Cary Cardwell

Thursday, Sep 13, 2007 10:53 AM UTC

Ocelots are collateral damage

The U.S.-Mexican border fence, which could be ramrodded past environmental laws, would set back decades of wildlife conservation.

By Cary Cardwell

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Sonia Najera walks under a canopy of ash and sugar hackberry trees, down a dirt path that ends at the water’s edge of the Rio Grande. The spot is a mile from the tidal flats where the river mixes with the Gulf of Mexico after its journey from the Colorado headwaters. Najera, South Texas project manager for the Nature Conservancy, points to paw prints in the muddy river bank. “That’s a canine,” she says, “probably a coyote. That looks like badger; that’s chachalaca for sure,” she continues, describing a pheasantlike bird found in this southern tip of Texas.

Najera, a wildlife biologist, also looks for tracks of the ocelot, the endangered wildcat with a signature rosette camouflage that allows it to hunt in sun-dappled canopy forests. No tracks today, or most days. Once the ocelot hunted all the way up through the woodland areas of eastern Texas and into Louisiana and Arkansas. Now the only two remaining family groups in the U.S., fewer than 100 individuals, can be found here.

The ocelot is not the only rare creature carrying on a precarious existence in this unique corner of Texas. Although not as well known as Yosemite or Yellowstone, the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge offers a variety of species unmatched in the United States — 500 bird species, 300 butterflies, 700 vertebrates. “This is one of the crown jewels of the national wildlife refuge system,” says Carter Smith, Texas state director of the Nature Conservancy. Saving and restoring this area took $70 million in federal land acquisitions and three decades of work by the Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society and local communities. But now the victories could go for naught.

At issue is the Bush administration mandate to build 700 miles of fence along parts of the U.S. border with Mexico. It’s part of the Secure Border Initiative, a Department of Homeland Security program first funded by Congress in 2005 to address border security. While the fence has stirred a bonfire of debate over terrorism and illegal immigration, the fate of the area’s unique wildlife has been lost in the uproar.

In Texas, 225 miles of fencing will begin to be installed this fall. A large percentage of that fencing will be built in the valley along the unique river bank and habitat that follows the Rio Grande. It would cut across more than a dozen refuges and parks totaling more than 100,000 acres. Critics warn the fence and its accompanying patrol roads will sever critical wildlife corridors on the animals’ natural territories. Animals depend on these corridors to reach mates, and seek food and water. If the fence is installed, says Martin Hagne, director of the nonprofit Valley Nature Center, “it will be a huge catastrophe.” Hagne is a member of an unusual coalition of environmentalists, local farmers, ranchers and local business interests fighting the fence.

Construction is slated to begin later this year, and opponents are worried they won’t have a democratic voice to stop it. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has vowed to seek community input and consider local concerns. But while department spokespersons in Washington say the consultative process is under way, folks in the valley say they haven’t been heard. Even biologists with Homeland Security’s sister agency, Fish and Wildlife, say they don’t know where the fence is going to run or what it’s going to look like.

The most likely route for the valley fence would run along a 1935 earthen flood control levee. The levee follows a straighter course along the river than do the tortuously winding banks of the Rio Grande. In some places it comes within yards of the river and in others, the levee is a mile inland. While the levee makes an easy natural crossing for animals, the construction of a secure fence or even hard-packed patrol roads would create small islands of land between the fence and the river and interrupt the natural movement of animals to the river, where they feed.

Jody Mays is a Fish and Wildlife biologist who has worked with ocelots in the valley for a decade. She explains that the open areas created by the fence would further limit the ocelots’ hunting range because the cats, marked for forest and night hunting, simply will not risk exposure in the open. “The ocelot cannot adapt to open areas,” she says. “They’re vulnerable because of their markings. If an ocelot’s standing in the middle of a clearing, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb.”

Mays has seen the ocelot population in the U.S. fall to just two groups. One is a group of 25 to 35 individuals that live on the Laguna Atascosa wetlands, and the other is a smaller group of 10 to 12 cats that occupy a large private ranch nearby. Even though the two groups are separated by only a few miles, they cannot reach each other because of the habitat fragmentation caused by development.

