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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."
Couldn't that $1.4 billion have been better spent buying Valium for the rampant xenophobes in Congress? Just trank 'em all out and stop them from worrying about a non-problem.
The Mexicans who do enter illegally aren't exactly "stealing" great jobs from American citizens. They're picking crops, cleaning houses, flipping burgers, etc. The real problem is that our legitimate businesses are legally shipping planeloads of cash overseas for crappy products and services. Do we really need a million plastic "movie tie-in" figurines to be given away with Happy Meals, or blankets with arms in them?
John
The fat lady has sung for the fence.
There's no defense like the virtual fence.
is it dead... or just virtually dead?
Regardless of their economic impact, these aliens are still lawbreakers.
There is a legal process for becoming an American citizen. These Mexicans know this, too. They just choose to put their own interests first, and in doing so they willing violate American law.
Those aren't the kind of people that America needs. They clearly don't respect American customs and laws at all. It starts with them breaking immigration laws, and soon enough they've gotten themselves involved in the drug trade, they rape your daughter and then murder any witnesses. After all, American law means nothing to these people. They made that clear with their very arrival in America.
I went to the wikipedia page on sbinet and got wiped out by a wall of text. What exactly is a virtual fence and what is it supposed to do?
Now if we can just put an end to the asinine "war on drugs", we'll be in good shape. When the laws surrounding a substance are more harmful than the substance itself, there is a serious problem.
As far as the fence is concerned, if we had just poured $1.4 billion into Mexico's economy instead of this cluster fuck of an idea, workers would have less of a reason to leave Mexico and try to sneak into our country. They come here for jobs, but if we help create jobs in their own country...
We will never be able to keep them out, so why not make it so they have no reason to come here?
Living With a Nerd
It was brillant... convinced the congress to pay them 1.4b for just snake oil.
They say they can't compete without cheap labor, but it they'd have invested as much in robots as they have in lobbying for protection and special access to illegal immigrants, then they'd be competitive without having to load NAFTA with special protections just for them. (free trade. ha!)
Now the restaurants and building industry are spraying malathion on the middle class suburbs. (just call your critics "xenophobes" and you WIN the argument. wtf? )
Just fine the crap out of people that hire illegals and the problem goes away.
but no. let's build a virtual fence and make sure it doesn't work.
If picking lettuce and sweeping floors is scarce labor, how come wages have gone down in these industries? Why is average working Joe making less? Wouldn't wages have gone up if the labor was as scarce as some people whine about?
As easy as it is for an American to become a Mexican citizen.
oh, wait...
This project was about two things:
1) Lining the pockets of a lot of people
2) Making those who fear illegal immigration feel better
Goal 1 was *very* successful. Goal 2, not as much but...there will be other mufti-million dollar projects coming up that will.
Seriously, did anyone really think this would work? Of course not. Plain common sense would immediately tell you this was destined for failure. Government and corporations simply ignored that and moved forward, That's a difference between "them" and "us."
If they had just called it SkyNet (or even SyFyNet) we could all rest easier.
Think Deeply.
the economy isn't doing well. It's an easy distraction for the government to use so the people don't realize how much of a role the government is playing in screwing up the economy in the first place. Honestly, most of those illegal Mexicans are harder working than many Americans at the poverty level. I still don't see Americans out of work lining up to pick grapes, or mow lawns for the minimum wage, do you?
No one talked about illegal immigration in the 90s when things were great. A healthy economy makes illegal immigration a non-issue.
.. there are no jobs in US even for unemployed but willing to work US citizens, so illegal immigrants don't have reason to come to US anymore. If they do, they might regret doing so.
This is not going to change soon.
...as a UK citizen I'm not paying for this, but my first thought was that for a product (potentially) of that scale, a $1.4bn write-off doesn't sound all *that* much. It's only a small fraction of the $12bn+ wasted on a disastrous IT project by the NHS in England.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Skynet is dead!
What is that? Oh, Sbinet! Nevermind then. Keep running, Connor.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The cameras would detect human-like and vehicular motion and notify the border patrol for interception. These would be used in unpopulated areas. According to a 60 Minutes piece, the technology was still in the research stage and not up to snuff. The desert environment was brutal on the devices. There is no power or communications infrastructure in these area, so that all had to be added. Desert wildlife set the alarms off. There were many potential points of failure. Perhaps we should have hired the Israelis.
