by Note: this post should have appeared after the one about the El Paso missions. Once again on this slow journey across the U.S., I am trying to get caught up.
As I visited border towns in California, Arizona and Texas, I didn’t encounter one person in favor of the fence along the southern U.S. border–let alone any support for adding to it. And locals are dismayed to learn that people from other parts of the country think the border region is dangerous. It is not.
First, a little background…
Fences demarking the border have been in place for decades, (see the old photo in this post) but most of the fence that is currently in place was authorized by Congress in 2006 under George W Bush’s administration. Depending upon which article one reads, there are now about 650 miles of fence in place along a border that is over 1900 miles in length.
After the big fence building push from 2007 to 2009, the Dept of Homeland Security began to emphasize technology–drones, sensors, etc.–rather than building more physical walls because all the walls did, according to Border Patrol officials, was change the paths of entry. The coyote guides simply led small groups of migrants around the end of the fence. The route was simply somewhat longer than before.
Which brings us to conditions on the border now…
During my tour of El Paso Missions I had a lengthy conversation with a woman who had lived there all her life and had seen the steady stream of migrants and never felt threatened by them. She has family and friends on both sides of the border. She told me that she is puzzled by why–all of a sudden–there is a big influx of people from Central America. Why now? She asked. Who is encouraging them to come now? She said. And why in these big groups?
I share her questions and, like her, have no answers. In my more paranoid moments I wonder if some wealthy U.S. political donor–either on the right or the left–is sponsoring these groups to stir up anti-immigration sentiment–to create a sense of threat–for political gain. I won’t go into the arguments on both the right and left, but I wanted to show these photos of what’s actually going on in the border area these days.
