Border Patrol Plans To Erode the Rio Grande's Banks

Anyway, that's what the headline of this story should read, though the editors chose the following instead:

Border Agents to Dump Agent Orange-Like Chemical to Kill All Plant Life Among U.S.-Mexico Border

From the article:

(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed -- but refused to cancel -- plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers. ...

What happens when you completely defoliate river banks, perhaps with something like a broad-spectrum herbicide, is that the banks themselves start rapidly eroding, which silts up the river, which increases the chance that a freak storm, or one of the Gulf of Mexico's occasional hurricanes, will overrun those banks.

Now granted, we are talking about a river that's so extensively drawn down for irrigation that it doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico all the time. But sometimes, even on the Texas/Mexico border, it does rain.

As to the particular herbicide planned for use, imazapyr, both Mexico and the European Union consider it more toxic than does the US EPA. The EU has gone so far as to ban it.

I wonder when we'll hear the Border Patrol planning to do something this stupid along the Canadian border. Oh wait, right, that'll be never.

Can't we just take it as a compliment that people want to come to our country looking for new opportunities? We should be flattered. Especially if they're looking for work, because every country needs good workers and hardly anyone can better prove their chutzpah than someone who's willing to come to a whole other nation where the customs are different and they stick out in a crowd.

No sense to be made of any of it.