Bush signs 700 miles of border fence into law

October 26, 2006

President George W Bush signed into law a plan for 700 miles (1,125km) of new fencing along the US-Mexico border, to curb illegal immigration. Bush admitted that the US has not been in control of the border for decades.

Mexican officials have opposed the fence, with outgoing President Vicente Fox calling it "shameful" and likening it to the Berlin Wall.

At least 10 million Mexicans are thought to live in the US, with at least four million of them crossing the border illegally.

An estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrants were arrested last year trying to cross into the US via the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Signing the Secure Fence Act 2006 into law, Bush said that his administration will tackle illegal immigration by means of increased funding and numbers of immigration officials. He said that remote cameras, satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles would also be used to create a "21st-century" border with Mexico.

The double-layered barrier is estimated to cost anywhere from $2.2 billion to $9 billion. A separate $34.8 billion homeland security spending bill that Bush signed into law this month provides at best a down payment on the construction.

"We're modernizing the southern border of the United States so we can assure the American people we are doing our job of securing our border," he said.

"Ours is a nation of immigrants. We're also a nation of law. Unfortunately the United States has not been in complete control of its borders for decades. Therefore illegal immigration has been on the rise."

But Bush promised to continue to work for a temporary guest worker program as well as moves to grant eventual citizenship to some of the illegal immigrants already in the US.

Such efforts are opposed by many within his own Republican party.

TJ Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing patrol agents, told Associated Press that the fence would not be enough on its own. "A fence will slow people down by a minute or two, but if you don't have the agents to stop them it does no good. We're not talking about some impenetrable barrier," he said.

Mexico has said it will challenge the fence at the United Nations and on October 25 it presented a declaration against the policy to the Organisation of American States, supported by 27 other Latin American and Caribbean nations but opposed by the US.

Mexican politicians accuse the United States of hypocrisy for enjoying the benefits of cheap Mexican labour but not being prepared to offer Mexican people a chance to cross the border legally, our correspondent said.