Ranchers like Mike Vickers, and others who make their living on the US-Mexico border, aren’t the only ones who think building a fence to keep out illegal immigrants is a dumb idea. Environmental groups working along the border and the National Park Service object to a fence on environmental grounds.
Where illegals routinely cross the border you find millions of tons of trash, erosion from thousands of illegally carved trails and roads, and habitat fragmentation, among other environmental effects. Building a fence doesn’t solve that problem; it just shifts it to another location as immigrants cross somewhere else. “We realize that the problems we are facing environmentally in this region are a direct effect of past border patrol strategy that have relied primarily on walls,” says an environmentalist in a new Mother Jones piece. Read it here.
