Two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff approved a $20 million virtual fence along a 28-mile stretch in Arizona, the fence was scrapped as unworkable.

Chertoff accepted the Boeing Company’s “Project 28” on Feb. 22, not long before the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that the virtual fence project could not work and would not be used in the future.

Although the $20 million will never be recovered, Chertoff is determined to continue building real and virtual fence segments along the international border with Mexico.

The border fence idea is a fool’s errand.

The United States and coalition forces cannot seal the borders in Iraq and Afghanistan where wars are ongoing. It is foolish to think that U.S. borders can be sealed with fences and walls during peacetime.

The Great Wall of China, visible from outer space, failed to prevent foreign intruders. Walls and fences are more of a statement than an impediment. If a giant wall wouldn’t work 2,200 years ago, it won’t work today.

Rather than tackle the reason that illegal immigrants come to the United States, Congress chose to spend $1.2 billion on a border enforcement bill that called for the construction of 670 miles of real and virtual fencing along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

El Paso’s experience

El Paso, which is the largest city directly on the border, has years of experience with a border fence that runs along the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

Every day Border Patrol welding teams go out to fix holes cut in the fence the night before by illegal immigrants. This is a small stretch of fence that separates El Paso, with a population of more than 600,000, from Ciudad Juarez.

The population of the Greater El Paso-Ciudad Juarez Metropolitan Area is nearly 2.5 million.

If U.S. authorities cannot prevent people from climbing over and cutting through a short stretch of fence in the middle of a downtown metropolitan area, it is completely unrealistic to think that they can stop the same activity out in remote areas of the border.

As proof, one of the new fence segments erected 10 months ago 80 miles west of El Paso in New Mexico has been easily breached by illegal immigrants using a variety of methods.

According to an April 12 news story by Associated Press writer Alicia A. Caldwell, illegal immigrants “armed with torches, hacksaws, ladders and even bungee cords are making it around a section of the border fence hailed as the most efficient way to stop them.”

It’s nearly as though illegal immigrants have used as many creative ways as possible just to mock the idea that a segment of fence, no matter how expensive, can stop them. Except for the entertainment value of going over or through the fence, people could always choose to simply walk around it.

There are areas along the shared border that are so far removed from cities or towns that they must be beyond the imagination of members of Congress and other fence advocates.

In a Feb. 21 New York Times piece by Lawrence Downes, the editorial writer told how he had lunch with CNN host Lou Dobbs at the world-famous Four Seasons restaurant.

Dobbs, who has manufactured a career boost by bashing the illegal immigration drum on cable television, had cranberry juice and seltzer with his Dover sole while emphasizing that the border must first be sealed before other immigration reforms are attempted.

Among those people in Congress who support sealing the border with fences, high-tech gadgets and law enforcement, it’s likely that few have ever visited the border in person. Of those who have actually set foot on the border, it’s likely that not one of them has visited the remote sections away from the few authorized international crossing points.

It’s in those remote areas, as the saying goes, where the rubber meets the road.

Also, a prima facie case can be made that anyone who lunches at the Four Seasons is incapable of understanding the vast remote areas along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rowland Nethaway’s column appears Wednes- day and Friday. E-mail: RNethaway@wacotrib .com