If republicans are pushing an issue, I’d bet any amount that the left will at some point or another attempt to link that position with environmental damage. It’s a standard in their old, worn-out playbook.

Imagine an area the size of the state of Rhode Island with only one wagon track crossing its vast emptiness, a 860,000 acre wildlife refuge in Arizona’s Sonoran desert along the Mexican border that comprises 56 miles of what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls the “loneliest international boundary in the continent.” In fact, you’ll have to imagine it, because while that description of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge still appears on its web site, there are now 1,200 miles of illegal roads and footpaths created by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants scarring the refuge.

Right off the bat we see blame being miscast, as it’s the illegal aliens destroying this precious environment by…walking all over it! Nevertheless, there is serious concern over the dastardly republican plans to use fences!

Cabeza Prieta is just one part of the 2,000 mile-long border that conservationists are increasingly worried about. While politicians of all stripes focus on the human side of the noisy immigration debate, there is a rising concern over what illegal immigration and the U.S. response to it may do to the area’s fragile ecosystems. The $7.6 billion federal Secure Border Initiative passed last year calls for the construction of 370 miles of pedestrian fence along the border by 2008 ? 129 miles in Arizona, 153 in Texas, 76 in California and 12 in New Mexico. Pedestrian fences have so far proved useful in inhibiting human traffic, but conservationists and others worry they limit access to the habitat for endangered species such as jaguars and the antelope-like Sonoran Desert pronghorn.

Well of course they worry, it’s what the left does. They are professional worriers. I can’t quite figure out how this article got titled, though. It seems to me the main focus is on the negative impact of illegal immigrants. Security measures are also themselves simply a response to their trespasses. Yet the headline blames security, rather than what is causing that need for security. Same media crap, different day.

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