An Associated Press report on Thursday teased “450 miles of border wall” that might be built by 2020, which sounds like a lot. But then you get to the crucial part of the article — it’s starting in Arizona.
Newsflash: almost nobody is crossing the border illegally in Arizona right now.
There is one specific area where illegal immigrants are crossing by the hundreds of thousands, and it’s in Texas. There’s some activity in New Mexico, too, but the bulk of it is at the southern tip of Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley sector of the border.
So far for fiscal year 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that it has apprehended 58,500 illegal immigrants in Arizona, known as the Tuscon sector. In the Rio Grande Valley sector, it’s nearly 250,000.
I saw it myself in the Rio Grande Valley sector earlier this year. The reason for the high activity in that particular area is that even though there is already some border “wall” to control it, the actual border between Mexico and the United States is in the middle of the Rio Grande, the river we share with Mexico and which farmers on both sides rely on for their crops.
There’s no way to build a wall in the middle of a shared river, so the walls that actually do exist in the sector are about half a mile or so back into U.S. land. Border agents told me that the walls do work in controlling illegal immigration and that they want more walls to stop human traffickers and drug smugglers.
That sector covers about 320 miles of river. The wall should have started there, not in Arizona.
