The Economic Drain Foremost among the southern Arizona ranchers speaking out is Bill McDonald. McDonald is a fifthgeneration rancher, conservationist, friend and colleague of Robert Krentz, founder and executive director of the Malpai Borderlands Group, and a 1998 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant, for his environmental work. For instance, he’s arranged for fellow ranchers to sell conservation easements that simultaneously protect the land from 26 Wavelength
development and put some desperately needed money in the bank. Asked to provide a balanced summary of the impact on Arizona ranchers for the Foreign Affairs Committee in late May, McDonald testified: [The result has been] mountains of trash in the landscape. Water is our lifeline out there, as you can imagine, in the arid Southwest, for our animals, as well as for the wildlife. And we would lose thousands of gallons of water storage when people would leave valves on and cut water lines, or break off floats in water troughs. It still goes on. Wildfires get started on a regular basis, gates left down, fences are cut. There are trails made by human traffic going over the same places, to the point where we have gully erosion as a result. Roads are torn up by the use of Border Patrol, almost exclusively now. We use them a small percentage of the time in comparison. These are significant costs to us, in equipment repairs and extra days of work, not to mention the negative impact it has on our resource and our landscape. But we’ve hung in there and kept hoping it would get better. It’s gotten worse. Photographs of the trash bring the problem home immediately. Castoff camping gear and backpacks by the dozen, abandoned clothes (including, in one case, high-heeled shoes), food cans, toothpaste tubes and, primarily, empty plastic water jugs and bottles. The trash accumulates along eroding pathways and in the canyons, and serves as an unsettling reminder of several things at once: how easy it is to spoil the fragile desert environment, the nature of the crossing as a life-and-death risk, and the humanity of those taking that risk, driven by their own needs and dreams and the conditions south of the border. McDonald didn’t mention the loss of stock. According to Patrick Bray, the loss of cattle to ingesting plastic is an occasional problem, but there’s a more immediate problem with immigrants cutting the fences to get through, especially fence lines along the international boundary. American cattle get out and wander south, and Mexican cattle wander north. Ranchers on both sides tend to have good longterm relationships. But livestock health standards are different in Mexico, even in Sonora, with the highest standards in Mexico. So the threat of disease is very real, particularly tickborne disease. To address this, some ranchers have gone to the expense of installing gates where the fences are most often cut. The crossers see the gates, suspect that the gate is monitored or tricked up in some way, and simply find another stretch of fence to cut.
WENDY GLENN
Cattle kings living in baronial splendor are, to put it mildly, hard to find. What you will find are mature ranchers who run operations in their families for generations. As a group, they’re dedicated to their livelihoods, articulate, proudly self-reliant and uninterested in any kind of sensationalism. Their opinions about the immigration problem are also tempered by a good deal of compassion for the suffering of ordinary Mexicans. But they’re up against it. Everybody agrees that in the last decade, after 9/11, immigration and smuggling crackdowns in the major crossing areas like San Diego have redirected traffic into the “Arizona Corridor.” The 354-mile line represents only 18 percent of the entire U.S.-Mexico border and, according to Homeland Security statistics for 2005, bears more than two-thirds of the illegal traffic. The number of apprehensions that year topped 403,000. And those were the ones who got caught. On top of that, according to Patrick Bray, the deputy director of government affairs for the Arizona Cattlemen’s Association, other efforts like “Operation Gatekeeper,” concentrated in Nogales and Douglas with their law-enforcement resources, pushed traffic away from those cities and their two-mile buffer zones, and concentrated it even more effectively. Into the empty spaces. The result is that long lines of UDAs (“undocumented aliens”) in denim and backpacks, hundreds and thousands of them making their long way north single file, have been channeled onto the land of those least equipped to resist. Ranchers, on the front lines, in a seemingly empty landscape, are inherently exposed. It tends to be solitary work. The livestock is always out in the open. The crossers, whether they’re drug smuggling or human trafficking or both, are shadowy, unpredictable, unmeasurable and take advantage of any opening they sense. As rancher Wendy Glenn of the Malpai Borderlands Group puts it, “A shift in where they are coming in happens when a certain area is hit hard by the law enforcement. After a large number of apprehensions, they just shift to the east or to the west of the main areas they were using. There are the same numbers, but it takes the Border Patrol awhile to find where they shifted.” It’s a match made in hell.