Patching a Leaky Fence : Reinforcing Border Barrier Reopens Debate of Its Worth

Along the southern levee of the Tijuana River, a crew of U.S. Navy Seabee engineers and Border Patrol welders labors to reinforce the 10-foot-high fence that demarcates the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

“They’d have to drive a truck through this to break it,” one of the Navy men says confidently after completing the addition of heavy-duty metal planking along a section of the battered fence.

A few miles east, several dozen men and women gather at the end of a half-mile stretch of reinforced fencing, casually walking back and forth across a frontier where there is no barrier, awaiting nightfall to make their dash into San Diego.

“They can put another fence, and another fence, and another fence--still people will cross,” says Manuel Hernandez, a 40-year-old who was among the many massed at the end of the marked swath of border. “If the fence is too high, we’ll just bring a ladder.”

Along the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, the most concentrated crossing zone for the constant movement of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, the tattered, much-maligned “Tortilla Curtain”--long derided as sievelike and easily breached--is undergoing major renovation.

The goal is to improve the fence’s admittedly limited--some say non-existent--enforcement value by installing unsightly, but to date effective, military-surplus sheets originally designed for use in constructing portable airstrips.

The continuing work, which has been assisted since late last year by the presence of Navy engineering, or Seabee units, has rekindled an old debate about the prospective effectiveness that even the world’s most imposing barrier might have in an area such as the U.S.-Mexico border, an almost-2,000-mile boundary line that many consider a mere inconvenience of history. (Border fencing was initially designed to keep out Mexican cattle.)

Now, thousands of people fleeing economic distress and civil strife daily breach the porous boundary almost at will, crossing a landscape that ranges from deserts to rugged mountains and deep-rutted canyons to lush riversides, seeking opportunities unavailable to them at home.

Borderwide, authorities say, there is less than 30 miles of fencing between Mexico and the United States, although there are some other scattered portions strung with metal cables, strips of barbed wire and other primitive dividers. Even if workers completely reinforce the approximately 7 miles of fence in the San Diego area, perhaps another 5 miles of fenceless border will remain essentially open frontier.

Against such a backdrop, some experts ask, what good is any barrier?

“A better fence may make it more difficult to cross--the coyotes (alien smugglers) will probably charge more--but it will never stop people from coming,” said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, a Tijuana social scientist who studies immigration patterns. “I think it’s a useless expenditure. . . . They’ve said before that fences were indestructible, but people have always found a way to destroy them or get around them.”

But Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Gene McNary has said that barriers, combined with other enforcement techniques, can be an effective weapon at the border, particularly at well-traveled crossing zones such as San Diego’s. Agents say fencing helps to “funnel” border-jumpers away from heavily populated urban areas--such as the San Diego border neighborhood of San Ysidro--where they quickly blend into a maze of residential and commercial developments and are difficult to apprehend.

Improved barriers, authorities say, are an important component of a overall border stratagem that includes deployment of additional agents; using night-vision equipment, better aircraft and other improved equipment; using high-technology techniques to unmask document fraud; building more detention space; and heightened pressure on employers who illegally provide jobs to undocumented workers.

However, Verne Jervis, McNary’s chief spokesman, said that budget constraints mean that no new border fence construction is planned, but renovation and repair in San Diego and elsewhere will continue. Thus, the many unfenced stretches of border will likely remain so for the foreseeable future, thwarting control efforts.

Groups of immigrants typically gather at the many gaping holes in the existing chain-link fence or in areas where there is no barrier. Entrepreneurs hawk food and clothing at strategic gaps. Few interviewed expressed a belief that any physical impediment would halt their inexorable advance.

“Our necessity is great; no fence can stop us,” said Jorge Gutierrez, a 33-year-old father of four from the Mexican city of Guadaljara who was seated on a stone alongside a sewage-clogged arroyo at the border strip in an area known as Stewart’s Drain, west of the San Ysidro port of entry. There is no fence there.

Given the current atmosphere of fiscal austerity, authorities acknowledge that the availability of free assistance from the Navy Seabees was attractive, supplementing the Border Patrol’s own maintenance crews. But others have voiced fears that the Navy’s presence--along with that of existing National Guard units now working on border road construction and at U.S. customs stations--contributes to an ever-expanding “militarization” of the area.

