LETTER TO THE EDITOR
From The Front Lines
Of The Border Wars
To the Editor:
Our pal Kelly Kimbro lives on a ranch in Arizona near the Hadley’s Diamond A Ranch which is on the border with Mexico. I was riding with Kelly and her dad Warner Glenn in the Animas Mountains of the Diamond A Ranch the day that Robert Krentz was killed on his ranch.
Kelly was featured on CNN on Wednesday in a report on the border wall. As she points out in the interview, building a discontinuous section of wall in the middle of the high desert is not going to make America any more safe and secure. Almost all of the drugs come across the way everything else does – by truck on roads at the 50 ports of entry or in ships or air freight from China.
Most illegal aliens, like viruses, come in on airplanes and just overstay their visas, no ladders, tunnels or hikes in the desert necessary. Or they go to Canada and walk across to the U.S. – anywhere on the border.
The Texas border with Mexico is 1,200 miles long, consisting entirely of the Rio Grande River. Since there is no practical way to build a wall in the middle of the river, the wall would have to be built out of the floodplain in Texas, effectively ceding the river and north bank to Mexico. Almost all of the right-of-way in Texas is privately owned, and they aren’t selling. Like Kelly, they know that walls in the desert won’t stop drugs that are coming across in 18 wheelers and foreigners coming in on cheap flights with strange bugs.
We can do better on illegal immigration and drug smuggling. But not with political theater in the high desert.
CHIP NORTHRUP
Cooperstown