A prominent story in the Sunday, April 20 issue of the Washington Post weighed in with a long view of the environmental impact of the so-called border fence - not only in South Texas but across the deserts of Arizona as well.

The story mentions a number of endangered species along the border that wildlife researchers say will be imperiled by hundreds of miles of border fencing. Some of the wildlife mentioned includes the Sonoran pronghorns and long-nose bats in Arizona and the ocelots and jagurandi, (small cats), of deep South Texas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is so concerned about all of this that one of its regional directors told customs and border protection officials that its scientists have concluded  some or all of these species may disappear over time with the construction of the border fence, The Post story reported.

Obviously, the fence builders of the political right will hardly be moved by such concerns. They even went after the Pope this week after he had the audacity to say a good word about immigrants in the U.S.  A leading member of that flock, the failed presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, accused the good Pope of “faith-based marketing,” saying Benedict was trying to draw more immigrants, (i.e. Mexicans), to the U.S. to increase the membership of his church in this country.

The endangered state of the Sonoran proghorn and the South Texas ocelot aren’t going to touch terrible Tom’s heart given the crusade on his part to protect American sovereignty and culture from excessive immigration.  The fence is going up. The always personable and affable secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, announced recently that he was unilateraly waving more than 30 environmental and land management laws to meet the urgent deadline of building at least 360 miles of border fencing by year’s end.

Chertoff’s move has been roundly panned in the editorial pages of newspapers across the land - NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle - as a power grab that Congress ought to rescind. The Sierra Club and some other enviromentalist groups are going to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of the authority that Congress gave the grumpy Chertoff to do as he pleases.

Not to worry, says one of Chertoff’s flacks at the department to protect America. A spokeswoman for homeland security tells The Post that “just because we’re using the waiver authority doesn’t mean we’ve not be mindful of our obligation to be stewards of the environment.”

No, of course not, that’s why the department to protect America is eager to stick metal, concrete and other obstructions in the midst of some of this country’s more endangered habitat in order to discourage all of those dry wallers, hotel cleaning ladies and landscapers from crossing over and working to make U.S. products and services cheaper for all of us hard-working Americans.

The Post story notes that “prized (and endangered) wildlife species are not respecters of international borders.” That’s just tough. One of the wildlife expert types called the belt of natural habitat along the Rio Grande in our neck of the woods as being one of national importance.

“The signficance of this (South Texas) area, biologically, is extraordinary,” said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. Nor have the wildlife experts been impressed with the efforts of homeland security to build a nature-friendly fence, if there is such a thing.

“When you’ve got a wall 27 miles long and 16 feet high, that’s a tough one,” said Nancy Brown, a wildlife specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in The Post story. “Whether you’re an armadillo or an ocelot, when you bang into six miles of concrete wall, you’re in trouble.”

Sure enough, Nancy, but we need to protect America from excessive numbers of Mexicans. So, something has to give. Looks like the critters will have to take one for national security.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger Y Columnista

In Pennsylvania, the state has lost more than 100,000 steel industry jobs since the 1980s, and seen another 200,000 manufacturing jobs go to overseas factories since 2000.

Here in the Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville specifically, considerable job growth in the sectors of public education, federal law enforcement, retailing and construction has only put a dent in the endemic poverty of a border region.

So who’s bitter, angry, and what should or could the goverment do about it?

The political distraction of the week came recently when a prominent left-leaning website, the Huffington Post, reported that Barack Obama said many people in the Rust Belt feel “bitter,” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” when economic fortunes in their communities and their lives turn sour.

Hillary Clinton became an instant born-again defender of all things God and guns when she and her campaign heard about Obama’s supposed gaffe. Hillary and her well-known spouse have earnings topping $100 million this decade, but that hardly stopped Clinton from morphing into blue collar Sally in saying Obama was out of touch with small town America. Hillary even downed some whisky and beer at an Indiana bar to prove her point.

Obama surely made, by his own admission, a clumsy explaination in trying to describe how Republicans have historically used religion, guns, and now immigration as wedge issues and tools of fear to sway working class Americans from voting for Democrats. We get that, but it was a no-win proposition for Obama to psychoanalyze blue-collar Pennsylvania, a place full of Archie Bunker Democrats who are going to have a hard time voting for a black guy for president.

I haven’t spent much time in the Rust Belt to know how angry or bitter Americans there are about a global economy and improving technologies and automation that have resulted in the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs. We’ve had our share of economic downturns as well, including a hollowing out of Brownsville’s economy throughout the  1980s when Mexico’s economy went to hell and took the city’s economic prosperity with it. And even after all of these years, it’s easy to recall the pain after the devastating Christmas Day freeze of 1983, which flattened this region’s economy and pushed unemployment above 20 percent.

