Deeper, Deeper!

A new article posted on the BBC Americas website is headlined Texas mayors want deeper border. Essentially, a group of mayors from border towns in Texas has called for sections of the Rio Grande (the river marking the border between Texas and Mexico) to be dammed as a deterrent to illegal immigration. Their feeling is that if the river is deeper and wider, it will be a bigger deterrent to people crossing it to enter the United States illegally. And, yes, that might just work. After all, having a ninety mile wide body of water hundreds of feet deep has done a fair job of keeping the illegal Cubans out.

But I have to ask just one question: if the Rio Grande is dammed, just how much further back will the mouth of the river recede? From Wikipedia:

In the summer of 2001 a 100m wide sandbar formed at the mouth of the river, marking the first time in recorded history that the Rio Grande failed to empty into the Gulf of Mexico. The sandbar was subsequently dredged, but it re-formed almost immediately. Spring rains the following year flushed the re-formed sandbar out to sea, but it returned in the summer of 2002. Since then the sandbar has remained and now forms a usable land bridge between the US and Mexico. Ecologists fear that unless rainfall returns to normal levels during the next few years and strict water conservation measures are adopted by communities along the river, the Rio Grande may soon become extinct.

But hey, if the river disappears, that will just make it a lot easier to build that big ol' fence / wall to keep the hordes of brown job-stealers out.