by Cynthia Moreno

Created on: December 01, 2010   Last Updated: December 02, 2010

In the past few years there has been a very aggressive debate about a border fence on the southern border.  The border fence is going to be a waste of time and money that the taxpayers do not have and this does not even take into consideration the considerable damage to the environment that such a fence would cause.  The fence is not going to stop anyone, because what has already happened is we find tunnels, the drug traffickers do not go over the fence, they go under it.  Global Security.org stated that over 40 tunnels under the border had been built between 2001 and 2006.

Our southern border is 1,952 miles long and the fence would have to span the entire length of the border to be even partially effective.  Most estimates put the cost of the fence from $3-3.8 million a mile, but the fence in California has already cost as much as $11 million a mile.  All of this cost does not include acquiring land that will have to be taken from ranch owners that have owned their properties sometimes for several generations nor does it include manpower, labor to build the fence or maintenance. Some estimates are as high as $50 billion just to build the fence.  

The virtual fence project has been abandoned already by the Obama administration and for good reason, in under 60 miles they had already spent $1 billion for the demonstration and the fence had several technical difficulties.  It was probably a good thing that they abandoned this already failing project, because Homeland Security inspector general reported in December that since 1998, the Department of Homeland Security and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service spent $429 million on video and remote surveillance on the borders. Yet, nearly half of 489 cameras were never installed, 60 percent of sensor alerts are never investigated, 90 percent of the rest are false alarms, and only 1 percent overall resulted in arrests.

The environmental damage to the border areas has been tremendous and native tribes that have been in the area are concerned about the damage to fauna, increase in flooding and the disturbance of endangered species in the border areas.  A fence cuts off migration routes and cuts of ranchers and farmers access to water. Up to 75% of protected land and refuges would be affected by the fence and the DHS has exempted themselves from all environmental protections including clean water.  The fence cuts off the Rio Grande and without this

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