch them climb it, and you're thinking, 'How
could I have thought this would work? How can you climb a 10-foot
wall in 10 seconds?' Well, they're doing it."

For years now, Ladd has had a hawk's view of the cross-border
invasion. In that time, he's come to believe that our government has
no intention of stopping the human tide, and that certain border
corridors are kept open to allow a quota of illegals into the country
to satisfy the demand for cheap labor.

Ladd believes his land sits on one of those corridors. The wall fits
the theory.

The 13-foot section, which constitutes the majority of fencing along
his ranch, costs about $2 million per mile. As Ladd sees it, that
money isn't buying much security, because that wasn't its main
purpose. Its main purpose was to buy your opinion.

"The government isn't controlling the border," Ladd says. "It's
controlling what Americans think about the border."


Nothing on the border is what it seems, and the pedestrian fence is
another illusion. It's a moving target on a misty horizon, the pea
under a street hustler's shell.

If you ask most Americans about it, they'll say its intent is to stop
people from crossing the border. It isn't. Even Border Patrol admits
it only slows them down.

If you ask whether the government is building it, they'll say, of
course, I saw it on TV. But the majority of what's going in isn't the
double-layer pedestrian fence the Secure Fence Act required.

If you ask Americans whether border residents want the fence, they'll
say heck yes. Southern Arizonans are getting clobbered. Most don't,
though, and these are people who live with break-ins, need to get
house-sitters when they go out to eat in town and have to bury the
family dog after it's poisoned for barking.

The sentiment holds for border residents elsewhere as well. The
Department of Homeland Security's efforts to build fencing at
Brownsville, Texas, have filled public meetings with angry citizens.
These are patriotic folks who normally don't protest anything. But
when it comes to the fence, they're practically carrying pitchforks
to stop it.

Nineteen border towns in Texas, part of the Texas/Mexico Border
Coalition, have filed suit against the feds to get fence construction
stopped.

There's a great disconnect between those living on the line and
Americans in the heartland. The latter demand the fence because,
rightly and overwhelmingly, they want something done to protect our
sovereignty, our land and our citizens.

Even when they know an idea won't work, politicians respond, which
explains the campaign quote, spoken to an audience in Milwaukee and
repeated in the February 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, by Sen. John
McCain, who, by the laws of opinion roulette, finally got something
right on the border. The now- Republican presidential nominee said:
"I think the fence is least-effective. But I'll build the goddamned
fence if they want it."

A fence has an almost unassailable logic to it, an intuitive power.
If you live in, say, rural Connecticut, and want to keep the deer out
of your backyard, build a fence. It works. So why not a fence on the
border?

But the international line is a separate reality entirely, and those
pro-fence voices, from Connecticut to Oregon, are mostly people
who've never seen the border--never ridden horseback over the hills
of Arivaca, never walked the smuggling trails in the grasslands of
the San Rafael Valley.

Here's a truism: The farther you live from the line, the more likely
you are to believe the pedestrian fence will work.

Gary Thrasher, who knows the borderlands of southeast Arizona as well
as anyone, calls the idea of a pedestrian fence "junk." It's a waste
of money. It might even be a symbol of having too much money.

Thrasher is a veterinarian who spends a lot of time at properties on
the border, and he says what's needed is pretty basic: an east-west
road along the line for patrols and rapid access; rail-on-post
vehicle barriers to prevent smugglers from driving into the country;
and a livestock fence to keep Mexican and American cattle herds from
mingling, which has potentially disastrous economic and national
security consequences.

It's simple, cheap and doable, and it doesn't destroy the historic
dynamic between American border residents and their Mexican neighbors
the way a big wall does.

Understand: When an Arizonan living on the line meets his Mexican
counterpart, he's not talking to a "foreigner," someone he views with
suspicion. He's talking to a neighbor, sometimes a friend. They chat
about the drought or the Diamondbacks. It's no different from that
fence-lover in Connecticut who meets a neighbor at the property line
and spends five minutes on a Saturday talking about A-Rod, Jeter and
the Yankees.

As for that wall, Thrasher acknowledges that a few Arizona ranchers
want it.

"But even these people worry that if the government builds some
monstrous thing and doesn't do maintenance, they'll have nothing but
a bunch of mangled steel after a while," Thrasher says. "Plus,
somebody has to watch it. It's like putting a fence around a prison
without having anybody patrolling. It doesn't do any good."

In addition to men, money and maintenance, which costs as much as
original construction, the fence requires a government willing to
keep providing those things year after year, regardless of who sits
in the Oval Office. In other words, our desire to stop illegals from
busting the border has to be greater than the illegals' desire to get
here.

