Border Blues: They keep coming and coming, and citizens are at wits' end.(undocumented workers)

'You want to hear about my worst day on the ranch?" asks Ruth Evelyn Cowan. "I lost 10,000 gallons of water because some Mexican broke a valve off one of my tanks trying to get a drink. Another one left a gate open and four of my cattle wandered ten miles away. They're worth about $2,500 apiece and we had to spend hours finding them. And then someone else drove a truck across my land and knocked over a fence in two places." She pauses, exasperated. "All that happened in just 24 hours. But you know what? We have to deal with problems like these every day, and it's been going on for years."

That's life in Arizona's Cochise County, where Cowan believes that she's ...