They Don't Build Fences Like They Used To By Jared Beck

Two years ago, Chris Simcox was the man with the plan. Simcox, disgruntled with Washington’s seeming lack of hustle in construction of the Great Wall of America, organized the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, pledging to do what the government had failed to do: keep out illegal immigrants from skipping across the border from Mexico into America, Simcox pledged to construct a $55 million high-tech 2,000-mile fence called a “double-layered gauntlet of deterrence.”

Naturally, Simcox could not afford to privately fund the project, so a web-site was established to take donations from other concerned citizens across the country. Money rolled in.

And the money wasn’t put to use.

Why trust the government to build a fence that could be seen from space when you could trick others into building your own?Two years later, instead of the 14-feet fence with security cameras, sensors, razor wire, and ditches on either side to prevent vehicles from wreaking the wall, the Minuteman Defense Corps has managed to create what local ranchers call “a mere cattle fence” of five strands of barbed-wire.

On Memorial Day 2006, Simcox ceremonially broke ground for the privatized defense fence on an Arizona ranch owned by John Ladd. By then, donations had been flooding into the Minuteman’s coffers for a full year, although no one has any statistics on the exact amount of money raised. Regardless, one man so behind the cause mortgaged his house and forked over $100,000 himself to Simcox’s scam. Right now, this cow fence skirts Ladd’s property and another local rancher’s.

But what should we really expect? Simcox did what any good American would do: exploit popular opinion for personal gain. Why trust the government to build a fence that could be seen from space when you could trick others into building your own?

But Simcox has crossed the border, I mean line, here. He pledged that the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps would undertake this grand project because the U.S. government was sitting idly by. Reached for comment recently, Simcox said the plan was never anything more than a publicity stunt to provoke Washington to act. In the meantime, millions of dollars have disappeared from the Minuteman’s wallets.

Then again, is Simcox’s playing off the inane Iowan farmers’ fears -- those people dreading the next terrorists to come across our most “porous” border with Mexico -- really such a bad thing? The longest, I repeat, the longest undefended border in the world right now is between the United States and Canada. Not only that, but until the new passport law goes into effect, Canucks passing through customs is a joke. Remember those 9/11 hijackers? Yes, they came in from the north. Why? Because they were smart enough to not want to traverse thousands of miles of desert, the deserts that thousands of potential illegal immigrants die in each year, when they could drive their Toyotas in from Niagara. Fear the North.

Either way, Simcox has built a beautiful fence for John Ladd that will keep his cattle from crossing over into Mexico. Not that it would be that hard to come back across that three-foot barbed-wire fence if they really wanted to.

Photo credit: Minuteman Defense Corps' fence [http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/07/border.fence/index.html]