For those Brownsville folk who so admire the McAllen model of success, and who gush about that city’s political and business establishment, here’s a news flash.

If you’re looking for the most vociferous and passionate opposition to the border fence, check in at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce. That’s where “No Border Wall” bumper stickers are passed out like candy, and where the chamber’s director, (an Anglo fellow, I might add), will tell anyone who will listen that the whole concept of the fence is built on American racism and ignorance.

McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez, who is a CPA and is about as square and dull as it gets for a politician, has been busy scurrying up the border, trying to drum up opposition to the dreaded muro. But here’s the good news for you McAllen types: At least you won’t have to see the dang ugly thing everyday like those of us in Brownsville, Hidalgo, Rio Grande City and Roma.

About 10 miles from the border, McAllen is free and clear of the upcoming fence to be built to make middle America feel better that we’re finally doing something to keep Mexicans out. The teeming power shopping centers in Emerald City will continue unabated, choking with foot traffic and credit cards blazing through the cash registers of the foofy stores and resturants that are stuffed with business.

Mayor Cortez and the McAllen chamber types are worried that the fence will lead to a dip in the city’s vaunted retail economy. Did you know that more Mexicans, (of the wealthy variety, not the hated drywallers who are a threat to national security), use more of their plastic money in McAllen than any other U.S. city. Yep, it’s true.

Don’t worry, Mayor Cortez, the wealthy Mexicans who make up over half of your city’s retail sales will keep on spending, wall or no wall. Oh sure, they will be annoyed, maybe a little upset, when they drive over the bridges in Hidalgo and Pharr and see the border wall on either side of them.

But you know what? They’ll just shrug and move on to spend their precious dollars in McAllen. Those Mexicanos will correctly figure out that the fence is there to keep out the pobres, not them, the keepers of McAllen’s economy.

Cortez and Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos are fighting the good fight on the border fence. Cortez seems to think that if he can just talk enough that surely the sound business principles he speaks of will prevail. Cascos is the one with the notion of the feds finally doing something to shore up his county’s badly eroded levees, and then using those improved flood blockers as a natural wall to keep out all of those drywallers, hotel cleaning ladies, and landscaping workers that are threatening our national security.

Ah, Cortez and Cascos, those crazy dreamers, and both are CPAs!

The feds have put on a couple of border wall hearings in the Rio Grande Valley recently to make it look they’re listening, but they’re not. These dudes from Homeland Security are just going through the motions. Just like Santa, the feds are checking off their list: Quickie environmental studies, check; quickie public hearings to hear local blah, blah opposing the fence, check; permission sought to survey land under private ownership, check; and preparing eminent domain orders to seize said private lands for the fence, double check, check.

A trusted source who is dealing with the feds on the fence tells me that the muro will  run in an almost continuous path from the Gateway Bridge to the Veterans Bridge in Brownsville. The whole backside of the University of Texas-Brownsville campus will have the fence as its backdrop. The fence will run so close behind the baseball field at UTB-TSC that any homeruns will bounce off it, with the ball pinging back into the field of play. Hey, it’ll be like the green monster at Boston’s Fenway Park. Cool.

The fence will be 16-to18 feet in height in most places, and most likely will be pipe-like looking things fused together, one after another, running for dozens of miles between Brownsville and Matamoros. It won’t be much of a struggle to get the pipes into the ground on government-owned land, be it federal, state or local. Private land will be more cumbersome, but it will get done, for there is nothing to ultimately stop the forces for the fence.

You know, there’s a bunch of oddities to this so-called border fence. None perhaps odder than the hundreds of miles of no-man’s land that this fence will create between U.S. territory and the river. American forces fought fiercely, as we know, in the 1840s to capture a sliver of land from Mexico. Now, it looks like we’re giving some of it back in the form of the land that will be on the southern side of the fence, away from the U.S. and back to Mexico.

What would Jacob Brown think? We can’t know that, obviously, but the spot where Brownsville’s namesake died fighting for his country against Mexican forces will be on the other side of the fence, one long homerun away from the UTB-TSC diamond.

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