This is a classic example of Top-Down Error. Government was approached or approached a few big-players and they all agreed that it would be just peachy. Reality has a way of spoiling the party often times however. If they had adopted a more open model such as a bazaar of ideas that could have completed with each other through criticism I'm sure that something else while it also may not have been 100% effective would have emerged that would have been at least just as good and cost far less. Government has a fascination with centralization it appears they think it is the way to go, I disagree: I think that decentralized is better for cost, flexibility, and reliability. I also think that given few players with centralization that it is also effectively a command economy/system. See how well that has worked in history.
Shh.
"Those problems included Boeing's use of inappropriate commercial software, designed for use by police dispatchers"
of how large private companies only beholden to a few shareholders can not reliably build large complex systems.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's sad that $1.5 billion had to be spent to try and protect honest God-fearing Americans from poor Mexicans who wanted to pick our fruit for minimum wage.
This was all about "sensing". It didn't actually do anything to stop border crossers.
Multiple fences with a patrol road between them, plus a chain of towers to discourage people cutting the fence, might actually work. The sections with physical fences are doing their job now. There's solid fence from the Pacific Ocean to Yuma, AZ., which has pushed crossing attempts into Texas and the desert.
The Mexicans who do enter illegally aren't exactly "stealing" great jobs from American citizens.
Seriously, how does an adult person get to be this fucking stupid? Are you ex-military? Did your mother do drugs while pregnant?
Every 100 crop-picking immigrants equals three Americans driving tractors, one American maintaining those tractors, and one American building them. We have chemicals and vacuum-cleaners and disposable wet-mops. We don't need a million immigrants with toothbrushes hand-scrubbing out houses for us. I'd rather have a job producing steam-cleaners than being unemployed, and most Americans would too. Burgers can be flipped by machines. Drinks at your nearest McDonalds are already filled automatically, no immigrants required. I'd rather have the job of making those machines than have a million more minimum-wage mouths to feed, dragging down the average wage along with living standards.
Even if you're too lazy or stupid to do productive work, please stop pissing all over your fellow citizens who are.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Derka derrrr!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brj2UkUPjCI
Annexing Mexico.
Really, I done cleaning, accidents and stuff and it is actually an okay job. No, it is not as challenging as doing a massive IT project or being a doctor, but lets face it, the fast majority of people don't have that kinda job anyway.
But regular cleaning sucks because not only is the hourly rate piss poor, but the working hours are bad as well. For instance 2 hours in the evening after public transport has stopped in some remote corner of a city with no travel expenses.
I have had people complain they couldn't get cleaners and they just didn't get the math that with the income minus the expenses, people would be paying to work. Geez, no wonder nobody wants it.
And then something happens what I call in Holland "turkefication", Turks are our LEGAL mexicans. They come and do the jobs nobody wants to do and organize them so they can still make something of a living, by for instance chaining different jobs together. They then work very hard and do a decent job. Good? No. Because now the boss is going to lower the pay even further, the old Turks don't complain because they are not the complaining kind but then after a while they get to old and the job by then has become so overloaded, there is absolutely no way ANYBODY is going to take it legally. Que illegal immigrants and an entire sector going out of control.
Gosh, I wonder how that happened?
Because you kept gutting the job till nobody but someone living in a car is even capable of taking it anymore.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If those Mexicans immigrated here legally, us "God-fearing" Americans wouldn't need to be protected.
You wouldn't like it if someone crash your party, or just showed up uninvited, no matter how harmless they might be. And 1.5 billion is just a drop in the bucket for the richest country in the history of the world.
And maybe if it weren't for all these illegals depressing labor rates, you would have Americans doing the jobs.
I just utterly pwned and destroyed you.
Install non-lethal ice-bullet remotely controlled rail guns in DMZ areas along the boarder.
Ice-bullets minimize the litter and enable a way to create more ammo with relative ease.
Allow internet gamers to purchase time on the guns. Monies collected will be used to enhance the gaming interface, better detect potential violations and route gamers appropriately and maintain the hardware. Raid parties could be organized and purchase improved tools used to first snare the NPC prior to pelting it with an AOE.