Mexico has a healthier population of ocelots and jaguarundi. But the Laguna Atascosa ocelots continue to decline because the lack of wildlife corridors prevents them from breeding with ocelots in northern Mexico. Some bilateral programs are under way with Mexico to reopen some of the historic wildlife corridors that cross the Rio Grande. But a border fence would probably render those efforts useless. The isolation of ocelots on the U.S. side is already showing up in health problems, and has been seen in the degradation of their DNA quality. Inbreeding is taking its toll. “A simple flu could wipe them out,” Mays says.

It’s not just mammals that would be affected by fence construction, biologists say. They also point to the Texas indigo snake. Most wildlife tourists to the Rio Grande Valley might doubt the existence of a snake that reaches a length of 8 feet and eats rattlesnakes. But the Texas indigo snake is real. It used to be common in the valley but is now listed as endangered in Texas because of loss of habitat. Proposed security fencing could hinder its access to feeding grounds and water.

New roads would also increase the danger to valley wildlife. From 1983 to 2002, a study done by Texas A&M University found that 10 of the 29 ocelot deaths that occurred in the valley were due to road kills. The border fence would include construction of new roads to reach it, and some versions of the plan include high-speed patrol roads running alongside it. In places, the swath of fence and roads could become 150 yards wide. “Building a 150-foot wide strip of fencing and two roads is going to have a major impact on wildlife,” says Ernesto Reyes, an ecology services biologist for Fish and Wildlife in the valley. At the Southmost Preserve, where Najera pointed out the animal tracks, it’s easy to recognize an established watering spot. Yet the earthen berm where the security fence would likely be built is just yards away. Animals might have to travel miles out of their way to find a new watering spot. And road kills on improved patrol roadways will increase, Reyes says.

The final design of the fence is crucial. Will it be concrete and wire, or “ornamental,” as Chertoff remarked about fencing he had seen in the valley? Will it look like Smuggler’s Gulch in California — a blend of old-fashioned strip mining and security fencing worthy of a supermax prison? Brad Benson, a spokesman for the Secure Border Initiative in Washington, D.C., says no final decisions on design or placement have been made.

Lack of information and conflicting statements by authorities in Washington irritate local residents. In July, Border Patrol agents announced at a local Audubon Society meeting that the style of fencing could be decided by individual property owners. When pressed on that point by valley teacher Scott Nicol, a local Sierra Club member, the agents backed away, saying they had no authority to say what kind of fencing would be acceptable. “So they promise the moon, but they have no authority to keep their promises,” Nicol says.

This scenario is familiar to activists who have followed the border fence dispute in Arizona, near the Barry Goldwater military bombing range and the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. In August 2006, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense announced that a “hybrid” fence with anti-vehicle features that would allow animals to cross would be built. Pygmy owls that live in cactus, Sonoran pronghorn antelope and the occasional jaguar crossing from Mexico are among the wildlife whose corridors would be cut by a wall.

Sean Scully, a Tucson member of the Sierra Club and the Sky Island Alliance, who closely monitors the Arizona wall, said that the local parties, including the military base commander, had agreed on vehicle-barrier fencing that would allow the passage of most wildlife. But Scully contends that in the spring, Homeland Security invoked its power to bypass federal requirements such as environmental impact statements, and announced that the fencing would be “upgraded” to an impenetrable wall, with sheet metal stretching between concrete posts along most of it. “The Border Patrol had never even consulted with Fish and Wildlife,” he says. Fish and Wildlife biologists in the valley have voiced the same complaints about lack of consultation.

Chertoff has said — and Benson reiterated this week — that Homeland Security will comply with all environmental impact assessments, even though it was given special powers to bypass them because of its critical mission.

Homeland Security argues the Rio Grande fence will deter illegal immigration. Yet the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande sector itself has raised questions about whether it would make much of a difference. Its sector office told the Government Accountability Office in 2005 that the rugged geography of the area in the Rio Grande sector, which includes the Lower Valley river corridor and especially the rugged thorn brush country inland from the river, creates its own impenetrable fencing.

“The brush (inland from the river corridor) is so dense with sage, scrub brush and cacti that it has created an inhospitable environment for … smugglers or illegal aliens,” the report states. Because there are only two highways leading north from the Lower Valley, the local Border Patrol stated that it could intercept illegal immigration within its existing checkpoints. In fact, from 2000 to 2005, the number of apprehensions reported by the local Border Patrol climbed from 108,000 to 134,000, according to a report by Syracuse University.

