Word: bordered
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...busy all day. So busy, in fact, that it's hard to say honestly who controls the central-Arizona frontier. It's a no-man's-land where the law is only as real as the nearest cop. Dart took us to an ancient volcanic dome north of the border. It was nearly 40 miles (64 km) inside the U.S., but it was effectively the property of Mexican smugglers, who station spotters atop the hill. From there, a man with binoculars can monitor the movements of every CBP agent in the desert below. We climbed up and found a radio...
...ground. Steve McPartland leads one such force: the CBP's élite Air Mobile Unit operating out of San Diego. McPartland is a man of the world--born in Canada, raised in northern England and now an American citizen. After serving in the U.S. Army, he joined the border patrol 11 years ago. "Immigration was a natural for me," he explained, because having gone through the proper channels himself, he resented people who walk into the country illegally. McPartland's sector was the first to put up a border fence, as part of Operation Gatekeeper in the 1990s. Before that...
...still quiet, McPartland muttered, "Well, if they're not crossing here, where are they crossing?" Minutes later, he added, "I suppose I should be happy that it's quiet." As it turned out, that night was not completely quiet, but the fact remains that McPartland's piece of the border is tighter than it used to be. "What we've done down here works," McPartland told us. "If you have the right combination of personnel, infrastructure and technology, you can get it done...
...year National Guard initiative expires on schedule this month, after Congress and the President turned down a request from the governors of California, Arizona and New Mexico to extend the program indefinitely. Homeland Security officials are hopeful that an aggressive recruiting program to increase the number of border-patrol agents will make up for the loss of the National Guard. But new agents don't arrive with their own choppers or bulldozer drivers. And it's risky to hire too many agents too quickly--as the growing number of corruption cases along the border attests. The bottom line is that...
Finding a Way--at All Costs What the fence tells us, then, is that marking the border and aggressively patrolling it can reduce illegal activity. The fence also carries a lesson about limits, for it is only as effective as the force that backs it up. Even the Great Wall of China was not impermeable. Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian...