arizona - mexican border fence

By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow. Guzzardi's Op-eds about California social issues have appeared in newspapers throughout California and elsewhere for 15 years., May 12, 2011

In his Tuesday El Paso immigration speech, President Barack Obama referred to the border fence as “basically” complete. And instead of hoping his lie would slip by unnoticed Obama drew attention to it with a cheap insult to patriotic Americans: “Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat.”
Here are the facts behind the fence.
The Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized constructing 700 miles of double-layered, 14-foot barbed wire fence along the U.S./Mexican border and supplementing it with manned checkpoints. Five years later, according to the General Accounting Office, only about 30 miles has been completed. Last May, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) pointed out that under Obama, only 2.3 miles had been built.
Nevertheless, Obama and Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano insist that the border is secure and that the cities close to it are among the nation’s safest.
Arizona citizens who know better have grown tired of double talk. They came up with the novel step of raising money on the Internet to add more fencing.
Governor Jan Brewer recently approved a bill that would allow the state to create a website to raise money for fencing and would also permit using minimum security prisoners as construction workers, thus reducing the costs. The state’s border budget has been mostly depleted by the expenses it incurred while defending SB 1070 in court.