UT Brownsville still fighting border fence
The steel fence that the U.S. government wants to build along the Mexican border would do more than slice through the University of Texas' Brownsville campus and cut off the golf course from the rest of the school.The school used to be called Texas Southmost and was near the Fort Brown convention center. It has not always had the golf course along the river. If it were just about the golf course they could probably work a land swap and put the course somewhere else. Judging by the picture of it in the Chronicle their current course will never be confused with Pebble Beach.School officials say it would make a mockery of the very mission of the university: promoting close ties between the U.S. and Mexico.
The university — built close to the Rio Grande on land where the United States and Mexico traded cannon blasts during the Mexican-American War 160 years ago — recruits Mexican students, offers government and business classes in English and Spanish and turns out sorely needed bilingual teachers. It has a biological field station in Mexico and hosts educators at a Binational Conference every spring. About 400 of the 17,000 students are from Mexico, and more than half of them commute across the river to class.
The fence, if built as envisioned by the U.S. Border Patrol, would run a mile north of the Rio Grande, the international boundary, cutting off about 180 acres of the 465-acre campus. University officials say it would also thwart its hopes of expanding someday toward the river, and send the wrong message across the border.
"To slice off and fence off the 'bi' part of 'binational' violates the essence of this university," said university President Juliet V. Garcia, whose office is situated in what was once the thick-walled, tan-brick hospital at Fort Brown, built shortly after the Civil War.
On Monday, university officials will ask a federal judge to force government officials to work with the school on alternatives to the fence, continuing a long-running legal fight that began when the Department of Homeland Security sued the school for refusing to allow surveyors onto its property.
In March, a federal judge ordered Homeland Security to consider the school's "unique status as an institution of higher learning" in minimizing the impact on the "environment, culture, commerce and quality of life" at the university. But the two sides have been unable to agree on some kind of alternative to a fence.
In a May 27 letter to the university, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that in place of a fence, it would have to station Border Patrol agents every 50 yards along the 3.4 mile-stretch around campus, and the salaries alone would amount to $71 million.
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What they are really fighting is the idea of border enforcement. I get the impression that the school administrators don't want any enforcement of the border in their area. They certainly have not suggested any practical alternative that has been reported in this story. I really don't see why it is that big a problem for the Mexican students to come over the international bridges and go through the same process as all others transiting the border.
There are other universities along the border that seem to be dealing with the problem. Pan American University is in Edinburg to the north.
Another reason to ignore the schools argument is the campus sets just across the Rio Grande from Matamoras which is the home of the infamous Gulf Cartel. It sounds like a bad idea to have the only open border crossing along that part of the border going through your campus. It would become an obvious transit point for the cartel and endanger the students and the faculty. I would be surprised to see that addressed in the schools brief.
BTW, I am not impressed with the argument about bilingual education. English immersion is a much more effective method of teaching students to speak and learn in English. It also makes them much more prepared to enter the work force. I graduated from high school in San Benito which is about 20 miles north of the campus in question. The most successful Hispanics were the ones who spoke good English and there were plenty who did.
The politicians who voted for the Secure Fence Act were primarily interested in the symbolism of a wall, not its substance, otherwise they would have checked to see if the original San Diego border wall had worked. In fact, it hadn’t. The Congressional Research Service concluded that the border wall “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border in San Diego.” Recent Border Patrol statistics bear this conclusion out. Fiscal year 2007 saw a 7% increase in illegal crossings in the San Diego sector. In contrast, during the same year crossings border-wide dropped by 20%. The Del Rio sector, which like the rest of Texas east of El Paso has never had a wall, saw a 46% drop. The unwalled Rio Grande Valley saw a 34% drop, bringing illegal entries in that sector to a 15 year low. Even Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recognized the border wall’s ineffectiveness, saying, “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance which should not obscure the fact that it is a much more complicated problem than putting up a fence which someone can climb over with a ladder or tunnel under with a shovel.”
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