Paradise Lost

A merlin flashed over our heads, and bobwhite quail exploded from roadside brush. Many native plants at the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and in the valley’s three national wildlife refuges depend on irrigation. The pumps, which often clog with debris and stop working during electrical surges, need to be checked around the clock, but managers won’t be able to do that if the fence goes up, because they won’t be living there. Perhaps the pumps won’t even be needed. “DHS may just clear all this land so they can see everything,” Pons declared. Most locals expect it to do exactly that, but getting information on the project from the DHS is like soliciting driving directions from a Vermont farmer.

With Wayne Bartholomew, director of Weslaco, Texas–based Frontera Audubon, I canoed the Rio Grande along the 2,088-acre Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge’s southern boundary, enjoying some of the planet’s best birding. Among many other species, we had ringed kingfishers, green kingfishers, a groove-billed ani, and a pair of barn owls that studied us from their bank cavity, then obligingly flew over our heads. We even did our thing for national security by spooking nine swimmers five feet from U.S. soil and sending them back to Mexico like Mark Spitz.

Later we hiked in the shade of Spanish moss, draped like gray tinsel from the refuge’s cedar elms and Rio Grande ash. In the esteros, dozens of scissor-tailed flycatchers, fresh in from Mexico, swarmed around willows. Not a minute passed in which at least one golden-fronted woodpecker did not call or bob over our heads. From the lookout tower we watched a pair of Harris’s hawks orbiting over their two white chicks 20 feet below us, and gazed out over a vast riparian forest marred only by the soot-stained junction of Reynosa, Mexico, and Hildago and McAllen, Texas, far to the southwest. There, where wildlife has already been cut off and illegal immigrants easily blend with crowds, a border fence might make sense.

Next day we explored the 90,000-acre Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge, created expressly to facilitate wildlife movement, is a string of 115 wildlife corridors to the river and Mexico, spanning 275 river miles and sustaining at least 83 species of mammals, 484 of birds, 115 of reptiles and amphibians, 300 of butterflies, and 1,200 of plants—all for an investment of about $100 million. The service has been authorized to acquire an additional 42,500 acres, but now that may not happen.

The fence project will destroy most of the refuge’s function—cutting off wildlife from water and food, blocking gene flow, removing wide swaths of vegetation, increasing traffic and other human disturbance with access roads, drenching surviving habitat with light pollution, and creating a no-man’s land (two miles wide in places) that will be unsafe and inaccessible for managers and the public.

On the levee we drove from corridor to corridor, past a dead sea of river-irrigated corn, onions, and sugarcane devoid of wildlife save flocks of great-tailed grackles and red-winged blackbirds that blew across it like incinerator smoke. These are native species, but because they eat crops they occur here in alien profusion.

In the esteros, links in the refuge, we encountered birds and plants excluded by agriculture. Dowitchers, sandpipers, stilts, and herons stalked rooty shoals, while Couch’s kingbirds and kiskadees worked the high foliage. When we came abreast of the 100-acre estero called Monterrey Banco, I parked the rental car, and we walked along the northern perimeter, glassing birds and kicking dust into a desiccating wind.

Last April I visited the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, where I followed the future path of the fence from Brownsville, near the Gulf of Mexico, to Alamo, 60 miles to the west. When I brought up the subject with environmental leaders, educators, birders, wildlife officials, farm advocates, private landowners, or politicians, the response was always the same—visceral outrage. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” as Robert Frost observed in his poem “Mending Wall.”

The onions were ripe in south Texas, and I asked McClung if he knew what percentage of pickers I’d seen were illegal immigrants. “In the Rio Grande Valley and nationally, it’s 70 percent for field workers,” he said. This economic incentive for a porous border may have something to do with why the DHS locks up all illegal immigrants it catches except Mexican nationals, whom it transports back to their homeland. Prior to December 12, 2006, this catch-and-release policy applied to illegals from other countries, too, although they were given a slip of paper and instructed to report to a judge within 30 days. Of course, they didn’t, and the document became a passport north. Once the DHS started locking up these illegal immigrants, apprehensions in south Texas declined 34 percent. If Mexican nationals who enter illegally faced the same sanctions, the decline could be even more dramatic and, coupled with the increase in Border Patrol agents, which has also helped, there wouldn’t even be make-believe justification for the fence.

“I have just as many friends in Piedras [Mexico] as in Eagle Pass,” Mayor Foster told me. “We grew up together. I’m in Piedras at least once a day. Putting a wall up between brothers does not have a positive connotation. You have a kitchen sink with the pipes broken. Instead of us fixing the pipes, which is immigration reform, we just keep sending in mops.”