Study: Border agents, illegal crossings harm environment

Illegal immigration and the activity to stop it are having harmful effects on the environment at the border, according to research by a professor at New Mexico Tech. Professor Haoying Wang – an environmental economist – has been studying the impact of human activity along the border with Mexico for the past two years in response to a proposal by the National Park Service. “It’s having a very significant impact,” Wang told the Journal. He said he studied the entire Mexican border, from Texas to California. He is using raw NASA images and large-scale sensing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to model vegetation cover change from 2008 to 2017. Temperature and weather data are also being used. He said the large numbers of people trying to cross the border, especially in remote areas, and the large number of agents patrolling the areas are accelerating changes that were already occurring as the result of grazing that began in the 19th century, as well as climate change. Wang said the area along the border has a much harder time recovering from the loss of vegetation because of its dry climate. “There’s no sufficient data to determine just how many people are coming across the border,” he said. “But the number of apprehensions (from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection) is available, as is the number of border agents.” He factored those numbers into his research. The CBP has reported more than 684,000 apprehensions in the Southwestern region since last October. In May alone, there were 144,000 apprehensions. And Wang’s study, which was also featured in the publication Physics World and originally published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, listed 20,000 Border Patrol agents working along the border...MORE