For years, it's been no contest. The illegals win hands-down.


The Secure Fence Act was intended to change that. The bill called for
the construction of 698 miles of double-layer fencing to "prevent
unlawful entry by aliens into the United States." It passed the
Senate by an 80-19 vote, and President Bush signed it into law in
late October 2006, right before midterm elections.

At the time, the American people were screaming about the border, and
desperate Republicans, sensing the debacle ahead, lined up behind it,
saying, "See, we're doing something. Now vote for us." Many Democrats
did the same thing, some because they knew it'd never be built as
described.

Its chief naysayer was Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff. From the beginning, he made clear his view that
pedestrian fences were of limited use, mainly in urban areas, and
that he preferred a virtual fence, consisting of vehicle barriers,
radar and other technology.

Chertoff ultimately got his way. Fourteen months after the signing of
the Secure Fence Act, Congress passed the Hutchison Amendment, named
for Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. The amendment basically
dismantled Secure Fence, giving the secretary the power to decide
what would be built and where.

Do many Americans still believe the government is building a double-
layer, razor-topped people fence? Undoubtedly so. It's the illusion
thing again.

Instead, the DHS goal is to have 370 miles of single-layer pedestrian
fencing, along with another 300 miles of vehicle barriers, in place
along the Southwestern border by the end of this December. But even
that less ambitious goal will probably recede on the misty horizon.

The Government Accounting Office, a watchdog group, doubts the DHS
will be able to build what it promises in the months remaining, and
Glenn Spencer, of American Border Patrol, a private Arizona-based
border-security group, charges that the DHS is playing games with
numbers.

Example: Last month, Chertoff told The New York Times that the DHS
had completed 309 miles of fencing. But Spencer, who regularly flies
the line to inspect fence-building progress, claims that number
includes fencing that's been in existence for years, and a good
portion of it consists of vehicle barriers, not pedestrian fencing.

By Spencer's count, the Southwest border is now blocked by 183 miles
of pedestrian fencing and 128 miles of vehicle barriers--on a 1,950-
mile border. Most important: The DHS has only built 95 miles of new
pedestrian fencing since passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006,
almost half of that in Yuma.

Spencer, a border resident who strongly supports a people fence, says
Chertoff should be building 698 miles of double-layer pedestrian
fencing, as the law said, and by not doing so, he's thwarting the
will of Congress. "There's no doubt in my mind they're trying to
confuse people," says Spencer. "They're trying to convince you
they're hard at work on a pedestrian fence, and they're not. They're
rewriting the definition of a fence to include vehicle barriers that
won't stop anybody."

Arizona has a big share of the pedestrian fencing now standing--
including 50 miles near Yuma, 30 near Douglas and Naco, 7 at Sasabe
and 5 at Nogales.


Not surprisingly, the Border Patrol echoes the argument of their
ultimate boss, Chertoff, that pedestrian fencing works in these
select urban areas. They call it a "force multiplier," meaning it
gives the law time to respond to crossers who otherwise are within
minutes of a safe house or a waiting van.

Such fencing protects citizens of those towns from chaos and crime.
Without a fence, agents play cat-and-mouse with crossers, a game in
which the agent spots a group, but the group also spots the agent,
and the illegals turn and run back into Mexico. A fence keeps them
from getting away, which means it's as valuable at keeping illegals
in the country, so they can be arrested, as it is at keeping them out
in the first place.

Fence advocates have found new ammo in arrest numbers, down 16
percent this year on the Southwest border. The 262-mile-wide Tucson
sector has seen a significant drop, and the numbers out of the 125-
mile-wide Yuma sector are more impressive.

Yuma now has 50 miles of pedestrian fencing, including a triple-layer
fence separating Mexico from the American town of San Luis. The first
layer is Vietnam-era landing mat that stands 10 feet tall. After that
comes 16 feet of metal mesh, and beyond this comes the third layer, a
chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. This formidable barrier
stretches along 8.6 miles of border.

Yuma sector spokesman Laura Daniels says it has helped bring calm to
San Luis, which once had illegals running through its streets at all
hours. Between this fencing and other barriers, as well as stadium
lighting, cameras and more agents, she says the sector's arrest
numbers have dropped precipitously. In fiscal 2005, apprehensions in
the Yuma sector totaled 138,000. In 2006, they were 118,000. In 2007,
when much of the new fencing began taking effect, apprehensions
dropped to 37,000.

