...Now
the border loomed again, bristling with guards and cameras. This time,
if caught, he faced six months in detention. He didn’t care. “I’ll go
back and try again,” he said. Nothing could stop him, he said. Not even a
new wall.
Across
the globe, walls are going up. In Europe, columns of refugees snaking
over borders have sent leaders scrambling for solutions in concrete and
razor wire. Hungary has erected a 108-mile-long fence to keep out
Syrians; at the French port of Calais, Britain is funding a barrier to
prevent Afghans and Africans slipping into the channel tunnel. Public
sympathy for immigrants, once kindled by images of drowned infants
washing up on European shores, has been curdled by terrorist attacks in
Brussels, Paris and Nice. The defensive mood has spread to Africa, where
Kenya plans to build a 440-mile-long wall along its frontier with
Somalia to keep out the Shabab militia.
As
a reporter based in the Middle East, I’ve mostly been on the other side
of those walls, in places that might be described as the underbelly of
globalization. This spring, in a scruffy Egyptian fishing village at the
mouth of the Nile, I met restless teenagers who, drawn by images of Western glamour on Facebook,
yearned to board the smugglers’ boats. In the devastated Syrian city of
Aleppo, I had breakfast with a surgeon who, as bombs exploded outside,
spoke of dispatching his family to Canada. In Tripoli, Libya, a young
Nigerian migrant named Oke peeked through a church door, mulling his chances of surviving the fraught voyage across the Mediterranean.\
And
yet, the closer you get to the border, the fewer people think that it
might work — even among Trump supporters and law enforcement officials.
“The wall is a fantasy,” said Tony Estrada, the sheriff of Santa Cruz
County, Ariz., a border district that is one of the busiest corridors of
drugs and people smuggling in America. “I don’t care how big, how high
or how long it is — it’s not going to solve the problem.”
He sighed. “But people are eating it up,’’ he said. “I can’t believe it.”
Mr.
Estrada, who is 73, knows better than most that borders are more than
lines on a map. Born in Mexico, he arrived in America at the age of 1.
Until the 1970s, he said, the border had an organic quality. During the
Cinco de Mayo fiesta, dancers paraded from Mexico into America then back
again; beauty queens from both countries sat together on a platform
that straddled the border; white tourists crossed into Mexico for the
bullfights, the night life and the “rum runs” — cheap alcohol.
Then
the drug wars exploded, and in 1995, a fence started to rise. Crime
fell sharply, but the drop exacted a cost. Tourism withered, the curio
shops closed and there was a painful tear in the cross-border culture.
“The dynamic changed,” he said.
...The
fence itself is a formidable sight, spanning about one-third of the
2,000-mile frontier from California to Texas, and patrolled by about
20,000 agents. One of the most tightly guarded stretches is around the
city of Nogales, which straddles the border. Here, the first world abuts
the third. American Nogales, orderly and somniferous, pushes up against
Mexican Nogales, an unruly metropolis of 300,000 souls where the
Sinaloa cartel looms large.
John
Lawson, a border patrol officer born in Pennsylvania, took us on a tour
of the fence, a slatted metal barrier, 18 to 30 feet high, that
undulates along the hills on either side of Nogales. It was built at a
cost of $4 million per mile, which includes an array of military-style
fortifications. We passed pole-mounted cameras, radars, vibration
sensors and, in the dip of valley, a line of World War II-style Normandy
barriers meant to stop any Mexican vehicle from crashing through
America’s front gate. The border patrol reaches into the air, too, with a
fleet of drones, balloons and Blackhawk helicopters.
And yet, the “migrantes” and the “traficantes” still slip through.
...To
modern-day cowboys and ranchers, Mexican migrants are the new foe.
Ranching families thronged to the Cochise County Fair, outside the
border town of Douglas, for an archetypal show of rural Americana.
Children screamed with delight at the turkey race as their parents went
to the rodeo; neon-lit stalls sold corn dogs, Confederate flags and gun
paraphernalia.
Tony
Fraze, a rancher and Trump supporter, paused to chat. Migrants were the
scourge of the area, he said. They damaged fences, vandalized water
systems and left trash that killed livestock. “You can’t leave your door
open or your keys in your truck,” he said. “If you do, they might take
them and kill you, too.” He mentioned Rob Krentz, a local rancher shot
in 2010 in a traumatic case that briefly made the national news.
...Dark
clouds scudded the sky as we drove 30 miles east to to see Ed Ashurst, a
cowboy of craggy temperament. He is the author of three books on
ranching and one on the migrant problem, titled “Alligators in the
Moat.” “Immigration is a multikazillion dollar industry,” he declared.
“They have scouts on every mountain and an intelligence operation better
than the C.I.A.”
The
night before, he found a migrant snoozing in his saddle house, and
promptly turned him over to the border patrol. He hates President Obama
(“not a patriot”) and likes Mr. Trump, but dismissed talk of a border
wall as a “farce.” His solution was to deploy Navy SEALs along the
border, arm them with AR-15 rifles, and give them orders to shoot anyone
who crossed.
Later, on a walk through a field, Mr. Ashurst pointed to the detritus
left by migrants — food tins in Spanish, plastic bags. I asked if he
felt any compassion for the migrants’ plight. His voice rose sharply.
“I’ve helped more Mexicans than these activist types,” he said. “But
just because I’m a Republican, and I want a closed border, I’m a sorry
son of a bitch.”
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