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Farther down the gravel road, a young couple - Ithiel Cruz and Keren Tovar, from nearby Texas towns - also peer curiously at the concrete, steel and barbed wire.

They say they have no opinion about whether it's good or bad, but they don't like all the negative attention the debate over border security is giving their region.

"We were just in Houston recently, and they hear we're from the valley, and they're like, dang, how is it down there? You guys see a lot of crime or a lot of people coming over?" Cruz says.

"It's like honestly we don't really hear much about it. It's really good where we're at. We don't know why y'all are scared."

Statistics bear this out. Nearby McAllen, for instance, has the lowest crime rate in 34 years - with declines each of the past nine years.

The town's police chief, Victor Rodriguez, attributes the success to the totality of resources the federal government has dedicated to border towns - of which the already constructed border wall is only a part. The most valuable resource they've received, he says, is the human kind. The number of Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley region has grown from 392 in 1994 to more than 3,100 today.

"People can make arrests, people can deter, people can stop," Rodriguez says. "Fences and walls don't do that."

What's clear to him, however, is that McAllen and the towns around it are not in a state of crisis.

While they've seen a surge in undocumented migrants, placing some strain on city resources, the asylum seekers don't stay in the area. They head to the north and east, where the jobs, and their friends and family, live.

"They're going to Chicago, they go to New York or the big cities," he says. "They will be the ones to tell you whether this is a crisis or not."