Valley residents complain that Washington consultants and officials don’t understand what’s at stake. Nancy Millar, mayor of the border town of McAllen, points out that nature tourism now brings $34 million annually into the local economy and supports 2,500 jobs. Locals have also grown increasingly suspicious of federal officials. “We have always worked side by side with the Border Patrol,” says the Nature Conservancy’s Smith about local law enforcement. “They already have keys to all our gates and access to our refuges. The wall changes that dynamic. It isolates. It creates unnecessary friction and a hostile environment for landowners.”

Smith adds that he is striving to create a truce with Washington. “This is not a choice between the fence and national security of the U.S. against the animals and the birds,” he says. “It’s about finding a solution that preserves the ability of animals to move back and forth along their river corridors.”

One afternoon in his office at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, where the restored riparian forest looks like it might have when Spanish explorers first saw it, Reyes, the Fish and Wildlife Services biologist, explains that ocelots in the U.S. used to swim across the Rio Grande, and travel back and forth to Mexico. As recently as the 1990s, a pair of breeding ocelots regularly swam across a local shipping channel. But no longer. For seven years, Reyes has worked with his Mexico counterparts on a habitat management plan extending 60 miles on both sides of the border. Now he worries his project will be undermined by the border fence. “If they could build a fence that would let animals cross and keep people out, that would be great,” Reyes says. How might that work? He says that building a gap at the bottom of a fence — slither room — with a concrete base could let rodents, snakes and small animals pass under. But what about the ocelots and jaguarundis and coyotes? How would they get through to find shelter and new mates? Reyes shrugs his shoulders. “Quien sabe? as they say in South Texas. Who knows?”

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:47 PM UTC

Do you know the way to San Antonio?

With enough work for all, including illegal immigrants, the booming Texas city is the future face of the American workforce.

By Cary Cardwell

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It’s lunch hour and workers at the Rim — San Antonio’s busiest commercial work site — are hiding from heat that’s already hit the mid-90s. That’s not “in the shade.” There is none of that on this wound of raw land, once a cement quarry, located on the northwest side of this booming metropolis of 1.6 million. Driven by San Antonio’s hot economy, the Rim is destined to become the city’s newest “lifestyle center.” That means more than a million square feet of high-end shops like Neiman-Marcus and Bass Pro Shops, served by clusters of restricted residential housing, and a half-billion dollars in annual revenues.

It also means a labor market with jobs for just about every man and woman who wants one: residents, legal immigrants and migrants without papers who paid a “coyote” $300 to swim them across the Rio Grande and hide them in the back of a truck for the three-hour drive north. San Antonio is a city that has reached an accommodation with its laborers and the legal status of its workers, and it’s a family secret of sorts — not one that’s well kept. Undocumented laborers are a vital component of the city’s workforce.

At the Rim, workers sit in pickup trucks, engines running $3 a gallon gas to power the air conditioning for a half-hour respite. Pete Infante, 31, an apprentice electrician, moved to San Antonio eight months ago from Chicago and has experienced both sides of the endless debate about America’s undocumented workers. His father was an undocumented immigrant from Guanajuato, Mexico, who brought the family to Illinois, where Pete was born, thus becoming a U.S. citizen. The family was reared in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, amid the thriving winter fruit orchards that required migrant labor to flourish.

“It’s all about opportunity,” Infante says of undocumented workers. “Like my father, they come here to make a better living for their families. They don’t come to just sit around. You start off as a day laborer. That’s where a lot of the undocumenteds work at first. Then maybe you’ve got a family that’s in the trades. They’re already working. And they ease you in.”

Opportunity is what brought Infante to Texas. With its open shop laws that allow most employers to hire non-union workers, Infante could earn his journeyman’s license quicker and without coming up through the union ranks. He makes $15 an hour even as he works toward that license.

Infante points out that in Chicago, where he worked at a hydraulics manufacturing plant, the factory was run by Polish-Americans, who looked out for new relatives arriving from Europe “to ease ‘em into the job market” and help them obtain work permits. “It’s the same everywhere,” he says. Asked about undocumented workers at the Rim, Infante says you see them doing drywall and cleanup, making little more than minimum wage. Do they take jobs that American workers want? Infante shakes his head. “Would you do a laborer’s job in this heat for minimum wage?”

Whatever one’s position on the immigration debate — whether you favor open borders or a 700-mile fence — it would pay to examine San Antonio. It’s the future. “Look at San Antonio, and you’re seeing the diversification that’s coming,” says Steve Murdock, the Texas state demographer and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Of the 1.6 million residents of San Antonio’s metropolitan area, almost 900,000 are Hispanic, most of them Mexican-Americans. It’s impossible to know exactly how many are “illegal” or in the city without proper documents from the U.S. government. Eleven million illegal workers is a widely accepted national figure commonly used in the ongoing debate.

