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Arizona-Mexico border

Sgt Chad Matthews of the Santa Cruz county sheriff's department insists that, new law or no new law, his job won't change.

We are driving along Arizona's border with Mexico. It seems pretty peaceful. Cattle graze among the squat mesquite trees, the scrub dotted with yucca and a kind of cactus with dramatic spidery leaves, the countryside fringed by distant mountains.

Through it all runs a rusty metal fence undulating up and down the ridges like the spikes on the back of some monstrous dinosaur. Even the most desperate illegal immigrant couldn't make it over these 20ft-high poles. But suddenly the fence runs out and is replaced by a half-hearted string of barbed wire that wouldn't challenge even the least agile of them.

Arizona has become the centre of the debate on immigration because of its proposed new law, which has been challenged by the federal government and the courts. The law would make police officers question the immigration status of people they detain for another reason and suspect of being in the country illegally.

Sgt Matthews doesn't want to express an opinion on the new law. That's all about politics, he says. But he suggests that one way or another it won't change the way he does his job and it isn't racial profiling.

I question this. Isn't it just common sense that on this border he is going to challenge people who look Mexican, rather than, say, black or white? Not at all, he says. He's picked up many Chinese along this border and he says, on hearing my accent, he'd want to see my papers too.

A former cowboy, he is in charge of the local police force's weapons training. He is a man with a taste for action - a naval reservist about to go on exercise in Korea. But he resents the way some in the media portray the police in Arizona as jackbooted thugs. I am here this week in part to find out what has changed, why the debate has grown so sharp.

After all, the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico isn't new, neither are migrant workers or the strong Hispanic influences in this and other border states. After all, it used to be Mexico. It used to be Indian country.

Sgt Matthews says that in the 10 years he has worked here, the drug-related violence in Mexico has grown as gangs fight over the rights for this smuggling corridor.

He says there has been a slight escalation of violence on the US side, but most of the crime associated with illegal immigration - apart from the act itself - is burglaries of isolated homes for food, water and clothes.

Mostly, he says, those responsible don't take valuables and have been known to leave notes of apology. He sympathises with people who are coming to better themselves, but the law is the law and it's his job to enforce it. He repeats that he and his colleagues will go on doing their jobs in the way they've been doing.

Others think crime has got worse and action must be taken.

More tomorrow.

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