"For 2008, we're on track to apprehend 10,000 to 15,000 aliens," says
Daniels. "It's much harder for anyone to come through Yuma, so
subsequently, they aren't trying."

Sounds like the fence works, doesn't it? But the most important
question in the fence fight always is: Define "works." Remember:
Border Patrol brass can play politics with the best of them, and it
shows in how they spin statistics to convince everyone of the great
job they're doing. When arrests go up, the Border Patrol proclaims
good news: See all the illegals we're catching? When arrests go down,
the Border Patrol proclaims good news again: See all the illegals
we're stopping from coming across in the first place?

Critics wonder how much of the Yuma drop can be attributed to new
fencing, and how much is due to the declining economy. Bear in mind,
too, that much of the landscape around Yuma is flat, making it ideal
fence terrain, and that apprehension numbers are a bad barometer.
They tell us nothing about how many are getting through.

A possible answer to the Yuma "success" is that illegals are simply
walking around the fence. It wouldn't be the first time.

Enforcement advocates point to the San Diego fence, saying it has
been a rousing success in cutting crossings from Tijuana, and
resulting crime in San Diego. But as The Washington Post reported, it
took $39 million to build the first 9 miles. After invoking their
authority to override environmental concerns, the DHS got an
additional $35 million to finish the remaining 3.5 miles.

Total cost? $74 million--more than $5 million a mile. And what did
the San Diego fence do? It moved the illegals over to Arizona. Is
that the definition of "working"?

The same drama plays out wherever a pedestrian fence is built. Santa
Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada says the main effect of fencing west
of Nogales is to reroute illegals to remote areas, resulting in more
lost people, deaths and banditry.

"It pushes the crossers into areas where they become prey and makes
it more profitable for coyotes," says Estrada, adding that the cost
of autopsies and criminal investigations, which the county must
conduct, is a drain on its budget.

"Border Patrol has a huge task, and they're grappling for solutions,
and fencing might be a small part," says Estrada. "But unless they
fence the whole 50 miles in Santa Cruz County, which they won't,
fencing only creates more problems for us." If those 50 miles were
people-fenced, would it deter anybody? No, Estrada says: "Obstacles
like that are easily overcome."

Alice Knagge, who has operated the general store in the border
outpost of Sasabe for 40 years, agrees, saying, "As long as the
Mexican government continues to do nothing for its people, they'll
keep coming across."

Just south of her store, the government has built 7 miles of people
fence that runs east and west from the international crossing--at a
whopping price of $4.9 million per mile, according to the GAO. As a
result, Knagge no longer sees vans stuffed with 20 or 30 people
crossing illegally. "But they've just moved farther west to cross
around San Miguel on the Tohono O'odham Reservation," she says.

Should we people-fence the reservation, too? The Tohono O'odham have
75 miles of border. Using the San Diego standard of $5 million a
mile, that comes to $375 million for a barrier that eventually would
be full of holes along empty terrain.

Something similar already has happened to the eastern portion of the
Sasabe wall.

In an e-mail, rancher Tom Kay writes, "The Border Patrol says they
can't watch it enough to take care of all the cuts, etc., and
therefore, they don't even want it at all." Neither does Kay, whose
land begins east of where the wall ends. All the Sasabe wall has
done, he writes, is redirect the crossings, "causing a large increase
in foot traffic on our ranch."

Kay is expressing a profound truth that everyone along the line
knows: The government has never stopped cross-border traffic; it has
only moved it to another location, usually where there are fewer
people to notice and complain.


When it comes to vehicle barriers--which average $2 million per mile
to install--some of the news is good. Kay, who has 5 miles of
borderland, says they've all but stopped trucks from driving across
his Jarillas Ranch, and they've helped stop the fence cuts that
allowed his cattle to drift into Mexico.

Vehicle barriers have also been installed at Organ Pipe Cactus
National Monument and at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, both
in Arizona's western deserts, as well as at the Coronado National
Memorial south of Sierra Vista. At all three places, they've done
what they were intended to do.

At Organ Pipe, rail-on-post-barriers have blocked 30 miles of its
border since July 2006, and Superintendent Lee Baiza says they've cut
way down on drug drive-throughs. "They're probably the best
investment the Department of Interior has made in a long time," says
Baiza. But Organ Pipe is still a troubled place. Seventy percent of
monument land is closed to the public, because Mexican smugglers make
it unsafe. As recently as March, that figure was 94 percent.

In the San Rafael Valley in the mountains above Patagonia, 4 1/2
miles of border is now blocked by Normandy-style, rail "X" barriers.
They run from Lochiel almost to Montezuma Pass.

