There have been a lot of calls recently for a fence along the Mexican border to discourage illegal immigration. But at least one Arizona community wants to go further:
Faced with high-levels of crime and illegal immigration, authorities in Yuma are reaching back to a technique as old as a medieval castle to dig out a “security channel” on a crime-ridden stretch of the border and fill it with water.”The moats that I’ve seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here,” said Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden, who is backing the project.”It’s innovative thinking. It doesn’t take much brainpower to build a 12-foot high fence around something, but this is unique.”
Let’s think about this for a moment. In Texas, the border with Mexico is marked by the Rio Grande river. Now you might think that this kind of natural border moat might protect Texas from illegal immigration, but it seems that the immigrants have developed this technique, called swimming, which allows them to somehow cross from one side to the other. I myself once swam the Rio Grande when I was a kid. How big was that moat supposed to be again?
Engineers plan to dig a “security channel” up to 10-feet (3 meters) deep and 60 feet wide through the problem area, which lies a short way inside the border.
Yeah, that should be nigh-well impenetrable.The article goes on to mention the support the moat idea has gotten from south of the border (which hasn’t been so supportive of the idea of fences) and also talks a bit about the ecological benefits that should come from the moat. If I didn’t know any better, I might almost think that the good folks of Yuma were using border security as a pretense for getting funding for an ecological development project.
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