The (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star is in the midst of running a major four-part project about the implications of building a border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
It’s pretty timely. The Senate is talking about the fence this week.
The Daily Star project – titled “Sealing our Border: Why it Won’t Work” – traces the difficulties of enforcement and potential fence construction from Border Field State Park to the Gulf of Mexico.
It begins with this intro:
It stretches between two seas and slithers across four states. It climbs mountains, traverses canyons and slices through cities.
Most of it, including long stretches in Arizona, California and New Mexico, is vast and open, marked by wooden posts linked with sagging barbed wire, cement obelisks or nothing at all. In some cities, 10- to 15-foot-tall fences protect it. For 1,254 miles in Texas, it becomes a plodding, chocolate-colored river called the Rio Grande.
The line itself is midfield in the daily duel of brains and brawn between the thousands who cross it illegally and the uniformed men and women who patrol it.
This is the U.S.-Mexican border: a 2,000-mile dividing line at the center of one of the nation’s hottest political debates.
If you’re not queasy, check out this vignette, which preceded the series.
The project can be found here.
And our earlier fence coverage is here.