But what makes San Antonio different from other major Texas cities is that Latinos here are more likely to be second, third or fourth generation. “I find more Hispanics in San Antonio who don’t know Spanish than I find in Houston or Dallas,” Murdock says. The last census reported that two-thirds of the Latinos who migrated to Texas between 1995 and 2000 came from another country such as Mexico, while only one-third of the Hispanic immigrants in San Antonio came from outside the U.S. “In San Antonio, one is used to having multiple cultural groups in harmony,” Murdock says.

Murdock believes the diversity of San Antonio is as necessary to the economic health of the city, as it will be in the future to Texas and the U.S. “Immigration in general is the difference between the U.S. and what you see in Western Europe,” he says. There, the population of whites, along with people of working age, has been declining for some time, and the aging population is putting ever increasing burdens on medical care and pension care. Only immigration is replenishing the West European workforce, and the same will become increasingly true for America. Economic self-interest demands that America accommodate these new workers.

And contrary to a widely held belief, illegal immigrants are not a negative drain on the social services network. “Most [undocumented] immigrants do pay taxes; most do have Social Security taken from them, and they won’t be collecting Social Security when they get old,” Murdock says. “And they’re not eligible for most welfare plans.”

While San Antonio has not grown rich off its immigrants — it continues to be regarded as a low-wage, low-skill workforce — it has experienced low unemployment and rapid growth for almost two decades. The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce reports that the city added 12,000 new jobs in the last quarter of 2005. The unemployment rate stood at just 4.3 percent. Applications for new single-family residences increased 49 percent from the last quarter of 2004 compared to the last quarter of 2005.

“The San Antonio market is growing exponentially,” says Tami Munson, a project manager for a large commercial painting contractor, and a board member of Associated General Contractors. “There’s enough work to go around for everybody.”

A critical issue in the immigration debate is whether native-born, working class citizens, some without a high school education, are losing jobs to migrant laborers, willing to work for low pay. But in San Antonio, say employers and labor representatives, the issue is not that black and white. To them, the real problem is finding not unskilled but skilled workers, of any nationality.

David Loredo supplies unskilled “ready labor” to about 100 different companies in San Antonio. He is branch manager for AbleBody Labor, a national company. He pays between $5.15 an hour, the nation’s minimum wage, and $10 an hour, depending on the job. “Most of our people are unskilled labor,” he says during a recent workday when he placed 120 people in jobs. Because it is a national firm, Loredo’s company says it is stringent in making certain all potential employees are legal. “Everybody has to fill out an I-9 form, attesting to their status in the U.S. We do background criminal histories and check child predator lists. You have to have a Texas Driver’s License or a government ID card.”

Even with the tough restrictions, Loredo says he is able to fill all the job orders he receives daily without advertising in the newspaper. “Most people who come in have a valid work permit. If they don’t we turn ‘em away. There’s a small percentage who don’t; maybe 10 percent.”

Loredo’s success in filling all his jobs with legal workers argues that there are enough jobs to go around in San Antonio. Texas economist Ray Perryman of the Perryman Group, a consulting firm that advises businesses and government, has been studying the dynamics of the Texas workforce for three decades. “I don’t think they [undocumented migrants] are displacing a significant number of jobs,” Perryman says. “Our labor market is very dependent on these workers for a lot of jobs — unskilled work in construction, agricultural employments, the hospitality sector.”

If anything, businesses want a looser rein on legal immigration. The problem is finding workers to fill the higher-skill jobs. That is why the Associated General Contractors industry group favors a new “guest worker” program for skilled trades.

“We’re mindful of the fact there’s a shortage of labor in our industry,” says Doug McMurry, executive vice president of the San Antonio chapter of the AGC. “We want a guest worker program that will allow qualified workers from Mexico and Latin America to enter the country legally and spend three, four or five years helping us build our hospitals, schools and retail centers.

“This is not about cheap labor,” he continues. “Most commercial contractors and subcontractors are paying way above minimum wage to start with — $9, $10, $20 an hour. We want qualified people who can work in our industry for high wages; people in the trades, carpenters, plumbers, electricians.” Too much of the debate has centered on the emotional question of border security. “Mexican brick masons are not terrorists,” McMurry says.

