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US government investigators say it will cost six-and-a-half BILLION dollars over the next 20 years just to maintain the fence being built along the border between the US and Mexico. Anchor Marco Werman has details.

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MARCO WERMAN: Here in the U.S. the federal government continues with the program to secure our southern border.  You may remember that it calls for a fence hundreds of miles long between the U.S. and Mexico.  The Fence Program was championed by the Bush Administration.  It’s continuing under President Obama and it’s expensive according to the Government Accountability Office.  A GAO Report released today says the fence will cost taxpayers six and a half billion dollars to maintain over the next 20 years.  That doesn’t include the nearly two and a half billion dollars it will cost to finish building it.  That is one pricy fence.

The GAO also found that out that as of mid-May there had been over 3,000 breaches in the existing barrier.  Each one costs more than a thousand bucks to repair. While the cost is becoming clear, the fence’s effectiveness is not.  The GAO says the government can’t tell yet whether the barrier has helped control the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S., and it adds the much publicized new technology intended to monitor the border has yet to materialize.  Well, we recently noticed a far less techie issue that’s cropped up along the border, a plant, Carrizo cane is a tall river weed that provides easy hiding places along the border’s riverbanks.

It also jeopardizes border officials’ safety.  It gets them tangled up, and it doesn’t belong here in the States or in Mexico.  It came from Europe several hundred years ago.  In Mexico the weed is known as “the water thief”  because it takes much-needed water away from native plants, and hardly anything eats the stuff.  “Carrizo cane,”  “elephant grass,” whatever name you use, it might be the one thing that fence-lovers, fence-haters and scientists all agree ought to be kept out of the border region.  The governments of Mexico and the United States are now collaborating on a program to introduce a species of wasp into the area.  No prizes for guessing its favorite food.

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