Wall construction has started in Hudspeth County, out east of El Paso where the land rolls up against Big Bend country. The project footprint includes private land, and anybody who's lived through a federal taking in a border county knows land terms out here have been fought over for generations, in court and otherwise. The Dallas Morning News has the details.

I've got opinions on the wall, and Vince Carrow has different ones, and we've been arguing about it since before the concrete trucks showed up anywhere. He says enforcement matters more than barrier. I say you need both, because I've watched guys walk around the end of a fence line at mile marker whatever and disappear into the brush while a sensor somewhere in San Diego pings a report nobody reads for six hours. A wall without agents is a speed bump. Agents without a wall are cowboys playing whack-a-mole across 40 sections of rough country. Put them together and the math changes.

Hudspeth County is the kind of country that eats fencing crews for lunch. Rocky, broken, dry as a chalkboard, with heat that'll cook a boot sole off by August. Building out there isn't cheap and it isn't fast. When your back pasture is the corridor, you develop strong feelings about concrete, one direction or the other, and folks down there have been living with that corridor a long time. Same as we have in Kinney County.

People who've never set foot on the border love to lecture about how walls don't work. Funny thing about that. The sections where real barrier went up, crossing traffic didn't trickle down, it moved. It moved to the gaps, to private ranches, to places like mine, where the fence is three strands of barbed wire older than my grandfather and a cut in it takes me half a morning and a welding rig to fix. Every mile of wall built somewhere pushes traffic somewhere else, which is exactly why you keep building until the somewhere elses run out.

That's the part the studio crowd never grasps. The wall was never sold as a magic fix by anybody honest. It's a force multiplier. It slows a group down from a dead run to a crawl, and a crawling group is a group Border Patrol catches. I've seen it work with my own eyes on the stretches near Del Rio. Crossers hit the barrier, bunch up, and the scan crews pick them off like quail on a feeder road.

The Big Bend proximity is worth a word too. That's some of the prettiest country God ever drew, and I know folks get nervous about anything changing the view down there. I get it. I've ridden through it. But run a smuggling corridor through that country and you've got a highway with scenery. The trash lines and the cut fences and the stash spots don't show up in the postcards.

So the crews are rolling in Hudspeth County, panels and footings and all of it. Good. Pour the concrete. And keep the agents staffed up behind it, because barrier and bodies together is the only formula that's ever closed a corridor. I'll believe the border's secure when I stop finding water bottles stacked under my mesquites, and not one day before.