Arizona Border Fence Too Tragic To Be Serious

I haven’t decided who’s more tragic, the people who thought-up and got to work on the plan to raise donations to build a fence along the border between Arizona and Mexico, or the people who have donated to the cause so far. And I mean tragic in a pitiful way, with a tinge of dark humor.

Think about it. The idea was started by politicians who looked angry when they talked about their fence during a press conference. According to the Associated Press it was a collection of state Senators and Representatives along with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the guy who chases undocumented workers, dresses his inmates in pink and has them sleep in tents. They all made the appropriate frown faces, looking serious when they laid the blame on what they were about to do on the federal government for not living up to it’s responsibility of guarding the border.

Then they announced their plan: collect donations from the outraged public to fill-in the gaps of the U.S.-Mexico border fence. As the New York Times reported, they set up a web site with a convenient donation button along with a disclaimer that says the money donated may or may not be tax deductible and that the generous patriots should consult a tax advisor for a definite answer on the matter. And that’s about all they seem to have done,  aside from approving legislation to make the thing official. But it’s enough information to think this thing through:

• They don’t have a plan. They don’t know how or exactly where they’ll build it. They have some stretches of state owned land in mind, but nothing definite.
• They say they’ll ask permission of the federal government to build parts of the fence on federal property.
• They want to raise $50 million. At $40 thousand per-day, which is what they collected the first day, it’ll take them almost three and a half years to reach their goal.
• The federal government has already built roughly 650 miles of fence along the 2000 mile border at a cost of $1 million to $3 million per mile. That leaves a 1350 mile gap. But the goal to raise $50 million will be enough to build only between 16 and 50 miles of fence, depending on the cost and whether or not they’ll go all-out and add a moat with alligators, as some nuts have suggested (As a point of clarification, the folks who brought this donation funded fence to life have not mentioned moats or gators, but because they haven’t mentioned much else in the way of design I’m including the possibility.).
• In order to save money they say they’ll use prison inmates, although it wasn’t made clear if they’d be Arpaio’s dressed-in-pink prisoners.
• They said they might add a counter to the web site, with an up-to-the-minute tally of the money donated. So apparently they haven’t even thought-through their site design, much less a fence plan.

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