Before they went in, residents say, smugglers routinely plowed down
the barbed-wire fence in pickups loaded with drugs. But when Border
Patrol agents chased these bad guys, who were always armed, back into
Mexico, the valley turned into the Wild West. "Those escapes were
really dangerous," says Carol Bercich, a ranger at San Rafael State
Park. "They'd run you over, blow through fences and tear everything
up to get back."

But these barriers, as at Organ Pipe, do little to stop drug-runners.
Traffickers can still get their product into the country by heaving
it over the barriers into trucks waiting on the American side. And
vehicle barriers can be breached: Smugglers have built drive-across
"bridges" over them, and smugglers have even backed up to them in
flatbed trucks and lowered the back end, allowing drug-laden SUVs to
ramp down onto the American side.

The drugs are also still coming across on horseback and on foot. In
fact, San Rafael park manager Lee Eseman says the foot traffic has
spiked since the vehicle barriers went in, most of it from drug
"mules." From a telescope in a kitchen alcove of the main park
residence, Eseman and her rangers can spy out a window at a stretch
of border almost 5 miles wide. They regularly see cartel scouts
watching for the Border Patrol as they guide "mule" trains.

In March, Eseman saw four scouts eyeing the border, including one
looking south. Then nine "mules" appeared walking up the Santa Cruz
River on the Mexican side. At the border, they waited until a truck
filled with marijuana pulled up. The men hoisted the bales onto their
backs and walked into our country. "I watched the whole thing through
the telescope," says Eseman, a law-enforcement officer for Arizona
State Parks.

At her home, a half-mile north of the line, Bercich still hears
illegals walking along the creek about 300 yards from her door. "We
hear their voices, and then the dogs start up," she says. "The foot
traffic just keeps on coming."

At Lyle Robinson's Tres Bellotas Ranch southwest of Arivaca, the
family lived for years with the constant squealing of the gate
outside their kitchen. Their house, situated about 400 yards above
the international line, is a no-man's land at the end of a 13-mile
dirt road. The noise was from pickups jam-packed with illegals
driving into the country in caravans of up to 15 trucks.

The feds ignored these constant drive-throughs until 2006, when they
installed barriers along a portion of the Robinsons' borderland. But
now the pickup trucks pull up to the Mexican side of the barriers and
unload; then the illegals simply step over the barriers and walk in.
So many are still coming that the Robinsons' grandkids, while playing
in the backyard, make a game out of counting them pass by.


The Robinsons also have near their home one of the nine, 90-foot-tall
towers that make up part of Chertoff's dream of a virtual fence. They
loom over a 28-mile stretch of borderland along Arivaca and Sasabe,
and are intended to work in unison with cameras, radars and
unattended ground sensors to detect entries. When Chertoff ditched
much of the people fence, he banked heavily on the ability of the
Boeing Co., the main federal contractor, to make Project 28 work.

But his virtual fence, so far at least, delivers only virtual security.

In spite of its problems--including its radar mistaking raindrops for
people--the DHS is pushing forward. After retooling the technology,
the agency plans to replace the nine mobile towers with 17 permanent
ones, and expand the virtual fence concept elsewhere.

In a stunning admission, project managers said one of their early
mistakes was failing to talk to the Border Patrol, which is part of
the DHS, about what would work and what wouldn't. But the DHS also
failed to properly consult local residents. "They sit back in
Washington pushing their pencils and deciding things," says Alice
Knagge. "But you need to live here to understand how life really
works. They don't listen to people."

Yuma farmer Jim Cuming got a lesson in government relations last
summer when he looked out and saw heavy equipment rolling in. When he
asked what was up, he learned the feds were building a fence on
Bureau of Reclamation right of way abutting his land. It was news to
him. "It's federal property, so technically, they don't have to tell
me anything," says Cuming. "But they could've had the common courtesy
to talk to me."

Now the dominant feature of his once wide-open land is a towering,
diamond-mesh fence. Even as he acknowledges the fence has drastically
reduced crossings along the area it blocks, Cuming says, "I despise it."

Part of his disdain stems from the attitude that has come with it.
When he wants to access his 8-mile strip of land on the west side of
a cement canal, he must unlock, open, close and relock a new bridge
gate. And when he returns, he's greeted by Border Patrol agents
asking who he is and what he's doing there. Cuming, 70, a third-
generation farmer, grew up in Yuma.

"It's comical how I'm treated here and how my employees are treated,"
he says. "They're putting us in jail. There are so many agents now,
you could line them up every quarter-mile. If you can do that, why do
they need a fence?"