I do believe there’s a basic difference in how our two parts of America view economic difficulties. The Rust Belt has a sense of entitlement about good jobs since they once had them, and enjoyed them for many a generation as $20-an-hour jobs at GM and Ford car plants were passed down as a birthright. In South Texas, we don’t have any such feelings of entitlement about jobs. We just hope there’s better ones in the years ahead because we’ve seen how little we used to have.

I saw some of that Rust Belt anger - and bitterness - about job losses in the late 1980s when Trico Technologies moved much of its manufacturing operations from Buffalo, N.Y., to Brownsville and Matamoros. The United Auto Workers sent a contingent, more like a mob, to this area to denounce the move and spout a series of ugly racial and ethnic stereotypes about the border. To hear them tell it back then, we all wear sombreros and take siestas under a palm tree at lunchtime. I guess that fell under the department of “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

We should pause here to thank Clinton and Obama for fighting that menacing free trade pact with Colombia, what with that nation’s economy making up 1/43 of our NAFTA-ravaged economy. Since they’re both mining for votes in the Rust Belt these days, the two Democratic presidential candidates are playing to the usual exaggerations and distortions about trade agreements. It’s Obama’s key wedge issue, (and one of Clinton’s as well), in trying to persuade the Archie Bunkers in Scranton that he can look out for their interests, too. 

Hey, it’s tough all over. Here in Brownsville, Tx., the poorest city of its size in America as defined by the Census Bureau, we can tell our own stories of woe and contrasts - job growth vs. enduring poverty, rising incomes vs. 42 percent of the local population living below this nation’s federally defined poverty level.

“Yes, there is an emerging middle class,” said Antonio Zavaletta, vice president for external affair at the University of Texas at Brownsville, in an interview with The Herald.  “(But) we’ve got so many people and we’ve grown so fast that the problems just multiply. As a community, we don’t break out.”

But we’re not bitter,  just resilient.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger.

The immigrant had lived the American dream.

A 41-year-old father of three, he owned two homes, some commercial property and ran and owned a successful heating and cooling business.

“I earned the respect of my clients,” said the immigrant, who put down roots in Chicago.

One big problem, though, this immigrant to America was here illegally. He didn’t cross a border. He didn’t climb over some ill-begotten border fence. His last name doesn’t fit the stereotype fashioned by the right-wing culture crowd on talk radio and cable television.

No, Andrezj Derezinski came to the U.S. in an entire legal manner 18 years ago. He stepped on American soil via a valid visa and passport. But Derezinski, or “Peter,” as he was called in the U.S., stayed in the country after his visa expired, becoming one of the nearly six million illegal immigrants who became undocumented in this manner. All told, up to 45 percent of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are visa overstayers.

You don’t hear much about these sort of illegal immigrants from the right-wing culture crowd. CNN’s resident hatemonger, Lou Dobbs, doesn’t have any storylines with the words “Broken Visas,” headlining any of the reports on his slanted program. You won’t hear Fox News fathead Sean Hannity every push a guest on his show with questions like: “Mr. Homeland Security Secretary, when are we finally going to secure our leaky visa system?”

Nope. For the right-wing culture crowd it’s all about broken borders and securing the border, (the southern one, of course, nary a mention of the little country of Canada to our north), and so an illegal immigrant named Derezinski isn’t going to being demonized on CNN’s daily diatribe on broken borders. It doesn’t fit the script, the stereotype always being nurtured and pushed by the right-wing culture types who have assigned themsleves the task of protecting America’s sovereignty and purity from the Mexican hordes.

It would be informative for Dobbs, Hannity and their demagogic ilk to read the page 1 story in this past Thursday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. In a rare piece of reporting that goes beyond the usual media framework about how all illegal immigrants are Mexicans, the Journal story not only tells the story of Derezinski, the Polish illegal alien, but also details how many such immigrants fit his description.

Relatively few of the illegal aliens who are visa overstayers are from Latin American countries. The vast majority are from European countries, (i.e. Polish, British, French), and then followed by visa overstayers from the Phillippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam. Gee, are they, too, crowding our public schools, using our medical and health care facilities, and all on food stamps, too, just like the Mexicans?

No, Derezinski, like the vast majority of Latin American immigrants here illegally, are hard-working, pay taxes, own property in many cases, and are raising American-born children. In Chicago alone, the Journal reports that there are about 70,000 Polish illegal immigrants, second only to the city’s undocumented Mexican population.

“Illegal immigration isn’t just a Latino issue,” said Frank Spula, president of the Polish-American Alliance, in the Journal article. “Polish people who overstayed their visas are here with family and property, and they just can’t pack up and leave.”

Gee, sound familiar? Sorry, Mr. Derezinski, what part of illegal don’t you understand?

And so, on April 10, the day the Journal story was published, Andrezj “Peter” Derezinski was deported back to Poland, leaving his American wife and three U.S.-born children behind. America, after all, can’t afford to have such hardened criminals in our midst.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

If they were coffee products, Barack Obama would be Starbucks and Hillary Clinton would be Folgers.