Gaming interface can represent moving objects as zombies and gamers can move up in ranks from citizen to minuteman to ranger based on varied metrics.
I'm sure there's lots of room to improve the idea, but it wouldn't take long before no sane individual would take on bored gamers....those gamers might even be citizens of MX!
Positive outsourcing of labor and solving a govt problem with capitalism!
Don't worry about Boeing, they are getting a nice big order for their Frankentankers to keep them busy.
The problem is obvious. They used a virtual fence instead of a fence in the cloud. A fence in the cloud would obviously be hand-wavingly cheaper, way more reliable, highly secure and infinitely scalable.
Dear USA Gov: I am happy to consult on this issue and assure you that I can implement a fence in the cloud at half the price.
Let's see: There are no jobs in the USA, people are losing their houses... The richest person in the world is a Mexican... Therefore, I think Americans should be racing to get into Mexico, the land of opportunity! I'll bet if we had a mass migration of poor Americans into Mexico for their jobs and free health care, they'd build a real wall in no time.
Either that, or let's just declare Mexico a terrorist state. I mean, with all the drug-war related deaths on the border, it's a good bet more Americans have died in Mexico due to the drug wars than were killed on 9/11...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It's not the government's job to create jobs, if that's what you're saying.
I don't know. I think it's the government's job to do whatever's necessary to promote the country's overall well-being. (Certainly it's in the government's best long-term interests to do so, as they get to govern a more powerful and prosperous country - and I think the rest of the nation benefits as well) If that means creating jobs, then, yeah, it's the government's job to create jobs.
Bow-ties are cool.
It doesn't have death lasers!
To clarify, regardless of whether a government project succeeds or fails, government wins. Look at the big picture. Failure in government is everywhere, yet still, somehow, the business of government expands in total revenue year after year, and becomes more lucrative for those who control the business. This is because success and failure are merely smokescreens hiding the main goal, which is simply to get that money passing through your hands so you can leverage it for your own personal gain.
How about a real wall. The Great Wall of China has lasted.
The Berlin Wall worked, albeit for evil purposes. There's no reason such simple applications couldn't be applied except for the fact it's the government doing it.
"An unjust law is no law at all", said St Augustine, providing the foundation of civil disobedience movements across the globe. If a law is not really a law at all, it is argued, one has a right -- even a duty -- to break it. Martin Luther King articulated this view in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws".
The problem is that while the law is a matter of public record, justice is an intensely personal matter. What one person regards as just may strike another as an unwarranted imposition. This is why we need law; if we all behaved according to our personal standards of morality, anarchy would rule. While we may have our own views about the justice of particular laws, we generally accept that some rules must apply universally. If we are to follow Martin Luther King's exhortation to resist unjust laws, then, there must be an unusual type or degree of injustice to justify that. What kind of injustice might do so?
The great American democrat Henry David Thoreau had an answer. In his classic essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau observed that "a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice". An infantile deference to the will of the majority, however ill-informed, is still common today. It informs the thoughtless "majority rules!" which is frequently blurted out as if, on its own, it magically justifies anything (I always want to ask whether, if the majority jumped off a cliff, the speaker would too). In fact, "majority rules" is a solution of last resort. Ideally, people should act according to their consciences. If that is inappropriate, unanimity should be sought. Only if these two fail should the will of the majority be imposed on the rest. Thoreau called for this kind of government, "in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience... in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
OK call me a hoser, but WTF is a "virtual fence"?
I can only parse that together to mean "Not a real fence" or a "fence that doesn't really exist".
You spent 1.3B on that? You are surprised that it "didn't work"?
I think I have some interesting projects for you and I am in need of some funding...
Gridlock might be the intention, but it's at least definitely the intention of the design of the federal government that one group can't just grab the reins and run wild.
Anyway, a few things you got rather wrong:
> The other growing example of this is the US pseudo-debate over health care. If you listen to this
> "debate" at all, it rapidly becomes clear that they almost never discuss health care itself. Rather,
> they always talk about the money, primarily insurance money. The main consideration in both Congress
> and the White House is that the existing insurance companies and the flock of other medical management
> firms, which do no actual medical work at all, maintain or increase their income. Actual medical care
> is far down in the list of priorities. Even when corporations such as hospitals are discussed, the
> "issues" are things like profits, mergers & acquisitions, etc.; they rarely deal with any actual
> medical issues.
