Irate citizens on 'wrong' side of border barrier

Like many a proud Texan, Pamela Taylor likes to mark her turf. So on any given day, she makes sure passers-by can see the Stars and Stripes and the Lone Star Flag of her native state fluttering atop the poles that stand in her front garden.

Taylor has lived in the southernmost city of Brownsville, Texas, since just after World War II, when she left the UK to join her late husband John, a US soldier who had been based near Birmingham.

With that in mind, she also flies a Union Jack. "I hang it lower than the American flags," she says, "because it's a smaller part of my heritage."

Lately, though, there's been a distinctly surreal flavour to Taylor's colourful display of patriotic identity.

About 350m from her porch, an imposing metal fence looms into view. It is supposed to divide the US from Mexico, but by a cruel twist of fate, the 83-year-old grandmother's family home has ended up on the "wrong" side.

Four years ago, amid the seemingly endless hand-wringing over the flow of drugs and illegal migrants across their southern border, Washington politicians voted to erect a tall fence that would stretch thousands of kilometres from San Diego on the Pacific coast to Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico.

The best-laid political schemes do not always work out as planned, though. When government engineers arrived in Taylor's neighbourhood, their plan hit a snag: the Mexican border follows the meandering Rio Grande in this area. And the river's muddy banks are too soft and too prone to flooding to support a fence.

As a result, this corner of southeastern Texas had its barrier constructed on a levee that follows a straight line from half a mile to two miles north of the river, leaving Taylor's bungalow - and the homes and land of dozens of her angry neighbours - marooned on the Mexican side.

"My son-in-law likes to say that we live in a gated community," she says, explaining that to even visit the shops she must pass through a gate watched over by border-patrol officers. "We're in a sort of no-man's-land. I try to laugh, but it's hard: that fence hasn't just spoiled our view, it's spoiled our lives."

Taylor's domestic situation demonstrates - despite sound bites from politicians (President Barack Obama last week gave a major speech on the issue) - there are no simple fixes to America's great immigration debate.

In total, roughly 20,234ha of sovereign US land is now on the wrong side of the fence, most of it in Texas. Legislators believe that is a fair price to pay for the political benefits of being seen as "tough" on immigration.

But to many locals, Taylor included, the headline-prone barrier - which cost US$7 million ($8.9 million) a mile - is an expensive white elephant.

"First of all, it doesn't work," she says. "Anyone with a rope and a bucket can just climb on over. Second, they've used it as an excuse to reduce border patrols. Thirdly, it's left people like me unprotected. While the officers are guarding the fence, any drug smugglers can just walk up to my front door."

Like many of her neighbours, Taylor has been forced to turn her home into a mini-fortress, with alarms and motion sensors and a small arsenal of firearms in strategic positions around the house. "We're never safe," she says. "You just try to avoid living in fear."

It was not always like this. For most of the almost 70 years she has lived there, Brownsville has been on the frontline of America's immigration debate. But in the old days, things were less confrontational. Families heading north from Mexico would camp overnight in surrounding cotton fields.

"We'd wake up in the morning, and the migrant workers would have built a fire and made tortillas," Taylor says. "On occasion, they'd bring me breakfast."

But from the mid-1990s, with the growth of Mexico's drug trade, security declined. Taylor's car was stolen several times. One morning, she found a package containing 22.5kg of marijuana in her flowerbed. "I turned it in to the sheriff," she says.

Since the fence went up, crime has further spiralled.

Down the road, Taylor has erected a protest banner. "We're part of America," it says. "We need representation and protection, not a fence."

You hear a similar sentiment across Brownsville. Roughly eight in every 10 of the city's 170,000 inhabitants are Latino and most speak Spanish as a first language. The local economy relies heavily on imports from factories south of the border.

Obama signalled his intention to bring the immigration debate into play in next year's presidential elections, travelling to El Paso, on the other side of Texas from Brownsville, to unveil plans to create a "path to citizenship" for the roughly 12 million undocumented workers thought to be living illegally in the US.

He emphasised that his Administration has deported more immigrants than any of its predecessors. And he ridiculed Republican legislators who have endorsed building ever-larger barriers along the border.

"Now they're going to say that we need to quadruple the border patrol," Obama said, reaching out to the large demographic of Latino voters. "Or they'll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll say we need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat. They'll never be satisfied."

The joke might have played well in the next day's news pages - but in Brownsville, they were not laughing.

"Let him come here and say that," says Debbie Loop, whose 6ha citrus farm is on both sides of the fence. "Round these parts, people like alligators a whole lot more than politicians."

- INDEPENDENT