In Texas, Weighing Life With a Border Fence

[XemaSab]

Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this small border city, 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.

Juan Hernandez sounds resigned to the fence. “I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re going to do it,” 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 build by the end of the year.

Although federal officials say 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.

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This border fence is a crappy plan. It would involve razing the only major riparian corridor in south Texas, and it would be devestating to local wildlife. I bird, and the area along the Rio Grande is hallowed ground for birders. In short, it would cut a hole in North America's avifauna. :(

[xchrom]

1. The Great Wall of America. nt