Slashdot Mirror
The Death of the US-Mexico Virtual Fence
eldavojohn writes "A couple of years ago it was announced that the Boeing-built virtual fence at the US-Mexico border didn't work. Started in 2006, SBInet has been labeled a miserable failure and finally halted. A soon-to-be-released GAO report is expected to be overwhelmingly critical of SBInet, causing DHS Chief Janet Napolitano to announce yesterday that funding for the project has been frozen. It's sad that $1.4 billion had to be spent on the project before the discovery that this poorly conceived idea would not work."
Along those lines...
Hair based drug testing relies on melanin - most drugs they test for bind to the melanin in the hair.
So detecting drugs in people with black hair is 50x easier than it is for people with blond hair.
So you get a situation where the entire process is racist, but most of the people have no idea just how biased it is and just accept on blind faith that the people in charge are doing the right thing.
The fallacy in your comparison is that illegal immigration isn't harmful per si - the only "harm" it causes is violation of law. Murder destroys life, regardless of whether it's considered a crime or not.
Of course there are fiscal issues when people hire workers that officially don't exist, but I'm willing to bet that if the immigration process weren't so long and cumbersome the huge majority of illegals would be running to the immigration offices. It's obviously better for the individual to be legal than an alien, and if they still can't do it, then it's somebody else's fault.
The Mexican government can be argued to be at fault for not providing proper employment within the homeland, but defending that point is very naïve. The USA doesn't have a 0% unemployment rate either.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
The only way that this will end is when the standard of living is equal between the two countries. Since raising the standard in Mexico is impossible because of the culture and financial system, it means that the US has to have the same standard of living as Mexico does today.
Actually its worse, since you're assuming Mexicos economy won't collapse faster than ours.
Two huge sources of income to Mexico are currently collapsing (not collapsing in the future, I'm talking about right now)
1) About half their govt budget came from selling oil... Their wells are now in permanent, fast decline. Once its all pumped out, its gone. That doesn't mean there is no production, just like the US has been in permanent oil production decline for 40 years but still produces a little oil. Higher tech means the extraction rate is higher so the decline is faster. And producers become importers at a much faster rate than total gross production decreases. Mexico is going to stop exporting oil pretty soon. Most of which, went to the USA. Ooops. So we're out of oil and they're out of cash. This won't turn out well.
2) A substantial fraction of their GNP (like a third to a fifth, depending on whom you believe) was Mexicans in the US sending money back home, via WU or cash or whatever. Probably via drug trafficking too. As the US slides into great depression 2, that money flow to Mexico dries up.
You may think that we're chasing down to them at the bottom. But they are falling faster than we are, if anything. Where we'll meet up, as you claim, is likely to be way the heck down there...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
After reading through 100 comments on the politics of Mexican immigrant workers, I realized I'm reading a technology blog, and all I wanted to know was why the fence didn't work. The article doesn't really say. It says the "fence" is composed of towers with monitoring equipment. But it doesn't really say what that equipment was supposed to do, or what it failed to do.
"Ninety to 100 percent of all illegal crossers, this camera system was going to identify and characterize this threat,"
What does that mean? Was it supposed to magically know who was crossing illegally and who wasn't? Or identify Mexicans -vs- Americans? That's silly. Was it just supposed to detect people, or movement? Did it fail at doing that?
"It's not a matter of, you know, do you look at the screen and see things?" Stana said. "Yes, you're going to see some things. The question is: Are you going to see things over time? Is it a quality image and is it a reliable image?"
This is still very vague. It is supposed to "see things over time" - what things? Over what time? Was it supposed to identify behaviors somehow?
This whole thing is really vague.