Illegal immigration slides under the election radar
John McCain and Barack Obama are too busy telling voters who will champion the economy and healthcare during their third and final debate to tackle the estimated 11.9 million undocumented residents of the US.
Alamogordo, New Mexico - Immigration has become the white elephant squeezed out of the room for this election.
John McCain and Barack Obama were too busy telling voters who would champion the economy and healthcare during their third and final debate on Wednesday to tackle the estimated 11.9 million undocumented residents of the US.
That's understandable: everyone from the economists down now seems to agree the US is in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
But it demonstrates just how far a single issue is dominating this election contest.
Before the subprime disaster laid waste to Wall Street, we were led to believe immigration, Iraq and Afghanistan might be the battlegrounds.
And yet this relative silence on the issue chimes with what Diana Romero told us.
Diana's backyard in Sunland Park, in southern New Mexico, overlooks the latest section of fence cutting off Mexico.
The extension was created by the Border Fence Act of 2006. It runs hundreds of miles through Texas and New Mexico.
The budget was nearly three billion dollars, but Congress has had to approve an extra 400 million dollars to finish the project.
That's a lot of money. Both Obama and McCain voted for it. But residents like Diana think it's a waste of money.
"If you really stop and think about it spending billions on a piece of metal that you think will protect our borders isn’t really the best thing people had in mind," Diana says.
"The way our government makes it seem, it’s like OK, we need this, we need to protect our borders. We have border patrols - you can see them every day here. I feel quite safe myself here and I live like five minutes from Mexico."
Of course, many would say border security is a priority and point to the fact that the fence has helped drive down the number of illegals crossing the border by 30 per cent in the past two years.
But Diana is right about the visibility of border patrols. During our backyard chat a border guard helicopter hovered overhead.
Earlier, we'd driven up to the fence to film. Within a few minutes two different border patrol guards arrived in 4 x 4s to check our credentials, followed by an officer from the Union Pacific Railroad police, whose freight line runs close by.
The message was clear: we're everywhere and watching you.
It's a reminder that, far from Washington and Wall Street, securing the US border matters just a little more than we may think right now.
