On the Fence Over the Wall; Weighing ‘Anchor Babies’

ON THE FENCE: With a bill sanctioning a 700-mile border fence cleared by a House majority this week, attention now turns to the upper chamber where the Republican leadership will work against a ticking legislative clock ahead of the midterm elections. Sen. Bill Frist (R., Tenn.), the majority leader, makes the case for the fence legislation — even apart from the “comprehensive reform” package he has supported — in a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed. “All in all,” he writes, “I’m convinced that the finished network [of fences] would give us the protection we need to achieve what immigration law enforcers all ‘operational control’ over the entire border.” A border fence around San Diego achieved just that, Mr. Frist notes, but the rest of the California border remains largely unobstructed: “Today, one can walk in a more-or-less straight line from Mexico’s Baja California to Riverside without encountering a single physical barrier.”

Meanwhile, a newspaper in Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy’s home state of Vermont accuses the politician of straddling the fence issue. A double-layered fence extending 700 miles would be “a scar on a fragile desert ecosystem, and a scar on our legacy as a nation of immigrants,” Mr. Leahy argued in a speech on the Senate floor. But, writes Battleboro Reformer reporter Evan Lehmann, “Four months ago, he was on the other side of the fence issue when he supported construction of a barrier along 370 miles of the southwest border. … Leahy voted yes to the shorter fence.”

For National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune, the momentum behind the fence is a victory for the Neanderthals — and he means it in a good way. Today’s bipartisan support for the border fence marks a reversal; earlier in the year, when immigrants and their supporters took the streets, “polite opinion scoffed” at the fence in favor of reforms that included a guest-worker program and citizenship for some illegal immigrants. “But a funny thing happened on the way to ‘comprehensive reform’ — the political marketplace worked,” Mr. Lowry says. The Minutemen, with their border vigils, “have shown that Washington can be made to respond to public opinion on immigration, for a change.”

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The Wall Street Journal