DEMING, N.M. — Lawrence Hurt shifted from foot to foot like a boxer. He advanced on a group of calves and cows and set them trotting into the corral's sorting alley.
With five cow-calf pairs funneled into the alley, he swung the corral gate shut and, prod outstretched, moved in, clucking softly, to separate the mothers from their calves.
It was a chilly morning in the middle of the fall roundup at his family's ranch in New Mexico's Boot Heel.
The ranch's 28-mile southern and eastern boundaries lie in one of just four major stretches of the United States-Mexico border that won't be fortified with electronically monitored steel fencing under a bill signed by President Bush this fall.
Because the border in Deming will remain a simple barbed-wire fence punctuated by metal obelisks from the 1880s, the illegal entrants who would have entered the United States to the east or west are likely to make their way across this pristine country instead, ranchers and immigration experts agree.
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"It's like funneling cattle into a corral," said Wendy Glenn, a longtime Arizona border rancher acquainted with the Hurts. "It's going to push more people into the area without a fence."
That influx could threaten the Boot Heel's balance of ranching, nature and border life.
Smugglers already at work
Hurt has performed the roundup for most of his 46 years with his brothers William and Avery.
"From the time I was old enough to figure it out, I knew this was what I wanted to do," Hurt said. He and his brothers now manage a breeding operation with almost 5,000 cows on close to 700 square miles of creosote-dotted Chihuahuan Desert grassland.
"We like the lifestyle, and our parents instilled a good work ethic, so we're not afraid of hard work."
Smugglers already are bringing record numbers of people and drugs through the area, locals said, and the Hurts said they often see breaks in the border fence and the fences on their property and land they lease from other private owners and the federal government.
The additional impacts that ranchers, Indian tribes and other residents of borderlands in Arizona, California and parts of Texas now regularly face are numerous: fouled water supplies, break-ins, litter, thefts, migrant deaths and a heavy presence of the Border Patrol and volunteer militia groups.
Rancher Wendy Glenn worries that illegal entrants also are trampling the fragile habitats of endangered frogs and rattlesnakes. But she's no fan of the fence, which would be two layers thick and line most of the 300-mile Mexico-Arizona border to the west, as well as 90 miles of the border east of the Boot Heel, from Columbus, N.M., to El Paso.
She fears the fence will disrupt the precarious return of wildlife like the two jaguars her husband, Warner, has encountered roving north from their breeding ground 200 miles south in the Sierra Madre of Mexico.
Preserving ranching, habitat
Dozens of local landowners, including the Glenns, have collaborated to preserve both the viability of cattle ranching and the richly diverse native flora and fauna. The centerpiece of their efforts is the Gray Ranch, a stunning, 500-square-mile reserve in New Mexico that straddles the Continental Divide.
East across the Boot Heel from the Gray Ranch, William Hurt and his wife and children live at the southernmost corner of the family's land on the slope of the Alamo Hueco Mountains. Mexico is a constant presence for them. Even more than for Lawrence, 40 miles north near Windmill, or Avery and the Hurt matriarch, Velva, who live close to each other on the original homestead another 40 miles east near Deming.
William Hurt, 50, has herded cattle with his Mexican neighbors, and they've helped him in kind, as neighboring ranchers almost anywhere would. In some places, corrals are built into the border fence to facilitate the sale of livestock by ranchers in one country to ranchers in the other under the supervision of agricultural inspectors, a practice that dates back generations.
There's a long history, too, of Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros, working the border ranches in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The Hurt brothers all speak fluent Spanish, learned in the saddle over a lifetime.
In addition to the Hurt ranch's core staff of five — three Mexican cowhands, Martin Salazar and Oscar and Socorro Chávez; helicopter pilot Hank Hays, a retired Border Patrol agent; and Norma Pennell, who started as the ranch cook and now rides the range — the family's teenagers help out on weekends and neighbors help out at roundup.
After the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 made it a crime to hire undocumented workers, the Hurts helped a dozen of their Mexican employees apply for green cards, William said. Of those, only Oscar Chávez remains.
"It was easier to cross back then," said Chávez, who first found work harvesting chile peppers near Deming when he came to the United States illegally more than two decades ago. "You just walked over. It's a lot harder now."
Velva Hurt, 68, said the family has mechanized its operation as much as possible because labor is much harder to find now.
Fence reduces crossings
Border residents are in good company as they struggle with the challenges of illegal immigration. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives spent much of this year wrangling over whether border and workplace enforcement would stop illegal immigration if reforms don't include a guest-worker program or a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants already here. In the end, Congress voted for the fortified fence without approving the funding needed to build it.
Scholars who study migration from Mexico are skeptical that a fence will work by itself.
"You reduce the number of crossings but not the number of crossers," said David Spener, a professor of sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio. "With the fence, people will cross less often, they will tend to come more definitively to the United States, and more people will likely be injured or die in the process."
Had used bracero program
Velva Hurt, who keeps the company's books and cultivates a garden of grapes, figs, walnuts and apples on the old home place, remembers participating in the bracero program. It brought Mexican agricultural workers to U.S. farms and ranches on seasonal contracts from 1942 to 1964.
"It really worked smooth," she said. "I sure would like to see something like that again. There needs to be a legal program to protect everybody."
For now, illegal entrants continue to hike across the desert, swim the Rio Grande or enter through checkpoints with fake papers or temporary visas that they overstay.
As night fell in Columbus, the border town south of Deming, police arrested two young men from the southern Mexico state of Veracruz. Sitting on the ground waiting for Border Patrol agents to take him to the station, Israel Laguna, 28, said he left a job as a nurse to come north. He hoped to spend a year working in the United States and socking away money for his wife and new baby.
Laguna's arrest was one of roughly 1 million the Border Patrol made in 2006 as its forces increased and it began fortifying the border with new technology. Some potential immigrants are arrested repeatedly before they make it across or give up trying.
Electronic fence contract
Even if the 700-mile fence never materializes, the Department of Homeland Security has already granted Boeing Corp. the first of what could amount to a multibillion-dollar series of contracts for a "virtual fence" of electronic sensors, radar and other monitoring devices along the most heavily trafficked stretches of the border.
William Hurt, who always calls the Border Patrol when he sees people coming overland from Mexico, also doubts the proposed fence will work on its own. But like most of his neighbors, he has no truck with American border vigilantes like the Minutemen, a dozen of whom spent a month in Hachita this year and succeeded only in diverting immigrant smugglers right past Hurt's house.
