Border fence is working in New Mexico

Houston Chronicle:

At this fabled border crossing, where the last armed conflict between the United States and Mexico flared, the rancorous debate over the new U.S. anti-immigrant fence has been resolved.

The fence works, residents north and south of it say. At least it works for now on this snippet of the line.

"You hear it all the time: Fences don't work. Fences don't work," said Mark Winder, a transplanted New Englander and part-time deputy sheriff who lives on a small ranch outside Columbus, N.M., where a 3-mile stretch of wall was completed in August. "I live 2½ miles from the border, and the fence is working."

Many merchants agree in Palomas, once a sleepy farm town, now a booming haven for smugglers.

"The fence has destroyed the economy here," said Fabiola Cuellar, a hardware-store clerk on the main street of Palomas who used to sell supplies to the throngs heading north from here. "Things are going back to the way they were before."

Of course, with only about one-fifth of the fence complete, migrants from Mexico and other countries who had planned to cross the border illegally in places such as Palomas-Columbus can simply go elsewhere.

But U.S. officials have vowed to complete nearly 400 miles of the fence by the end of next year. Workers in August and September built 70 miles of it here, in Arizona and in parts of California. Thousands more Border Patrol agents, electronic monitors and other measures will tighten the squeeze.

James Johnson's 3,000-acre family farm abuts the border west of Columbus. "Where there is a will, there's a way," said Johnson, 32, of some migrants' ability to get around, over or under any barrier.

"But anything is better than just running across the border anytime you want to," he said.

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The fence, a 15-foot-high phalanx of girders tightly spaced and rooted deeply in the earth, is a jarring obstruction to the otherwise "for miles and miles" view of these parched high plains.

Rather than a solid wall, the barrier more closely resembles a vertical iron grate. It lets people on either side see across the border while preventing them from crossing it.

Its builders say the fence permits wildlife free passage. But the spaces between the posts seem tight enough to prevent even the wiliest coyote from slipping through.

The Border Patrol made about 36,000 apprehensions in New Mexico in the first 10 months of fiscal 2007, which ended Sept. 30. That's a huge drop from fiscal 2006, when nearly 74,000 illegal crossers were caught on the state's border, according to government records.

Palomas and Columbus, dusty pinpricks in the vast Chihuahuan Desert, were carved into border history nine decades ago when Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary and bandit, raided the New Mexican town with about 450 troops.

The attack, repulsed by a detachment of U.S. cavalry, left 18 Americans and as many as 100 Mexican raiders dead. And it sparked the nearly yearlong expedition of 10,000 U.S. soldiers led by Gen. John. J. Pershing deep into Mexico in fruitless pursuit of Villa.

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The "Punitive Expedition" as it was called gave George Patton his first taste of "combat." While on patrol in cars and trucks his group came across a ranch where one of the leaders of the bandits was staying. They assaulted the hideout and took him out along with some of his associates. Patton later used this "mechanized" assault as a reason to put him in charge of training and leading the US first tank units in World War I. He proved to be an excellent tank commander. Unfortunately, the War Department decided to not support armored divisions after the war and sent him back to the horse cavalry until shortly before World War II.

If this modest section of the fence has led to a reduction in illegal immigration crossing of 50 percent, then that suggest that the finished fence will be even more effective and will help to regularize the immigration process. We need to expedite the process.