SUBSTRATED

Like I said to my editor, writing this thing was like making sweet love to my own conscience, and she’s not a cheap date.

Look for this in its abridged form on the Daily Texan online tomorrow (as you should be reading my column every Tuesday, O loyal reader(s)!).

This month, state media have reported on a dispute between the University of Texas at Brownsville and the Department of Homeland Security over the proposed border fence that would bisect the UT-B campus. The dispute is endemic of the petty, foolish and downright lazy approach the federal government has taken to border security at large. Besides the absolute stupidity of building a wall through the middle of a college campus – a college whose self-avowed mission is to bridge the gap between the two countries, the DHS requested an 18-month free pass on the UT-B campus and wavier for responsibility of any damages incurred. Unscrupulous to the extreme, this example of small-mindedness is only a piece of the systematic disregard for true understanding of border security.

As reported by the Texas Observer, a lifelong U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worker was bullied out of his job when he refused an order to approve a surveying request that endangered a 180,000 acre tact of wildlife refuge along the border, even though he did so in pursuit of standing federal law. The federal government had previously shelled out $80 million to restore the land, now home to 1000 species of rare native fauna. The federales are now strong-arming into places like the 115 wildlife refuges on the border to push the hallmark of the Bush administration’s flimsy border security plan, the $49 billion border fence initiative.

It’s a plan of such utterly shallow thinking that the federal bullying and wholesale surrender to the security industry that has gone along with it should be a complete shock to the conscience. It is a wonder that a plan as jokingly half-assed as putting up a wall to keep out criminals, terrorists and drug-runners while in reality keeping out people who wish to contribute to the economy and improve their families’ lives isn’t simply ignored, or at least pursued only superficially. To the contrary, this has become an issue of such purely symbolic importance that is has morphed into the vanguard issue of the border hawks in Congress and the White House. The border fence not only creates new drains on taxpayer coffers and negates millions of dollars of existing federal investments in environmental protection, it tears apart the social and economic fabric of border communities, much to the chagrin of border-dwellers and their representatives in government. At a meeting on the issue in April, arch-border warrior Rep. Tom Tancredo witlessly quipped that if the residents of Brownsville where so staunchly opposed to the fence, perhaps it should simply be built north of Brownsville, reports the Observer. It’s a sentiment that might speak to the truer ambitions of the border-hawks.

The bottom line, however, is that the plan simply won’t work. If we are to take this issue seriously, as the hawks claim to, we would work with the Mexican government to neutralize the power of drug lords and smugglers in places like Nuevo Laredo and Juarez. Instead, Congress seems content to throw money into an ineffectual black hole of a policy, and the White House has responded with joyous gusto. It’s a narrative that doesn’t quite fit into the supposedly fiscally responsible self-view of the Republicans in Washington. 

Meanwhile, the recommendations of experts, the spurn of the Government Accountability Office and the anger of the border community goes unnoticed as the DHS uses congressionally mandated power to negate existing federal law in the pursuit of the border fence. Tucked into the 2005 Real ID Act is a provision that lets DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff waive the law to protect nationally security, and he’s using it to execute a fencing plan that is, by his own admission to CNN last year, “symbolic” and “overly simplistic”.

It is high time the people of Texas and the power of the UT system, including this university, are brought to bear against a useless, $49 billion plan that is being aggressively and tactlessly pursued to the detriment of the UT system, the state of Texas, and our neighboring nations that rely so closely on each other.   

Roush is a government senior.

Sources:
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2796

http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/06/23/TopStories/Ut.System.Disputes.Border.Fence.Plans-3384254-page2.shtml

http://blue.utb.edu/newsandinfo/BorderFence%20Issue/UpdateBorderFenceIssue.htm

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.00418:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/01/le.01.html