On the Border: The 'Virtual Fence' Isn't Working

Presidential candidates talk big about security to the south, but so far electronic surveillance costing millions is doing little to keep illegals out

"Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder," says Arizona Governor Napolitano Jeff Topping

by Geri Smith and Keith Epstein

It's a scene replayed often along the southwestern border of the U.S. Helicopter-borne Border Patrol agents cruising above a stretch of harsh Sonoran Desert known to immigrants as la puerta dorada (the golden door) spot a white Ford F-150 pickup truck packed with a dozen Mexicans barreling northward on Arizona's State Road 286. The migrant smuggler driving the truck whirls around, floors the accelerator, and zips 20 miles back to the border, swerving wildly to avoid tire-puncturing metal spikes placed on the two-lane highway. Two helicopters and five patrol cars follow in hot pursuit. The truck screeches to a halt at a brand-new border fence, and four of the men, including the suspected smuggler, scramble onto the cab's roof, shimmy over the barrier, and drop to the Mexican side.

The 18-foot fence—an impressive-looking series of vertical steel bars, three inches in diameter, filled with concrete and reinforcing rods—is a prototype designed especially to thwart climbers. As shotgun-toting agents arrest the eight migrants left behind, the four who got away watch from a hilltop on the Mexican side until a Chevy Suburban pulls up next to them, doubtless ready for the next run around the seven-mile-long barrier. "Border fences don't keep people out—they just slow them down," muses Jesús Rodríguez, a 15-year Border Patrol veteran, after the Jan. 23 chase near Sasabe, Ariz., one of the most popular crossing points for migrants trying to get to prized jobs as cooks, nannies, and construction workers. "People who want to get into the U.S. really badly won't let something like a fence get in the way."

AN IFFY PROPOSITION

That's not exactly how Republican Presidential candidates make it sound these days with their tough talk about "sealing off the border." Some 12 million or so unauthorized immigrants are already in the U.S., and nearly half a million more sneak across the border every year. Comprehensive immigration reform is stalled until a new President takes office, so Republican candidates are racing to offer simpler solutions. On the stump, John McCain, once a booster of more sophisticated remedies, now pledges that "as President, I will secure our borders" first. Fellow GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee also call for a fence. Huckabee blames a "dysfunctional" government for failing to keep migrants out.

Anyone who has spent any time along the no man's land separating Mexico and the U.S. realizes that the proposition of a sealed border is iffy at best. From Tijuana to Texas, along nearly 2,000 miles of scorching desert, steep canyons, winding rivers, and urban mazes, Federal agents routinely strive for the unattainable—to stop the flow of people so desperate for better lives that they will climb, run, swim, tunnel, bribe, and even hide in car undercarriages to get into the U.S. In the past 15 years the government has erected nearly 300 miles of fencing, including sturdy sheet-metal barriers. The number of Border Patrol agents has almost doubled since 2000, to 14,900, supplemented now by up to 3,000 National Guard troops. Still, migrants continue to cross. And they'll continue to as long as Mexico's per capita income remains one-fifth that of the U.S.—and employers in El Norte welcome them.

The latest chapter in the effort to seal the border is an experiment called Project 28. No one thinks building a metal fence along the entire border is practical. It would cost billions to build and tens of billions more to maintain, and migrants would still climb over it at unpatrolled spots. So the Bush Administration has embarked on what it hopes is a lower-cost, more effective alternative, borrowed from Pentagon plans for future warfare. The idea is to connect a web of radar, infrared cameras, ground sensors, and airborne drones to extend the eyes and ears of the Border Patrol. This "virtual fence" is taking shape along a 28-mile stretch of the border just south of Tucson—right where the high-speed chase occurred. Nine futuristic towers rise 98 feet above the desert.