New border chief: Walls are not the answer

UCSON, Ariz. - Two weeks on the job, the new head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday he does not favor building a huge wall along the Mexican border.

"I don't support, I don't believe the administration supports a wall," Commissioner W. Ralph Basham said in Tucson, where he met with patrol officials and agents before embarking on a tour across the Arizona desert.

Asked about proposals in Senate- and House-approved immigration measures to build security walls 380 or 700 miles long, respectively, Basham said, "It doesn't make sense, it's not practical."

As Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano put it, "You build a 50-foot wall, somebody will find a 51-foot ladder," he said.
...

"There is not a silver bullet out there, there's not one answer," he said.

...
"You can sit in Washington, D.C., and you can get briefings and you can look at maps and hear from people what the challenges are out here," Basham said. "But until you get up there and you look and you see what kind of terrain you're dealing with and the difficulties of it, you really don't have a true appreciation."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060620/ap_on_re_us/border_fence_basham

MENDING WALL
Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

end

Is this from the Onion?

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