Border Blues

‘YOU want to hear about my worst day on the ranch?” asks Ruth Evelyn Cowan. “I lost 10,000 gallons of water because some Mexican broke a valve off one of my tanks trying to get a drink. Another one left a gate open and four of my cattle wandered ten miles away. They’re worth about $2,500 apiece and we had to spend hours finding them. And then someone else drove a truck across my land and knocked over a fence in two places.” She pauses, exasperated. “All that happened in just 24 hours. But you know what? We have to deal with problems like these every day, and it’s been going on for years.”

That’s life in Arizona’s Cochise County, where Cowan believes that she’s spent $50,000 undoing the damage done to her property by illegal aliens since 1999. And that figure doesn’t include her biggest expense: the enormous amount of time she and her employees have put into the repairs, from fixing cut fences to picking up all the trash left behind by thousands of people streaming across her ranchland.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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‘YOU want to hear about my worst day on the ranch?” asks Ruth Evelyn Cowan. “I lost 10,000 gallons of water because some Mexican broke a valve off one of my tanks trying to get a drink. Another one left a gate open and four of my cattle wandered ten miles away. They’re worth about $2,500 apiece and we had to spend hours finding them. And then someone else drove a truck across my land and knocked over a fence in two places.” She pauses, exasperated. “All that happened in just 24 hours. But you know what? We have to deal with problems like these every day, and it’s been going on for years.”

That’s life in Arizona’s Cochise County, where Cowan believes that she’s spent $50,000 undoing the damage done to her property by illegal aliens since 1999. And that figure doesn’t include her biggest expense: the enormous amount of time she and her employees have put into the repairs, from fixing cut fences to picking up all the trash left behind by thousands of people streaming across her ranchland.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.