South Texas fence sitters

NY Times:

Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this minuscule border city, (Granjeno) stood steps from the back door of his simple brick house and chopped the air with a hand. “This is where the actual fence would be,” he said.

And the federal property line, he said, would be at his shower.

Mr. Garza, 36, a Hidalgo County sheriff’s sergeant who traces his family here to 1767, was imagining what life would be like in the shadow of the Proposed Tactical Infrastructure — the wall, to many outraged South Texans — that the Department of Homeland Security has committed to building by the end of the year.

Although federal officials say that its location and design are still in flux, official maps of the Texas third of the 370-mile intermittent pedestrian barrier from Brownsville to California have provoked widespread alarm among property owners fearful of being cut off from parts of their own land or access to the Rio Grande for livestock and crops.

In the Rio Grande Valley last week, yards were plastered with signs demanding “No border wall,” raising the prospect of a protracted legal, if not physical, standoff, although Congress has recently taken steps to review the original plan. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is under fire from some fellow Republicans for amendments to a financing bill last month that they say scale back the fence.

At the same time, local concern was heightened by letters in December from the United States Army Corps of Engineers to property owners in the southwest — 71 of them in Texas — who had refused access to their land for up to a year of survey work and were given 30 days to comply or face a federal lawsuit.

One was Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, who owns three acres in Calabos, the remnant of a 12,000-acre land grant to her ancestors in 1747 by the King of Spain. The barrier would rise within feet of her backyard as well.

“It’s all I have,” said Dr. Tamez, 72, a widow who served for years as a chief nurse in medical centers of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. “Who do they think we are down here? Somebody sitting under a cactus with a sombrero taking a nap?”

Her deadline expired last Monday with no legal action.

But Laura Keehner, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, said Friday, “We will begin that process as early as next week.”

Ms. Keehner said that of 135 letters sent seeking access for surveys, 30 local landowners have so far agreed. “They recognize that a fence will help fight drug trafficking and human trafficking,” she said.

The government would have to pay for any private land acquired or condemned for the fence, at a price set by federal evaluators. But landowners would not be compensated for allowing surveys of their property, except for cases of damage.

...

Valley officials and residents who denounced the fence said they were not soft on illegal immigration or blind to the dangers of drug smuggling and terrorism. “Who doesn’t want security?” said Mayor Richard Cortez of McAllen. “Our fight with the government is not over their goals, it’s how they go about them.”

“You can go over, under and around a fence,” he said, “and it can’t make an apprehension.”

Instead, he said, the government should deepen the river, clear the land for better surveillance and create a legal Mexican worker program.

...

My guess is the environmental wackos would not like that idea either. There will eventually be a legal Mexican worker program if we can get control of the border. There proposal does not accomplish that objective. What fences do is channel crossings so that they can be monitored. They are already having that effect at other places along the border where they have been constructed. One alternative that may work in some areas is the use of internet video cams as proposed by Gov. Perry.