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 News from Around the Americas | November 2005 
US Lawmakers Proposes to Fence US-Mexican Border
 Xinhua
| | U.S. Border Patrol agent Gavin Weidman searches for tracks left by illegal immigrants along the Arizona border with Mexico using an infrared torch and seen through a night vision scope near Naco, Arizona. The U.S. Border Patrol said more than 165,000 illegal immigrants were picked up last year in a scrub- and cactus-strewn corridor near this sun-baked community, nearly an eighth of the total 1.2 million arrested for the whole 2,000-mile Mexican border. (Reuters/Tim Gaynor) |
Two US lawmakers have introduced a bill which calls for fencing the entire 3,200-km-long US-Mexican border to keep off illegal immigrants, US media reported Friday.
The bill, co-sponsored by Congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Congressman Virgil Goode, proposes to create a two-layer reinforced fence with lighting and sensors from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a 100-yard (meter) border zone to the north of the barriers and 25 new ports of entry.
The cost of the project is estimated at 8 billion US dollars.
They also propose to assign thousands of new border patrol officers, immigration investigators, attorneys and immigration judges to beef up immigration control along the porous US-Mexican border.
At present, only the westernmost 22-kilometer stretch of the border is lined with parallel fencing.
There is secure fencing at other vulnerable points, but long stretches of the border are protected only by patchy barbed wire or nothing at all.
However, some other lawmakers are skeptical that a new fence will effectively stop illegal immigration.
Congressman Jeff Flake said that such a fence will not work for half of the 400,000 immigrants who enter the country every year and overstay their visas.
Currently, it is unclear whether the bill will receive enough support to pass in both chambers of the US Congress. |
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