Sitting high on their political perches in Washington, right-leaning Republicans egged on by the yakkers of conservative talk radio have no idea of the havoc their border fence will have on our South Texas communities.

I’m not sure that they much care about our community sensibilities and histories - in fact they likely care not one whit about such things given the urgency to protect their version of the American identity from excessive immigration, especially from Mexico. Right-wing Republicans pushed through their border fence project with the approval of a president who had previously spoken out against it, (that would be George W. Bush), because of their own biases and simplistic notions of what can secure a border.

And so now those of us who live here, and who have had families that have lived here for generations in many cases, will be forced to put up with this mess and the indignity of the federal goverment shoving this thing down our collective throats. Most of us in the Rio Grande Valley community aren’t against additional border security in the way of more Border Patrol agents, or improving ports of entry with more Customs agents and better bridge facilities to boost inspections. Barriers of some sort in short intervals around the bridges and/or certain heavily used crossing points may make sense in providing a bit better security.

But the notion of hundreds of miles of a border fence, some of it in fairly remote stretches, will be neither effective or cost-efficient, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars in maintenance it will take in yearly upkeep. Beyond the efficiencies, there are other practical realities that politicians in Washington would not have a clue about.

In Rio Grande City, for example, the feds are considering a fence map that would extend in some fashion into or around a historic 130-year-old military fort, as well as adjacent land that houses four school campuses, the local school district’s administrative offices, and a football stadium. In Brownsville, the fed’s first map had the fence running across the northside of a nearby levee, leaving UTB-TSC’s International Technology, Education and Commerce Campus on the other side of the fence with Mexico.

The feds backed off that notion after UTB’s leadership pointed out that, uh, it’d be nice to have part of our campus located in the United States. The latest is that feds via the Department of Homeland Security want access from the levees to the heart of the campus in an area near the Student Union and the Life and Health Sciences Building. So, rightly, UTB leadership wonders: How far will this fence cut into our campus?

UTB-TSC President Juliet Garcia has thus far refused to grant the feds access, saying giving the feds the access they want would jeoparadize campus security, and saying the building of an 18-foot fence on the edge of the UT System campus would “directly contravene our mission and destroy the campus climate that has been so painstakingly and carefully created.”

On Wednesday, the UT Board of Regents backed up Garcia’s position in urging the federal government to work cooperatively with the UT System “to identify solutions that will ensure border security and allow UTB-TSC to fulfill its education mission.”

Given that nearly half of this nation’s illegal immigrants entered this country legally and then became illegal by overstaying their visas, one wonders where all of the passion and heat is from the political right in going after this aspect of the immigration issue. But, of course, the heat and missives of the angry right is aimed at the southern border in its ongoing battle to protect America from multiculturalism and the Balkanization of this country that they’re always freaked out about.

And so, for that, let’s hope kids in Rio Grande City don’t have to go through a fence checkpoint to get to their classes, or students at UTB don’t have to sip their Coca-Colas at their student center while looking up at an 18-foot fence built to satisfy the wishes of Americans who are frightfully worried about too many Mexicans finding their way to Iowa.