THE TOWN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF AMERICA'S DRUGS WAR

A huge fence runs thousands of miles along the border with Mexico to
keep migrants and narcotics out. Trouble is, it also cuts off half of
Brownsville, Texas. By Guy Adams

Like many a proud Texan, Pamela Taylor likes to mark her turf. So on
any given day, she makes sure passers-by can see the Stars and
Stripes and the Lone Star Flag of her native state fluttering atop
the poles that stand in her front garden.

Ms Taylor has lived in the southern-most city of Brownsville, Texas,
since just after the Second World War, when she left the UK to join
her late husband John, a US soldier who had been based near
Birmingham. With that in mind, she also flies a Union Jack. "I hang
it lower than the American flags," she says, "because it's a smaller
part of my heritage."

Lately, though, there's been a distinctly surreal flavour to Ms
Taylor's colourful display of patriotic identity. About 350 metres
from her porch, an imposing metal fence looms into view. It is
supposed to divide the US from Mexico, but by a cruel twist of fate,
the 83-year-old grandmother's family home has ended up on the "wrong"
side. Four years ago, amid the seemingly endless hand-wringing over
the flow of drugs and illegal migrants across their southern border,
Washington politicians voted to erect a tall fence that would stretch
thousands of miles from San Diego, on the Pacific coast, to
Brownsville, on the Gulf of Mexico. The best-laid political schemes
do not always work out as planned, though. When government engineers
arrived in Ms Taylor's neighbourhood, their plan hit a snag: the
Mexican border follows the meandering Rio Grande in this area. And
the river's muddy banks are too soft and too prone to flooding to
support a fence.

As a result, this corner of south-eastern Texas had its barrier
constructed on a levee that follows a straight line from half a mile
to two miles north of the river, leaving Ms Taylor's bungalow - along
with the homes and land of dozens of her angry neighbours - marooned
on the Mexican side. "My son-in-law likes to say that we live in a
gated community," she says, explaining that to even visit the shops
she must pass through a gate watched over by border-patrol officers.
"We're in a sort of no man's land. I try to laugh, but it's hard:
that fence hasn't just spoiled our view, it's spoiled our lives."

Ms Taylor's domestic situation demonstrates - despite sound bites
from politicians (Barack Obama last week gave a major speech on the
issue) - there are no simple fixes to America's great immigration debate.

In total, roughly 50,000 acres of sovereign US land is now on the
wrong side of the fence, most of it in Texas. Lawmakers believe that
is a fair price to pay for the political benefits of being seen as
"tough" on immigration.

But to many locals, Ms Taylor included, the headline-prone barrier -
which cost $7m a mile (UKP4.3m) - is an expensive white elephant.

"First of all, it doesn't work," she says. "Anyone with a rope and a
bucket can just climb on over. Second, they've used it as an excuse
to reduce border patrols. Thirdly, it's left people like me
unprotected. While the officers are guarding the fence, any drug
smugglers can just walk up to my front door."

Like many of her neighbours, Ms Taylor has been forced to turn her
home into a mini-fortress, with alarms and motion sensors and a small
arsenal of firearms in strategic positions around the house. "We're
never safe," she says. "You just try to avoid living in fear."

It was not always like this. For most of the almost 70 years she has
lived there, Brownsville has been on the frontline of America's
immigration debate. But in the old days, things were less
confrontational. Families heading north from Mexico would camp
overnight in surrounding cotton fields. "We'd wake up in the morning,
and the migrant workers would have built a fire and made tortillas,"
Ms Taylor says. "On occasion, they'd bring me breakfast."

Ms Taylor once found a woman on her porch in the process of giving
birth (she called an ambulance and helped care for the woman until
help arrived). Another time, she found an exhausted Hispanic man
asleep in her armchair (he apologised, saying he had decided to use
her bathroom to shave and brush his teeth).

But from the mid-1990s, with the growth of Mexico's drug trade,
security declined. Ms Taylor's car was stolen several times. One
morning, she found a package containing 50lbs of marijuana in her
flowerbed. "I turned it in to the sheriff," she says. "I'm a cancer
patient and when I told my doctor, he said I should have used the stuff."

Since the fence went up, crime has further spiralled. "I'm a gung-ho
Texan. I've brought up four kids here and I've made this place my
life. But there are times, since the barrier went up, when it hasn't
felt like home."

Down the road, she has erected a protest banner. "We're part of
America," it says. "We need representation and protection, not a fence."

You hear a similar sentiment across Brownsville. Roughly eight in
every 10 of the city's 170,000 inhabitants are Latino and most speak
Spanish as a first language. Every street corner seems to have a taco
stall and the local economy relies heavily on imports from factories
south of the border.

Most locals rue the divisive tone of the current immigration debate.
The city's former mayor, an attorney named Eddie Trevino, who
describes himself as a "very right-wing Democrat", says the furore
over the fence demonstrates the extent to which the US immigration
system needs a complete overhaul.

"Nobody's in favour of illegal immigration," Mr Trevino says. "Let me
be unequivocal about that. We don't want anybody violating our laws.

"But the reality is that our laws are antiquated and need to be
updated to make sense in the world in which we live. It made no sense
to build this fence, other than making people in other parts of the
country feel better and feel a false sense of safety. It's like the
old joke: build a 12ft fence and you'll be having a huge demand for
15ft ladders."

Even the city's white, Republican-leaning minority is opposed to the
border fence. The well-mown greens of a local golf course are on land
that now sits on the "wrong" side, while fields and orchards farmed
by generations of landowners have been sliced in two by the metal barrier.

"I'll say right off the bat that I'm a conservative - I believe in
hard work and I believe our border needs to be secure," says Debbie
Loop, whose 15-acre citrus farm is on both sides of the fence. "But
when they signed this fence into law, nobody stopped to think Texas
isn't Arizona or California. Our border does not run dirt to dirt.
Any idiot could have told them that. My grandchildren now live on the
wrong side. Who is going to protect them? Who protects me when I'm in
my orchards after dusk? I just want to work hard and earn a living.
But they've changed this place forever."

This week, Mr Obama signalled his intention to bring the immigration
debate into play in next year's presidential elections, travelling to
El Paso, on the other side of Texas from Brownsville, to unveil plans
to create a "path to citizenship" for the roughly 12 million
undocumented workers thought to be living illegally in the US.

With his speech - aimed to court the growing Latino demographic that
now numbers about 50 million people - he entered into
electoral-campaign mode. Mr Obama emphasised that his administration
has deported more immigrants than that of any of its predecessors.
And he ridiculed Republican lawmakers who have endorsed building
ever-larger barriers along the border.

"Now they're going to say that we need to quadruple the border
patrol," Mr Obama said, reaching out to the large and growing
demographic of Latino voters.

"Or they'll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll say we need a moat.
Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat. They'll never be satisfied."

The joke might have played well in the next day's news pages - but in
Brownsville, they were not laughing.

"Let him come here and say that," was Ms Loop's response.

"Round these parts, people like alligators a whole lot more than politicians."