This is from an article titled "The Borderland" in Field and Stream magazine. Hardly a left wing periodical.
“The plans for the wall are the ideas of people that are far away from the reality of this place.”
Directly to the south of us, just west of the Animus Range, is a wide plain, and somewhere in the middle of it, the border between the United States and Mexico. It is impossible for me to imagine a wall being built there, cutting this wild country in half, stranding the pronghorn, the Coues deer, all of the wildlife that lives by migrating from water source to feed and back again. How would the engineers get the wall through the Animus Range? How much would that cost? How would the water from the mountain snows and seasonal downpours get through the wall? There is nobody in sight and no evidence that illegal immigrants even use this stretch of the border. “The plans for the wall are the ideas of people that are far, far away from the reality of this place,” Trejo says. “It’s a solution that seems simple: People are coming in that you don’t want, bringing drugs or whatever; you build a wall and keep them out. But it’s not like that. This is not where the problem is. You can’t stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling by building a wall out here. But you can wreck this place. You can build roads and bulldoze and waste billions of dollars, but the wall here won’t be what stops the migrants or the smugglers.”
Vasquez, when he worked for Sen. Martin Heinrich, was a researcher on border security. “There are marijuana smugglers who use these isolated places to bring bales across, but most of the heroin and other drugs come in at the border cities,” he says. “In the past few years, they’ve been flying remote-controlled drones that deliver to wherever they choose.” That is another reason for the extraordinary level of Border Patrol presence, with the high-tech observation and listening equipment we’d seen mounted on trucks and trailers as we drove in. “The Border Patrol has all this new technology deployed, which has definitely had an impact here.”
I had noticed that we’d left the camping gear and a lot of other valuables totally unprotected back at camp. Although we have the shotguns, and Trejo and Clemente have handguns in their trucks, nobody has expressed any security concerns or even mentioned the sign we’d seen that warned of illegal immigrants and smugglers in the area. “People who don’t live here think there is all this danger out in the desert,” Vasquez says. “They imagine it to be like Tijuana or Juarez. That’s one reason they support the idea of a wall. They don’t know what is here—the camping, the wildlife, the mountains, all of this.” He sweeps his hand across the horizon.
Clemente, who spent a lot of time working to get his U.S. citizenship, has little sympathy for illegal immigrants of any nationality. His concern is for the wildlife that he has spent his life studying and hunting. “The wall would be a disaster for the wildlife,” he says. “Even for the quail and other birds that nest on the ground. For the deer and the jaguars, all of that, just a disaster.”
We all agree that illegal immigration has to be stopped, but that a wall here in this spectacular wilderness isn’t going to help. “The worst thing that could happen, and I could actually see this happening,” Trejo says, “is that the big contractors get all that money, come in here and start building the wall, and in a few years, when Americans realize that it was a bad idea, the project is abandoned, the money gone, this place changed forever.”
https://www.fieldandstream.com/quail-hunting-public-land-new-mexico