The reason that people aren't arguing about medical care as such in Congress is that that would be putting the cart before the horse. There are groups like the FDA and AMA and so on who care about actual medical care - what Congress is empowered to do is spend money and create agencies in the executive branch to enforce the laws and manage the regulations. Also, if there were a budget available of $1P for each human being in the country's medical expenses, medical care would simply be a question of how much were wanted - but there isn't. The whole problem is the allocation of scarce resources, best measurable by Congress as money. So yes, they care about the money, it's the tool at hand to address the problem, and what they're trying to do is get the money spread around, without sucking up too much more, in such a way that broke rednecks in forgotten corners of the Appalachians can also get medical care without wasting money at the emergency room.
> It was especially blatant in the recent "bank bailout". Many analysts reported that the government's
> support money went almost entirely into three things: officer bonuses, share dividends and
> acquisitions of smaller financial firms. Almost nothing went into fixing the problems that had got the
> financial system in trouble. So this was yet again a way of funneling money into the corporate owners,
> with no concern for whether it solved any actual problems.
Aaaah yes, the infinite black hole of incomprehension about the bank bailouts. First: citation required. Seriously. I've read a lot of those analyst reports (most of them are fairly mind-numbing; I wouldn't do this for pleasure), and that's not what they say at all. The government's support money went, via various channels, largely into their capital stocks so that they could stand up to stress tests designed to measure their capacity to handle liquidity crises. Many of the acquisitions were explicitly arranged by the government so that smaller firms would have some protection against the madness of the crash - they had to twist some arms for the acquisitions to even go through. Sure, they paid bonuses to company officers, but even if you counted them all up, they were orders (yes, that is plural) of magnitude smaller than the bailout funds. At worst, a pecadillo. Bonuses to traders were actually written into employment contracts, and were a part of their payment structure, not a surprise pat on the head for being a good employee. They were part of the banks' expenditure structures.
If you want a real scandal, remember that the bailout bill failed at first, and only succeeded when they tacked on roughly $100,000,000,000 of pork. Pork often with less prospect of success than this Boeing deal. That's right, Congress needed $300 in bribes for every man, woman and child in the country before they could be persuaded to avert another Great Depression.
Why aren't people screaming about that? I would have thought cynicism, but at this stage I think innumeracy has won; the public at large just doesn't comprehend it.
I guarantee that if the employers of illegal immigrants started having to do the perp walk, illegal immigration would drop to nothing in about 2 seconds. But that'll never happen, because it would embarrass rich people and more importantly, cost them money.
Trying to build fences and the like to keep out illegal immigrants is like trying to hold back the tide. If we were serious about the problem, we'd go to the source and start arresting the people who employ them. But we're not serious about the problem - the government has chosen instead to pretend to do something about the problem, while not actually inconveniencing the rich and powerful (and oh, by the way, dumping huge amounts of money into the pockets of various defense contractors for silly projects like the "virtual fence").
While I share your view that the purpose of government, in recent years, has become to further enrich the already really well-off, this statement is not quite true. There is a provision in the health care bill that forces insurers to spend at least 85% of their income on actual medical care. Given that insurance companies also have their own staff that has to be paid, this is going to put pretty strict limits on what they can take in profits. It's really a pretty smart provision.
Unless things have changed significantly in the past 3 weeks, there is still a huge stretch of unfenced, unmarked open border across the Yuha desert west of Calexico, and in the vicinity of Tecate peak. Granted, most of it runs through gulleys and over hilly terrain, but this is seldom a problem for people who have already crossed however many miles to get there.
Also that solid fence is frequently undermined as it only extends into the earth a few inches in many places. Thus there are holes dug under it at a frequency of at least one per mile or so.
First. We had a revolution exactly 100 years ago in Mexico. We don't need another one. You don't seem to know much about history.
Second, you also don't seem to know much about demography. Indians, original people, whatever you want to name them are less than 10% of the population, 18% european and the rest (we), are the result of the mix between Spaniards and the indegenous people (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograf%C3%ADa_de_M%C3%A9xico#Grupos_.C3.A9tnicos).