Contractor Munson says San Antonio has important lessons to teach the rest of the country about immigration and the assimilation of migrant workers into the community. “There are whole families of employees who came from Mexico. Their father did it and their grandfather did it. They know how to work the legal process.” She does not support amnesty for undocumented workers, but she also understands the important role played by them. “They provide a valuable source of labor for the workforce,” she says. “Our industry is growing exponentially, and a lot of the lower tier trades a lot of people don’t want to do.”

Back at The Rim, Martin Plascencia, 42, a first-year apprentice electrician, prepares to return to work. Construction trailers and heavy equipment dot the landscape. Names of some of the area’s biggest contractors identify the players — Bexar Electric, Brown Construction. Spokespersons for these companies say they do not hire undocumented workers. With the fines, it’s simply too risky. But their smaller subcontractors do.

Plascencia has been riding the crest of the immigration wave in the United States for all his adult life. He began as a 16-year-old from Jalisco, Mexico, with no skills and no papers when he and his cousin sneaked into California near Tijuana in 1981. Except for one trip back to Jalisco, Plascencia has lived and worked in the United States ever since.

Upon first coming to the U.S., Plascencia lived with his extended family in Van Nuys, California. They lived in one house, six adults and four children. Other family members had preceded Martin to California and found jobs as workers at a jet boat manufacturing company. Those relatives in turn got Martin his first job as a laborer, and as he gained in skill, he was given better jobs. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35 an hour, and everyone who worked was paying taxes. “It was one house — uncles, cousins, all family,” Plascencia says. “Everybody worked, except the kids, who went to school. My aunts worked in sweatshops, and the guys at the boat factory and other places.”

His story illustrates a central fact of immigrant life in the United States. Familial connections are a vital factor in migration from Mexico. A 2004 study by the National Council of La Raza found that more than 60 percent of undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. with someone of mixed status — a citizen or a legal resident alien or a temporary worker.

“They want to come out of the shadows and assimilate in American culture,” says Marisol Perez, a staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s San Antonio office. “They want that piece of paper, that document; they want us to know that they’re here.” Plascencia got his “piece of paper” in 1986, with the nationwide amnesty granted by Congress. Ten years later, he became a U.S. citizen. The family moved from California to San Antonio eight months ago. Today, Plascencia is married and has three boys — 18, 13 and 10 — all Americans.

Of course, the economic boom could go bust in San Antonio and immigrant workers could quickly find themselves unemployed and unwanted. (Although the city is on a roll, as a Toyota manufacturing plant is set to begin production later this year.) But San Antonio has lived through economic ups and downs before. In 1986, when amnesty was granted to almost two million undocumented workers nationwide, the city and the rest of Texas was suffering from a serious downturn in the oil industry. But those immigrants, made legal by legislative mandate, managed to be absorbed into the larger population, and in diverse San Antonio became critical to the city’s economic vitality.

Economist Perryman says America would benefit from a similar amnesty program today — at least one that makes room for the unskilled laborer. The alternative of spending millions to build fences and patrol every mile of the border, he says, would only create “critical gaps in the economy. We’d have difficulty in building things, in growing things, in supporting critical segments of the hospitality industry.”

No American industry has been more dependent on immigrant workers and unskilled laborers than farming. Dan Catalani, 52, has witnessed the political battles over migrant labor for decades from his spot in an air conditioned cubicle on the dock at the San Antonio Terminal Market. On a recent morning, workers are busy filling refrigerated tractor trailer rigs with fruits and vegetables bound for other states.

B. Catalani Produce has held a dock in this open air produce market since 1914, and Dan is one of seven brothers — the third generation of Italian-Americans — four of whom continue to operate the business. Many of the family farms that once dotted South Texas have been absorbed into large corporate operations, and B. Catalani is one of the few family produce companies that still thrives in San Antonio.

Catalani explains that he employs workers from across the racial and economic spectrum in San Antonio. They work all types of jobs, from sweeping the parking lot for $6.50 an hour to driving the small bobcats that move pallets of produce into the trucks for $7 an hour, to the commercial drivers who run the tractor-trailers and can earn $40,000 a year plus benefits. He hires a lot of Mexican workers, but stresses they’re all in the country legally. In fact, he says, his company is dependent on them. “I open at 3 a.m. Do you think I could get any white boys to sweep the parking lot for minimum wage?”

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