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Jewelry Corner, a retailer in downtown Brownsville, could see at least a 30 percent decrease in customers if a barrier like the proposed border fence were erected, said Chandru Buxani, the store’s owner.

Other merchants downtown — where 95 percent of the area’s customers come from Mexico — could see a similar downturn, he said.

“By putting a wall, you’re telling them you don’t want them,” he said. “They will take that personally. They would shop in Mexico. They would stay there.” (View multimedia "The Border Fence: Day 2")

While many questions remain about the proposed barrier, the project is worrying Rio Grande Valley agriculture, ecotourism and retailing businesses — industries that bring big bucks to the local economy.

The government hopes the proposed fence will help curtail the flow of drugs, undocumented immigrants and potential terrorists north across the U.S.-Mexico border. But local critics say it won’t be effective and will put a damper on Valley commerce. They favor a “virtual fence” of lights, sensors, aerial reconnaissance drones and more personnel from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

While there are broad, open spaces along other parts of the border, such as in Arizona, the Valley has a river, farms, U.S. Border Patrol stations and levees, and many people cross the border legitimately each day to shop, dine and work.

Locals wonder, if a fence is built, where it will go: through urban areas like the Brownsville-Matamoros borderplex, along the Rio Grande, between the levee system and the river, or on top of the levees — all of which have implications for Valley businesses.

Agriculture

In 2006, the total cash value for agricultural crops in the four-county Valley region topped $470.5 million, according to Texas Cooperative Extension statistics provided by the Texas Department of Agriculture. The Valley’s citrus industry alone — mostly grapefruit and oranges — brings the area $150 million to $200 million a year.

Three main issues center around the proposed fence’s potential effect on Valley agriculture, said John McClung, president of the Mission-based Texas Produce Association, which lobbies for the produce industry in Washington and Austin.

If the fence gets built — and that’s a big “if” according to him — McClung said the impact depends on how much land it would involve, whether that land would be taken from producers by the government and how water access would be affected.

Fertile topsoil along the Rio Grande’s banks and ready access to water allow for high crop yields. The river supplies almost all of the Valley’s irrigation, which requires 24-hour access to control for crops.

“Any kind of fence that would interfere with that access is a real problem,” McClung said.

At a farm in Cameron County, young, green cotton plants could be seen recently, growing in a field beside a dirt road southeast of Los Indios. Water crept along the rows, the irrigation supplied from river water pumped from a canal that runs along the levee, about 250 yards from the river.

The farm is run by the family of Tudor G. Uhlhorn, managing partner with Har-Vest Partnership, his family’s farming business. The family grows sugar cane, cotton, grain sorghum and corn on 3,500 acres in six locations in Cameron County.

Nearby, where the levee overlooks a weir dam in the Rio Grande, Uhlhorn points to a black inner tube floating in the rapids.

“That inner tube right there is someone’s crossing vehicle,” he said. Shortly afterward, a Border Patrol agent rode up in an SUV, and Uhlhorn introduced himself and two visitors.

“Logistically, I don’t think they’ve really thought it through,” Uhlhorn said of the fence proposal. “Out in Arizona it’s pretty simple,” but along the Rio Grande “it gets vastly complicated in a hurry. It just sounds like a nightmare that sounded good on paper.”

Fred Schuster, an Hidalgo County vegetable, grain sorghum, corn and sunflower farmer, has also been thinking about the proposed fence.

“Until we see something concrete, it’s hard to have an opinion,” said Schuster, who along with other family members owns Rio Fresh — a San Juan grower, packer and shipper that farms 3,000 Valley acres, 440 of which are south of the levee, just north of the Rio Grande east of the Pharr bridge.

“It would make it more difficult” if the fence were erected along the levees, he said. “We’d have to go through gates. If it’s anything more than two miles away then it really gets to be a nuisance.”

A fence would affect his bottom line slightly, he said, with additional expenses such as paying for the extra gas to drive to access points.