That’s what I gleaned from a cover story of the current issue of Fast Company, a trendy business magazine that reports on trends, technology, and changing marketplaces. A big headline that says, “The Brand Called Obama,” is played prominently on the magazine cover, as is a photo of the candidate looking off into the distance somewhere.

There’s a good amount of hero worship in the magazine article inside. When such adulation involves a politician, one should be careful about drinking too much of the Kool-Aid. Still, the article offers an insightful analysis on how the Obama campaign has skillfully tapped into the amazing and relatively new world of the Internet and all of its possibilities.

While the Clintons have largely clung to the usual political scripts, (i.e. depend on historically big donors, rely on mostly older establishment poiticians), the Obama campaign has tapped into a new age message machine of online clicks and Internet-based social networks. It is a machine that has not only worked to spread the candidate’s message and themes - but to also raise tens of millions of dollars a month from average wage-earning Americans.

While Hillary has been going to the usual fatcats of her party, Obama has gained hundreds of thousands of Internet-driven $50 donations from 18-to-34 Americans, many of whom had never given a contribution to a candidate before. Obama now regularly raises $30 million and more every month while Republican presidential candidate John McCain is lucky if he raises one-fifth of that amount while following traditional models of political fundraising.

“Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation,” the Fast Company article states. “Obama’s inclusive rhetoric is pitched to appeal to a Web generation of voters who want to be involved in creating messages and policies.”

Much, if not all of this, will surely sound like high-folluting nonsense to older voters, say a 40-something baby boomer like myself who struggles to get his mind around the richness of Internet intricacies and the online culture of instant messaging and social networking. But the kids get it and they’re moving fast, so fast that while skeptical boomers roll their eyes at Obama’s new age media machine, he has run right past the Clinton restoration,  with McCain now in his sights.

For all of Obama’s abilities as a candidate, his secret weapon might be a 24-year-old whiz kid named Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, a social networking engine that is hugely popular among young online users. Hughes took a leave from Facebook to become one of Obama’s chief gurus for all things online.  Fast Company says Hughes brought the Obama campaign “a mastery of the human side of social networking that has translated into real results.”

Millions of youthful Obama supporters have communicated amongst themselves about the campaign, the candidate, and in the process of all of their online social networking, generated enthusiasm, money and passion for the Obama campaign.

“This is where the Obama campaign has been strategic and smart,” says Andrew Rasiej, the founder of an online organization that studies how technology is changing politics. In the Fast Company article, Rasiej goes on to say, “They, (Obama campaign), have made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled. They’ve turned themselves into a media organization.”

This high-tech message machine will be the rubber that hits the road this fall against the McCain and the Republicans, if Obama does finally oust Clinton in the Democratic race. And then we will see if this new model of American political marketing and promotion will hold up against what is sure to be a full throttle Republican attack machine. A Boston Globe story this week reported that various Republican-leaning political groups are preparing “the book” on Obama, i.e. the return of the so-called “swift boat” line of attack advertising that helped to sink John Kerry in 2004.

It could be the battle of old-school swift boating vs. the new age social networking this fall, lining up not just a clash of ideas, but of political marketing and promotion that could decide a most interesting presidential race between a 46-year-old Democrat and a 72-year-old Republican.

Win or lose, Fast Company says the Obama Brand and the way it has run its Web-driven campaign has changed American politics, and is sure to generate a raft of imitators in the years ahead.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

Over 25 years, the stretches of native habitat that make up the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge were stitched together  carefully - and with lots of federal dollars.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recognized the vital importance of this precious habitat along the Rio Grande, which is esentially about all that’s left of the native terrain that once made  up all of the Valley. At nearly 100,000 acres and running in a checkboard fashion along the river, this network of native lands is home to an array of endangered species that have moved back-and-forth across the river for ages - and long before anyone uttered the words, “illegal aliens.”

Great care and maintenance - along with significant amounts of federal dollars - have been invested into being good stewards of these endangered lands. American taxpayers, through their yearly contributions due by April 15, made the funding for purchase and maintenance of these lands possible. Now after all of this painstaking care and the expenditure of millions of federal dollars for this endeavor, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, is casting it all aside, saying, in effect, “never mind,” as he invokes special powers unwisely given to him by Congress to play the role of heavy-handed kingmaker.

Chertoff on Tuesday waived the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental protections to allow the the feds to finish building 700 miles of border fencing by year’s end. It is urgent, Chertoff claims, to put up the fence as soon as possible because, he says, Americans are clamoring for increased border security. It is debatable if such real urgency exists to keep out all of those dasterdely sheet rockers, farm workers and hotel cleaning ladies who do such great harm to America, but even if one one believes such a thing, shouldn’t the federal goverment respect its own laws?

