Along the Way: ‘Go green’ can solve immigration problem

I’ve never seen a fence as pretty as a hedgerow, or a battlefield as sensible as a briar patch.

That’s why I think this problem along the Mexican border can be settled, or greatly diminished, ecologically.

We should dedicate a mile-wide strip on the Arizona side of the boundary with Mexico as a native plant and animal refuge, or sanctuary.

What I have in mind, mainly, is cylindropuntia fulgida — jumping cholla — and rattlesnakes.

We could add other beautiful cacti and critters.

How about ocotillo, prickly pear, pincushion, fish hook cactus and century plants, to go with families of gila monster, javelina and skunks?

Skunks would be important in this natural preserve. People who might risk encountering a rattlesnake wouldn’t go near a place where they might bump into Mr. Skunk.

I would plant wall-to-wall jumping cholla, the stuff with those awful needles.

My national park would stretch from the California state line to the New Mexico state line.

One mile of stunning beauty. Let the other states bordering Mexico — California, New Mexico and Texas — build ugly walls.

Arizona should go “eco.”

Signs in Spanish should be posted on the Mexico side warning of the dangers of this mile-wide swath of paradise.

And those signs might also alert would-be illegal immigrants (including drug dealers and coyotes) that chupacabras just might be lurking in this strip of land, beneath the spines and thorns and other ow-ees.

The line dividing us from the great country of Mexico, I read somewhere, is crossed more frequently by illegals than any other international border in the world.

We would lose that distinction if we dedicated the national park I have suggested, to pokey-things, snakes, skunks and other stuff that goes bump in the night.

Not to mention, of course, the value of a little false advertising about the mythical chupacabra.

Of all the ghost stories, the tales of witches and ghouls and boogers, nothing makes the hair on the back of one’s neck bristle more than the legend of the chupacabra, the infamous “goat sucker.”

Like a really nasty-looking prehistoric vampire, this beastie, legend has it, sucks the blood out of animals (and scares the living daylights out of villagers).

If we don’t want illegal aliens wandering around, and if we especially don’t want them dying from heat and dehydration ... Why not present them with a beautiful — impenetrable — garden and stock it with critters (real and imagined) that nobody wants to come across?

Why be mean? Let’s go green.

Corky Simpson is a former Tucson Citizen columnist who writes a weekly column for the Green Valley News.