We are poor because among other things we inherited a corrupt and injust system and we grew up as a colony. We usually don't produce/create/convert anything and while we're rich in natural resources like oil, we don't transform it and just sell the fluid and we buy back gasoline, diesel or plastic. So, we hace social clases, but these are not decided by race. Alas, Carlos Slim, the richest comes from a Libanese family.
We're still poor because in the last 20 years the farmers left their massively and moved to your country or to the border states to work on sweatchops, most of those now desappeared.
respawning in 3... 2...
... and the results were that illegal immigrants are primarily competing with, and lowering the wages of, Americans with less than a high-school education (sorry, can't now find the link). For everyone else, there was no effect. While that's bad news for those without the diploma, that is actually a pretty small subset of the labor force.
This is how I feel about just about every government bail out program and social service. Nearly 100 yrs and people still think throwing money at an issue and painting over the symptoms some how fixes the problem. Most of the time the actual problem is never addressed.
In this case there are a few easy measures to end the illegal immigration problem
- arrest the illegal immigrants, document them, and deport them
- arrest the people who hire illegal immigrants and charge them huge fines
- eliminate citizenship via birth and make it necessary for everyone to naturalize
As we see with via this recession, remove the profit from the individual, and the employer, and illegal immigration dwindles.
The project was about catching drug traffickers and wanted felons and making sure that illegal immigrants who don't fall in to those two categories don't die while crossing in or out of the U.S.
It would be interesting to see in 20-30 years of free flowing immigration from Mexico, if Mexicans would take on arms and declare independent states/countries within US... ? Europe is full of these scenarios where at one point immigration from neighboring countries was at a free flow, so people from poor countries populated richer in search of jobs, or land, or affordable living... and later wars ware/are being broken and land disputed. This is how Albanians from Albania got independent state of Kosovo away from Serbia by uncontrolled immigration basically. I'm all for helping those less fortunate, but if there are rules then they need to apply to all, not some. If you are going to let in 500,000 Mexican in and give them legal status, then you should also let 500,000 South Africans in and give them legal status, or have quotas that are regulated to keep good balance of ethnic diversity... RULES are important, and enforcing them is VERY IMPORTANT... If anyone cares, I have a virtual fence I wanna sell. It costs 10K, and is totally virtual - in every sense. I can make it as big or small as you want it, it only requires imagination on your part.
I'm all for private companies bidding on Govt. contracts, but frankly as a tax paying citizen I'm freaking tired of wasted tax dollars on projects that die. While most projects within Corporate America fail to go to completion this trend needs to NOT happen with tax payer monies.
If this project failed, why did it take well over 1 billion dollars to freaking figure this out. I personnally believe that the companies that bid on these contracts have an obligation to make the project work on time and within budget and should have a penality stake in it if the project fails to work and go to completion within the budget and time frame.
If Americans could get man to the moon in 10 years, what the heck is our problem these days?
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
The April 2010 issue of Popular Science has an article called "The All-Seeing Border" (pages 30-31), which talks about this border fence tech. Does not mention that it does not work at all. Makes me wonder if PopSci investigates what they are publishing or just throws crap on their pages.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
When I would cross over, I noticed that the virtual fence towers were using an off the shelf WiFi interface. My mig-labor-pickup van was always late, and I'd get hungry waiting. So, I would just internet-order a Pizza and have it delivered at the GPS coordinates on my cell phone. The problem I had with the virtual fence was that the pizza would be cold, and the beer warm; go figure. Maybe if Boeing would use Verizon's G3, my Pizza and Beer would taste better?
Can't we just hire some cheap Mexican labor to patrol the border ?
It wasn't really about making the people who fear immigration feel *better* - it was making the politicians who feed on them feel *popular*. That's not just elected politicians; it's also the right-wing radio jocks and anti-immigrant lobbyists and the folks who thought Israel's apartheid wall was really cool and wanted one of their own.
Building a "virtual wall" looked really cool and high-tech, so the politicians thought it would be a good sell, and it would get a lot less flack from environmentalists and local politicians in border towns (not that the promoters care about the environment unless it looks good, but they care about being forced to do paperwork and have years of delay for their boondoggle.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It was pretty much a scam from the beginning, intended to bolster the image of the politicians who sell the Anti-Terrorism and Anti-Immigrant lines to the public. They're no longer very relevant, now that we've got the Economic Crisis and Health Care around to keep the politicians and public busy, and it's a lot less disruptive to let something like this die out now that it's no longer interesting than to kill off the whole logistics chain they'd have needed for a construction project building an actual physical wall. Nobody really cares that it's gone, and none of the front-line politicians need to take responsibility for killing it, and we can push it all back under the rug where it belongs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's in the basement of the statue.
