http://www.wral.com/apnationalnews/9230050/detail.html

EL PASO, Texas -- Beto O'Rourke has lived in El Paso most of his life and cannot remember a time when there wasn't a fence or towering flood lights and pole-mounted cameras lining the banks of the Rio Grande.

So when President Bush proposed adding a high-tech fence, cameras and other technology to urban areas along the Mexican border, O'Rourke didn't pay much attention.

"It didn't seem like a meaningful suggestion at all," said O'Rourke, a 33-year-old freshman city councilman in this border city. "But maybe that's because we already have it and it doesn't seem to be working."

El Paso's border isn't alone in having the kinds of technology Bush proposed this week. Most urban spots along the Texas-Mexico border, as well San Diego and Nogales, Ariz., have them too. But still, immigrants and drug smugglers have found their way across the riverbed in Texas and deserts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Arizona.

In El Paso, the largest city on the southern border, flood lights line nearly 20 miles of border and two sets of barbed wire-topped chain link fences line about 14 miles. Near downtown, three fences stretch across five miles.

Bush's technology proposals were included in a plan announced Monday to stem illegal immigration, in part by deploying up to 6,000 National Guard members to help secure the 2,000-mile border. In Washington, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar told reporters that the upgrades and Guard assistance "is going to be a tremendous enforcement support partnership."

But T.J. Bonner, the head of the union that represents nearly all U.S. Border Patrol agents, said the plan was "underwhelming."

"The whole thing is just a smoke screen," said Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

He also questioned how the technology will be implemented. The last time cameras and sensors were bought and installed _ a project that started in the 1990s _ millions of dollars were spent on equipment that was either never installed or improperly maintained.

A federal investigation was launched in 2005 after an audit revealed lax oversight of the program, which was designed to keep tabs on unmanned sections of the border at all times.

Another part of Bush's plan _ building vehicle barriers in rural areas _ could run into problems along parts of the border. In Texas, where the border is marked by the winding Rio Grande, that option may not be the most practical.

Sheriff Danny C. Dominguez of Presidio County, said building barriers _ hollow six-foot-tall reinforced steel beams planted in the desert floor and filled with cement _ across the 108 miles of river in his rural county would be a waste of money. The desert in his county near Texas' Big Bend region is rugged and difficult to drive in even the heaviest of vehicles.

Bonner noted numerous spots along Texas' 1,200-mile river border that are simply too deep and wide to cross in a vehicle. And the spaced-out steel pipes wouldn't do much to stop row boats and inner tubes used to ferry immigrants and drug loads across the river.

Mayor David Franz of Hidalgo, Texas, whose small city is across the river from Reynosa, Mexico, population 750,000, doesn't want barriers or a fence.

"Fences and barriers I don't think is going to be the answer," he said. "I don't want the border to appear like a military zone. We've enjoyed a very good and long-lasting relationship with our Mexican neighbors and putting up a wall or a fence sends a wrong message."

Bonner said an unmanned aerial vehicle, which Bush also proposed adding to the federal border arsenal, sounds like a good idea but is an overly expensive tool. Besides, the one UAV the Border Patrol did have crashed in the Arizona desert last month.

"We crashed the one we owned," Bonner said. "Kissed that...tax money goodbye."