Don't trust federal cultural warriors about length, effect of border fence

The federal government’s fence builders appear to be backing down — at least for the moment — with their plans to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border.

Word leaked out two weeks via a Homeland Security Department memo that the construction of 153 miles of border fencing was imminent in Texas.

This would include the construction of an almost continuous fence from Los Indios, south of Harlingen, all the way to Brownsville.

The government memo, sent to some property owners, advised that contents of the letter not be made public.

“We ask that you please not publicly distribute,” the government memo stated.

Local government and community leaders were furious when they learned of the government memo. It was only weeks before that border leaders were assured by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that they would be consulted before any final decisions were made on the border fence.

In the Rio Grande Valley, political and community leaders were under the impression that fencing would be restricted to concentrated urban areas.

The preliminary map of border fencing, which was included in the leaked memo the government wanted to keep secret, indicated an opposite intent.

A border coalition of business and political leaders has responded quickly, not only in their continued denunciations of the repulsive border fence idea, but in applying pressure on federal law enforcement agencies.

Homeland Security officials quickly backtracked, saying that preliminary maps of fence sites were “drafted to serve as a starting point,” and no final decisions have been made. Mike Allen of McAllen, vice chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said last week that the early fence map is no longer applicable, or so the coalition was told by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner.

It would be best if Allen and other border community leaders didn’t put too much trust in those promises. The federal government, after all, is fully empowered to build as many miles of border fencing as it wants in the wake of the unfortunate passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

President Bush, the same politician who had long opposed the building of border fencing, signed this hideous piece of legislation into law last fall.

Bush signed the bill in his desperate hopes that such an action would help preserve his party’s control of Congress.

It didn’t help, after all, with Bush’s Republican Party losing big in the November elections and the fence bill doing nothing to arouse turnout from the GOP’s vaunted right-wing base.

It should be noted that both Texas senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, voted for the fence bill after years of saying they opposed such a thing.

Alas, all of those awards showered on the two senators by border and Valley chamber organizations did nothing to dissuade the two Republican senators from placing their party and their conservative suburban political base over the wishes of our South Texas communities.

It is remarkable to think that those of us on the border will have to deal with expensive, ugly and ineffective border fencing because Bush wanted to placate the noisy immigration restrictionists of the far right of his party.

This is the crowd fighting their culture wars to protect America from Mexican illegals. So consequently, a border fence is badly needed to protect the nation from the brigades of construction workers, housekeepers, landscapers, farm workers and other dastardly folk who come here looking for work.

Presumably, America’s self-appointed culture warriors will also build a moat filled with alligators to offer further protection from those evil immigrants who come to our land speaking foreign languages and eating strange foods.

We hope the border coalition along with South Texas community leaders of all types will raise all possible ruckuses to minimize the building of this so-called border fence.

We fear that eventually much more of this fence will be built than is necessary, or wanted by our communities, but the good fight needs to be fought.

The voices of the border are as authentically American as those of the right-wing culture wars crowd, and that message needs to be sent over-and-over, for as long as it takes, to Austin and Washington.