Schuster could be found recently driving a visitor in his truck along a dirt road about a mile south of the dusty parking lot at Rio Fresh’s warehouse-sized packing shed. The road ran past his land along the river south of San Juan and Alamo. One sunflower field was plowed and ready for planting, while another held young plants perking from the ground but without flowers yet.

A handful of white cattle egrets milled along a canal as he drove back across the river levee.

While these birds aren’t a rare sight in the Valley, other more elusive species bring bird-watchers — and their wallets — flocking to the Rio Grande.

Ecotourism

Ecotourism — including bird- and butterfly-watching, nature photography and canoeing — brought $125 million into the Valley’s economy and supported 2,500 local jobs in 2006, according to McAllen Chamber of Commerce estimates.

Some worry about the proposed fence’s potential effect on Rio Grande bird sanctuaries that are the area’s ecotourism attraction.

“You have to have the habitat to keep the wildlife, which attracts these wildlife watchers who spend a lot of money to come down here and a lot of money while they’re here,” said Nancy Brown, spokeswoman for the South Texas Refuge Complex, the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that oversees South Texas’ three national wildlife refuges.

“Having a big wall there, to me, would mean fewer and fewer people would come down there to bird,” said Carolyn Sternberg, 64, who travels the nation with her husband. During the winter the two retirees can be found volunteering at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge south of Alamo and bird-watching throughout the Valley.

Fewer bird-watchers is a scenario that concerns Keith Hackland, 58, who owns Alamo Inn, a bed and breakfast in Alamo where the sign out front reads, “birders welcome.” The inn brings in about $60,000 to $70,000 in revenue a year, he said, and 80 percent to 85 percent of his guests are birders, butterfly-watchers and photographers. He also runs river birding tours.

Narrow bands of unique ecosystems exist along the Rio Grande that support their own kinds of birds and butterflies.

“The rarest nesting birds are found in the river forest,” Hackland said, adding that some species can’t be found anywhere else in the United States or Canada.

But the Valley’s prime status for bird-watching would be jeopardized “if we wipe out that river forest or simply remove access to it or reduce access to it,” he said. “Then we have eliminated the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Retail

Mexicans who cross into Texas to shop provide billions of dollars to the state and account for more than a fourth of the retail trade in Brownsville, El Paso, Laredo and McAllen combined, according to Federal Reserve officials and experts.

While cities and counties on the U.S. side of the border are among the poorest in the United States, they have higher per capita retail trade than the national average because retailers are serving more than the local population, according to research from the Center for Border Economic Studies at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg.

From 1978 to 2001, an average of more than 35 percent of McAllen’s total retail goods sold ended up in Mexico, according to Dallas Fed research. Brownsville’s exported sales weighed in at more than 25 percent of the city’s total.

In 2001, Mexicans who shopped in McAllen, Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso bought about $3.2 billion worth of goods — roughly 19 percent of all retail sales along the Texas border and 1.9 percent of the state’s retail sales, according to Dallas Fed data.

Most of the shoppers who frequent downtown Brownsville stores cross legally at the bridges linking the city with Matamoros just south of the river, local retailers said.

A fence could foster a perception among Mexican shoppers that they aren’t wanted at businesses north of the border, said Ernest Kim, who owns an apparel store downtown. He said he doesn’t know how much a fence through downtown Brownsville would affect his business, but it would be “very negative.”

The manager at Kim’s apparel store, Fernando Nuñez, said 98 percent to 99 percent of the store’s shoppers are Mexicans who cross legally and then return home. Most live in Matamoros, but some also come from Tampico, Veracruz and Ciudad Victoria.

The store schedules extra staff around Mexican holidays, and sales decline if there are border-crossing concerns, he said. If the fence is built downtown, the store’s sales and customer numbers would drop by at least 40 percent, he predicted.

“That’s going to deter people just on intimidation,” he said. “If we have problems at the border, that’s when we feel it.”