| | |  Entertainment | Books | August 2008 
The US-Mexico Border: A Walk On the Wild Sides
 The Economist
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It is hard not to like David Danelo, a marine turned journalist and author. In the three months he spends travelling the length of America’s southern border, from the Gulf of Mexico in the east to the shores of California in the west, he displays a pleasing concern for almost everyone except politicians and drug pushers.
As a former military man, Mr Danelo understands the hard-pressed officers of the Border Patrol, but he sympathises also with ordinary Mexicans lured to America by the dream of prosperity. To him, illegal immigrants are often nothing more than brave pioneers in search of a better life. He understands too the anguish of Americans who feel swamped by a rising tide of narcotics-fuelled violence. Nothing is easy about immigration, or borders.
What stands out in this personal and readable account is the great variation in attitudes that Mr Danelo encounters as he travels “this 1,952-mile strip of river and earth where the developed world meets the developing; where rich meets poor; where law can mean so much on one side and so little on another.” As a native of Austin, though, the author plainly prefers the more tolerant attitude of Texas towards its neighbour to the much more negative views he encounters in the other border states, especially New Mexico.
Texas, Mr Danelo surmises, may be conditioned by having once been part of the Mexican empire—the Alamo and San Jacinto notwithstanding. Texans instinctively understand that a fairly open border has been good for both sides. One of the fastest growing cities in America over the past decade has been McAllen, which sits on the Texas-Mexico border and is a testament to the huge burst of job creation that the North American Free-Trade Agreement has brought to this part of the world.
But the border brings bad things too. Mr Danelo calculates that the drugs business is worth some $60 billion a year to Mexico, but notes that in 2007 George Bush asked Congress for a measly $500m to fight the menace. The Mexican government has repeatedly asked the Americans for more help in tackling the drug lords who have made many of its own border cities violent to the point of being almost ungovernable—but to little effect.
Mr Danelo also has strong views about what will work and what won’t. Only better intelligence, which means working much more closely with the Mexicans, will do the job. The biggest possible waste of money, he reckons, is the planned construction of 700 miles of fence along the border. This, he says, is because 80% or more of the drugs that enter America from Mexico do so through perfectly legal checkpoints, disguised among ordinary commercial goods. Drug barons call these entry points plazas. Each day 10,000 freight trucks enter America through Laredo alone, the gateway to the mighty I-35 interstate that bisects the country and runs all the way north to the Great Lakes.
Nor, he reckons, will the fence be any good at keeping out illegals; it will be too easy to cross, the thick carrizo cane that lines the Rio Grande offering plenty of cover. Besides, building the fence, which has to be done on the American side, means effectively ceding land and the river itself to Mexico. Property-owners hate that idea, and a powerful lobby group against the fence has sprung up in Texas.
A scholarly book this is not, though it brings in entertaining, if patchy, slices of history. If you want a feel for the strange, dangerous and inspiring entity that is both the border and la frontera, this is a pretty good place to start. |
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