Border whine about fence

NY Times:

Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas branch in Brownsville, saw a slight problem in the route of a border fence that federal officials displayed at a community meeting earlier this month.

“Part of our university,” Dr. Zavaleta said, “would be on the Mexican side of the fence.”

What about traffic between classes, he wondered. “Would the students need to show a passport?”

He was not the only one who was startled. Local leaders throughout South Texas have been voicing puzzlement and alarm at the implications of the barrier, which Congress has authorized the Department of Homeland Security to construct along 370 miles of the United States-Mexico border, including 153 miles in Texas, by December 2008.

Some of the gravest concern involves the effect on wildlife in the 90,000 acres of national refuges in South Texas, where bumper stickers read “No Border Wall” and a group of naturalists, Los Caminos del Rio, has been staging ecotourism forays into a long-closed sanctuary to draw attention to endangered habitats.

Customs and Border Protection officials say that the path of the fence is far from settled and that they are discussing it with local officials.

But maps like the one shown in Brownsville on June 4 by Chief David Aguilar of the Border Patrol put the route along a levee built inland to hold back flooding on the Rio Grande. That location, some here say, would in effect cede to Mexico the land on the other side of the fence up to the official international border, the middle of the Rio Grande.

In Brownsville, Dr. Zavaleta said, that path would cut off not only the International Technology, Education and Commerce campus of the University of Texas and Texas Southmost College, which is in a former shopping center about a mile from the main campus, but also its golf course and a national historic site, Fort Brown, where an upright cannon marks an opening skirmish of the Mexican War.

Even the heavily trafficked bridge between Brownsville and Matamoros, Mexico, would be on the Mexican side of the fence, Dr. Zavaleta said.

He said Chief Aguilar had seemed taken aback by the observations and agreed to review the route.

“Nothing has been finalized yet,” said Xavier Rios, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. “To say something will be cut off is way premature.”

Mr. Rios added that the fence would have many access points to allow monitored passage.

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These issues will be dealt with as the route is finalized. The access points will probably be pretty active in several cities. Whining about the changes caused by the fence suggest that some people are not concerned about the problems caused by illegal migration. They will now learn that one of those problems is the inconvenience that will be caused them and their neighbors along the border. They will learn to deal with it.