Just sayin'.
What bothers me is people try to make this about race or "xenophobia". It's not. Its about national sovereignty. Why would it be bad to protect our southern border in the exact same way that Mexico protects it's southern border?
You have obviously never crossed that border. These are all things I have done in the last year:
I have been to almost every country in Europe and many in Central and South America. Nowhere are immigration procedures as onerous as in the US, and I say this as a US citizen. I am sorry, but xenophobia is the only explanation I can find for this discrepancy.
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.
Or perhaps it's sad that they were able to conceal the fact that it wouldn't work until we had been screwed out of $1.4 billion.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Because you know (or should know) that the existing US legislation makes a mockery of the actual day to day situation in the border and the economic realities faced by both employers and immigrants
Before the US decided to live in a haze of dope induced political and social indifference (no to socialized care! In which planet you people live?) we didn't have any drug problems in Mexico.
No trafficking, no cartel drugs, no drug dependency.
I am not goin to disentangle what is first, supply or demand, at the end they reinforce each other, in this case in a descendent spiral of addiction and death.
The hypocrysy is to consider countries like Mexico evil suppliers and consumer countries like innocent victims of the evil traffickers.
There is enough blame to throw around at both sides, so the blame game should be replaced by mutual, *respectful* cooperation.
Mexico tried a shy attempt to tackle the local addiction problem by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs. The law was swiftly vetoed by the Mexican President when he was told in no uncertain terms by Bush that Mexico's aid to combat drug trafficking may be reviewed. Scores of our young men and women, ill equiped and trained, die every year figthing the drug traffickers, and offten the only thanks we get for such sacrifice is the insulting "certification" process in the US congress.
So the US, as a great mirror of the small drug deal, buys the dope, smokes it and is oblivious to all the chain of human misery necessary to supply his vice.
Bad news ladies and gents north of the border: when you buy dope around your neighborhood it gets rough just outside of your front door, as it is, the most abject drug related violence is in the Mexican side of the border (when you are anywhere in Mexico far away from the border, the situation is almost normal, that should give the US voting public and their inept legislators and law enforcers a clue), if you think it will stay there you are deluded (and you can keep deluding yourselves that you border controls will stop this).
As long as the US continues its puritanical (drug addicts are not criminals, they are sick people) and militaristic approach (there is a surprise for you) to drug dependency and drug dealing, we will continue to suffer, in both sides of the border the malaise of drug related social illnesses.
People in border towns give the jobs to unskilled labour because they can pay them less.
Why? Because they know they can exploited illegal workers (and we know why illegal workers are in the US: poverty, ironically in many cases caused also by US commercial policies or even by political decisions, or do you think Cubans would have flooded Miami if Cuba could stand on its own feet without the idiotic embargo?)
But the US public is part of that game. Do you want your $0.99 burger? Well, the only way is to have the cheapest labour possible on the avatoirs where the McCows are slaugthered. It is that simple. Kick all the illegal immigrants out and many of the cheap prices you enjoy for multitude of goods and services (even if you are in an area with little or no illegal immigration) will raise.
If USians were half serious about this, they would be willing to pay the price, as it is it is all wink-wink, smile, turn a blind eye, let Juanita, the $10 a day nanny, take care of the kids and Pablo, the 10 bucks a day gardener, keep those rose bushes in shape.
What exactly did they do with that $1.4 Billion dollars then? I know wire is expensive and all but $1.4 Billion?
Why is common sense called that if it's not common?
"make it so they have no reason to come here?"
Like shoot them on site. (i.e. in the USA)
Why is common sense called that if it's not common?
... highex landmines WOULD'VE been a MUCH BETTER choice...
woohoo, random Mexican infiltration and violence.. Yay!
Fuck the little shits. Build a REAL fucking WALL mounted with AUTOMATED defences ffs!
What is the use of a virtual purveyor of stolen goods, any way? Or are we talking about ebay?