“U.S. Border Fence Plan Upsets Mexicans”

By: Guillermo Salazar

Mexicans- from leading politicians to migrate preparing to cross illegally- consider fencing off much of the border shameful, offensive and ill- conceived. During October in 2006 President Bush signed a bill that would allot $ 1.2 billion for hundreds of miles of fencing along the U.S- Mexican border and for more vehicle barriers, lighting for the barb wires and infrared cameras so that you can spot someone easily. They put these fences so that they would not be anymore immigrants crossing the border with out papers and illegally.

But immigrants resting in Tijuana shelter after being deported from the United States said more walls would not deter them.

Alfonso Martinez, a thirty-two-year-old from Southern Mexico, had been working as a farmhand for six years in Vista California, when he was arrested and deported last week. “Wall or no wall, I will try at least three times,” said Martinez, who said he would try to cross by himself through Tecate, a mountainous town about thirty-five miles east of Tijuana. “I have three girls that I have to support, and in Mexico there is no work.”

“I think it is a deplorable decision that has been made by the United States Congress for the construction of this wall, and it does not solve our common problem, which is emigration,” Calderon told a news conference in Santiago, Chile.

Guillermo Alonzo, a migration expert, Colegio de La Frontera Norte, said fences instead will force migrants to look for new ways to sneak migrants into the United States and find new routes through deadlier terrain. “When migrants are determined to cross, they find a way to jump the fences,” Alonzo said. “Walls don’t stop anything”

While there are walls at various points along the border, the one in Tijuana is the longest stretch, running fourteen miles west from the otay border crossing and plugging into the Pacific Ocean.