Derek Staahl
The Arizona-Mexico border spans approximately 370 miles, but only a third of it has fencing designed to stop people on foot.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the international boundary in Arizona features 123.2 miles of pedestrian fencing, like the tall bollard-style fence in Nogales, Arizona.
Another 183.2 miles, or 49 percent of the Arizona-Mexico border, are covered with vehicle fencing. This type of fencing includes “Normandy fencing,” X-shaped barricades used on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day and intended to stop only vehicles.
The remaining 64 miles has no barrier at all. The un-barricaded land is in areas where there are natural barriers, like mountains, Border Patrol officials say.
Still, polling shows nearly half of Arizonans think the border wall proposed by Donald Trump isn’t the right move. In a poll of 2,600 Arizonans conducted by Reuters last month, 47 percent of respondents said the wall would be a “waste of money.” Thirty-four percent said the wall would be an “effective barrier.” The remaining respondents selected “neither.”
Inside Nickel’s Diner in Nogales, the breakfast crowd was split on the topic.
“We need to have this wall put up,” said Mark Gibson, a long-time Nogales resident. “I’m for it, and I think once you put this wall up, it’ll make immigration reform come around. Because there’s a lot of good people in Mexico and there’s a lot of families here. They need to fix it where you can go both ways.”
A few booths away, Nogales resident Saul Gonzales said the wall would be “a waste of resources.”
“No matter how far or how extended that wall is built, there’s always going to be some hole. Some loophole and they’re going to find it,” he said.
Some in this border town are worried about the symbolic message of adding concrete barriers, including Santa Cruz County Assessor Felipe Fuentes.
“My feeling is, we’re going back to the Berlin Wall. There’s going to be a real dividing wall between the two countries,” Fuentes said.
The poll, conducted Oct. 5 to Oct. 19, had a “credibility interval” of 3 percentage points for likely voters, according to Reuters. A credibility interval is a measure of accuracy.
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