How the fence doesn't work

Marc Cooper has a great article in LA Weekly about continued and successful efforts to get across the U.S.-Mexico border. For example:

What was remarkable is that we ran into this particular group barely a two-minute drive from the just-constructed, 15-foot-high multimillion-dollar fence that is a showcase of the Bush administration’s vaunted Secure Border Initiative. The same wall that both parties in Congress have recently embraced as the answer to stemming illegal immigration. Moreover, the group we found — right off the main road leading from the official U.S. port of entry at Sasabe — was but a few clicks away from one of the nine highly touted prototype electronic-surveillance towers that the U.S. government paid the Boeing Company $20 million to build along a 28-mile run of the border.

In other words, the small group of migrants we spoke to had not only just jumped the newest section of the government’s physical fence, they had also dodged the high-tech “virtual fence,” loaded with the latest gadgets and software.

“We got over the fence with a rope,” said the migrant who had flagged us down. “It took about two minutes and we were over.”