But authorities respond that the military’s efforts, billed as part of the nation’s “war on drugs,” are justified by the large volume of drug trafficking in the border area. The impact in retarding illegal immigration is secondary, officials say.

Some analysts favor a massive barrier-building campaign at the border. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to stem illegal entries, has called for the construction of “secure” fencing--perhaps including concrete structures--to be built at perhaps 60 miles of key illicit crossing zones near San Diego and El Paso, Tex. At an estimated cost of $3 million a mile, however, such a plan seems unlikely to be implemented any time soon.

Moreover, any plans for new barriers beyond the repair and reinforcement of existing fencing would likely strike a discordant note in the border area, where residents are extremely sensitive to any kind of “Berlin Wall”-type schemes from Washington. Intense opposition to a planned ditch in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego led to the scuttling of that concept last year.

Instead, Border Patrol crews seeking to deter so-called “drive-throughs” of vehicles in the flat Otay Mesa area are repairing existing metal cables strung in the area.

In San Diego, the Seabees are assisting in the complete refurbishing of the existing, 7-mile chain-link border fence in San Diego with strips of surplus military material known as Perforated Steel Planking, or PSP, which was originally designed for use on portable landing fields and parking areas. The Pentagon used the utilitarian metal slabs widely in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, when military zones such as Khe Sahn in Vietnam were practically paved over with them.

The metallic strips now cover about 2 miles of border fence. Renovating the other 5 miles of fencing could take the rest of 1991, if not longer.

Initially used for the patching of gaping holes several years ago, the metal stripping is now being utilized as the primary border fencing material, having supplanted the chain-link fence that authorities say was of limited use, despite the many millions of dollars spent in putting it down in recent years. The metal strips have the distinct advantage of being free, although officials fear they may eventually run out of the surplus substance and be unable to replenish dwindling supplies.

Immigration officials say the surplus material is the most effective--and least costly--barrier deployed to date along the always-busy border in San Diego, which is the prime entry point for immigrants headed to Los Angeles and elsewhere in California.

Although the welded metal strips certainly lack elegance--the surplus material is often rusted and appears like something out of a junkyard--authorities say that immigrants and smugglers haven’t been able to cut or drive through it, unlike the often-pierced chain-link barriers that preceded it.

The renovated fence leaves would-be border jumpers with two basic choices: climb over or dig under the bolstered barrier, or move to an area where the fence is broken or non-existent, as many large groups have done.

However, even the strongest supporters of the improved fencing are hesitant to take the position that it will deter the arrival of undocumented immigrants. Rather, Border Patrol officials say, the idea is to cut off some entry and escape routes, improving the odds somewhat for the limited numbers of patrol agents who are nightly charged with stemming the influx of immigrants. Groups of 100 or more sometimes travel together, routinely overwhelming Border Patrol capacity to stop them.

“It funnels them; it doesn’t stop them,” said John C. Johnson, a supervisory Border Patrol agent who headed a work crew of Seabees and immigration officials who were reinforcing the fence last week with the military-surplus material. “It puts them where we want them to be,” Johnson said.

His and other repair crews are now concentrating on the fence sections that provide quick access to the San Diego neighborhood of San Ysidro, where recent arrivals from Tijuana can quickly fade into the cityscape.

As the work goes on, most border-jumpers seem to be scoffing at the efforts to keep them out with better fencing.

“When a Mexican says he will cross the border, that means he will cross the border no matter what,” said Juan Olegario Martinez, a 22-year-old from the interior state of Oaxaca, 1,000 miles to the south, who was among those gathered one afternoon last week along a spot where the reinforced fence ended, in a hilly spot east of the port of entry at San Ysidro. “Sometimes they’ll catch us over and over again, and sometimes it may take a week or more before we cross, but we will eventually make it, always.”

To demonstrate his compatriots’ determination, he recited a corrido, or ballad, known as Los Alambrados-- roughly, “The Fence-Jumpers”--one of many similar ditties often sung in the area. It tells the story of a young man who leaves his village, heads to Tijuana with the intention of crossing the border illegally, successfully negotiates the fence, avoids detection and arrives in Chicago, where he makes lots of money and lives contentedly.

“His faith gave him much luck,” the tune concludes. “One does what one must in this life to earn dollars.”