We all accept that the border fence in some fashion is a done deal. But shouldn’t homeland security go through the legally mandated reviews of the consequences the fence will inflict? Perhaps that’s too much ask for a federal department agency that is all too eager to take legal action to confisicate the land of private property owners along the river for the vaunted fence, even when such lands have been in the hands of some American families for generations.

I’m not a squishy environmentalist nor do I count birdwatching as a hobby, but I respect both fields and endeavors, and even more so question the absolute need to run any fencing into the heart of carefully preserved natural areas. Can’t the feds run the thing around these areas, or pause long enough to carefully consider the best way to do it? Is it really essential to natural security to close the Sabal Palm Audubon Center after it will be rendered moot after Chertoff builds his fence through it? Is it really necessary to sqauander the millions of dollars in federal spending it took to buy 90,000 acres of land for the LRGV refuge by barreling fencing through much of it?

It is one thing for Chertoff to build his fence across the flat, federally owned desert of Arizona where no one cares if 20-foot fences go up to discourage Mexican immigrants who want to come into this country to clean hotel rooms, do landscaping, pick crops or build houses. It’s another to do the same to one of America’s more environmentally sensitive areas of native habitat along a river that divides two countries.

Litigation efforts to stop Chertoff from his plans to appease anti-immigration hardliners will likely fail, but Congress does  have oversight power to make this guy show that he has properly consulted local officials and landowners in construction of the fence. Legislation passed last December by the Congress ties funding of homeland security to Chertoff doing his job in providing detailed justification for each segment of the fence.

It looks like Chertoff sees all such requirements as hassles he doesn’t want to deal with - nor believes he is obligated to follow. Here’s a wish that Congress will remind Chertoff that he reports to the elected officials of  this country - and the people they represent - and not just his own wishes and ambitions.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

The border fence works.

That’s the word from  a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Yuma, Ariz., who says a 20-foot high, cement-filled steel-piped fence is getting the job done when it comes to reducing illegal immigrant apprehenisions in the southwest corner of Arizona.

“A lot of people have the misconception that it is a waste of time and money, but the numbers of apprehensions show that it works,” said agent Michael Bernacke, in a story published this week by the Christian Science Monitor.

That may be in what this agent sees in his small slice of the border, but not all in the law enforcement field are completely convinced about the effectiveness of a border fence within the scope and length of what is mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, a former U.S. Border Patrol sector chief in the Rio Grande Valley and his native West Texas, has a different take.

In a story published last year in Texas Monthly, Reyes said border fencing in small stretches in mostly urban areas could be effective, but said the vast stretches of fencing in isolated areas as prescribed by the 2006 law would prove to be costly and ineffective. When asked what he expected to hear in an upcoming Republican legislator-chaired hearing on border fencing, (a subject of the magazine story), Reyes said, “A bunch of bull.”

In Brownsville, a former high-level federal law enforcement officer who was also a police officer for many years, told me some border fencing could help in funneling criminal elements, (non-illegal immigrant types crossing to work), into areas where they could be apprehended, but otherwise took a cool view to the notion of miles and miles of such fencing.

“Twenty, 25 years from now, people are going to be clamoring to tear the thing down and asking, `What were people thinking back then when they had it built?’ ” he told me.

What the fence act envisioned was the sort of formidable fencing that divides Israel and the West Bank - and that has been constructed in the Yuma area. Triple and double-layered, and built in the desert and on federal land, the Arizona portion of the fence has seen few obstacles, either in geography or politics.

It’s a different story in South Texas. A meandering river, plenty of native brush, and hundreds of miles of privately owned land seperate the Rio Grande Valley and Mexico. It’s one thing to build fencing in desert land owned by the federal government and quite another to put up such structures on land that in some cases has been owned by the same families for generations.

On flat, hot desert land that is out-of-sight and out-of-mind except for the agents enforcing the law and the immigrants trying to get around them, residents in Yuma apparently give the thing little thought. In Brownsville, where a border fence is plotted out to cut into a university campus and block off the historical view between this city and neighboring Matamoros, this subject carries a completely different  meaning - and impact.

Of course, when politicians in Washington passed the fence law, after failing miserably to enact comprehensive immigration reform, they had no recognition or knowledge of the vast differences in geography, politics and history along the border - not that many of them would care. They don’t. Gaining such understandings is for sissies, apparently, so Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Tuesday that he planned to invoke legal waivers to go around various objections and environmental laws to get more of the fence built as quickly as possible.

Go ahead and put a finger in one stretch of the border, Mr. Secretary, and see something else come out on the other end. 

“For the Yuma sector, the numbers are telling,” said Ken Rosevear, president of the Yuma Chamber of Commerce in the Science Monitor article. “But we all know that once you shut down a pipeline in one area it merely diverts the traffic to somewhere else.”