Asked if he talked to Homeland Security when he saw the fence going
up, Cuming chuckled. "You might as well talk to God," he says.
"They'll talk to you just as much as God will."


John Ladd learned about the wall going in at his place when the
contractor called to ask about getting his equipment in. But the wall
has done some good at the San Jose Ranch. Ladd's cows no longer drift
into Mexico through fence cuts, risking serious disease outbreaks,
and the drive-throughs and helter-skelter chases back to Mexico have
all but stopped. There have been three since 2005. Prior to that,
there were 20 a month.

But Ladd says the wall has failed to stop people, and Bill Odle, his
neighbor to the west, concurs. "I think that's deliberate from the
highest levels of government," says Odle, a Vietnam vet and former
Marine who flies the American flag over his 50 acres a few hundred
feet north of the line. "They built this wall as a showpiece, so
Americans can see it and say, 'Oh, yeah, that'll stop 'em.' It might
stop a large, TV-watching gringo. But somebody coming from Oaxaca
who's hungry and wants a job, it isn't going to stop him. It's a Band-
Aid on a sucking chest wound. The whole thing is phony. It pisses me
off."

Odle, an environmentalist, also believes the wall is doing real harm
by altering normal animal migration patterns, and he reports seeing
wildlife probing the wall at various places, trying to find a way
through.

Humans have little trouble, however. So far, crossers have defeated
the 10-foot section by hack-sawing the bottom of the metal mesh and
pulling it up to make a door, and by pulling down an entire section
with a rope, a chain and a pickup truck. One day, Ladd watched a
Mexican rancher ride up to the wall on horseback, with knotted nylon
ropes hanging from his saddle. He left the ropes out for illegals to
scale the wall, then collected them again later to distribute to the
next wave.

The most popular method is to drive a van to the wall on the Mexican
side, climb the roof, then jump over the wall onto the conveniently
wide, flat tops of waist-high posts on the American side. The 13-foot
section requires a tool to scale, but this could be something as
simple as a ladder. Some are found hidden in the brush on the
American side, allowing illegals to scramble back into Mexico if
chased. But the illegals also toss hooks and ropes over the wall and
pull themselves up, or jam screwdrivers into the mesh as handholds, a
kind of Spider-Man maneuver.

Sabotage of the wall is constant, and it began even when it was under
construction. One night, after the contractor poured cement and went
home, vandals descended under the darkness to scoop out the still-wet
cement. The act had no practical purpose: It was merely a message to
the gringos that their stinking wall won't work. The worst of it is
that with the wall complete, Ladd says he rarely sees agents
patrolling it.

"They built it, then Border Patrol backed off up toward the highway,"
he says. "If you drive from the river to Naco, which is almost 13
miles, it's hallelujah if you see Border Patrol. They need to be on
the border."

As for those 110 illegals spotted recently on Ladd's land, at least
some were arrested, and that's good news. But nothing on the border
is as it seems.

"Most people think they get arrested, and that ends it," says Ladd.
"But if you're from Mexico and don't have a criminal record in this
country, Border Patrol buys you a sandwich from the Bisbee Deli, and
a Gatorade, and pushes you back across the line into Naco, Sonora.
And within a few hours, here they come again. I've had agents say
they'll catch a group in the morning, then catch the same group that
night. And the whole time, Border Patrol is tearing up my land for
nothing,"

How is a pedestrian fence going to work when each individual gets 15
arrests and voluntary removals before the U.S. attorney decides that
they've really broken the law and prosecutes for illegal entry? How
is a pedestrian fence going to work, as retired Border Patrol agent
and Tucsonan John Slagle asks, when the president and both parties
essentially advocate open borders?

That won't change after the presidential election, which will land
Barack Obama or John McCain in the Oval Office. Does anyone believe
either will provide the money to keep the fence standing against
constant sabotage?

Prediction: In a few years, portions of our pedestrian fence will
look like it's been dynamited; the Border Patrol will still be
demanding more agents and fancier technology; people in the country's
interior will still be thinking if only we had a tall enough fence;
and too many politicians will continue to feed both ideas.

Why not? It's easier than confronting their friends and contributors
by actually enforcing the laws they wrote against hiring people here
illegally, the only real solution.

"I know it sounds radical," says Ladd, "but I think politicians and
corporate America are in cahoots to override our immigration laws.
They don't want solutions, because they're making big money off this
cheap labor. It's blatant. They're just letting them come in, and
this wall is a way to make it look like they're doing something."

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