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Should America Build a Virtual Border Wall? Or Just Crowdfund It... (chicagotribune.com)
As America's government faces its longest-ever shutdown over the president's demands for border wall funding, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested "possible alternatives to a physical wall," according to one Silicon Valley newspaper:
Among the president's justifications for a wall is to stop drugs from coming into the United States, so Pelosi proposed spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" for technology to scan cars for drugs, weapons and contraband at the border. "The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing," Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said during her weekly press conference.
That didn't go over well with Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group that on Friday started a petition asking Democrats to drop plans for a "technological wall" that it says could threaten Fourth Amendment rights that guard against unreasonable searches and seizures. "Current border surveillance programs subject people to invasive and unconstitutional searches of their cell phones and laptops, location tracking, drone surveillance, and problematic watchlists," the group's petition says...
In December, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General released a report that showed searches of electronic devices at the border were up nearly 50 percent in 2017. The report also found that border agents were not always following standard operating procedures for searches, including failing to properly document such searches. In addition, information copied by agents were not always deleted as required.
The article also notes that Anduril Industries -- founded by Oculus Rift designer Palmer Luckey (and funded by Peter Thiel) -- is one of several companies already working on "a virtual border wall."
CNN also reports on a GoFundMe campaign started by an Air Force veteran to simply crowdfund the construction of the wall. Though 340,747 people pledged over $20 million, it failed to reach its $1 billion goal, and is now pointing supporters to a newly-formed non-profit corporation -- named "We Build the Wall."
Meanwhile, another 7,121 GoFundMe members have pledged $160,985 to a rival campaign raising money for ladders to climb over Trump's wall.
That didn't go over well with Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group that on Friday started a petition asking Democrats to drop plans for a "technological wall" that it says could threaten Fourth Amendment rights that guard against unreasonable searches and seizures. "Current border surveillance programs subject people to invasive and unconstitutional searches of their cell phones and laptops, location tracking, drone surveillance, and problematic watchlists," the group's petition says...
In December, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General released a report that showed searches of electronic devices at the border were up nearly 50 percent in 2017. The report also found that border agents were not always following standard operating procedures for searches, including failing to properly document such searches. In addition, information copied by agents were not always deleted as required.
The article also notes that Anduril Industries -- founded by Oculus Rift designer Palmer Luckey (and funded by Peter Thiel) -- is one of several companies already working on "a virtual border wall."
CNN also reports on a GoFundMe campaign started by an Air Force veteran to simply crowdfund the construction of the wall. Though 340,747 people pledged over $20 million, it failed to reach its $1 billion goal, and is now pointing supporters to a newly-formed non-profit corporation -- named "We Build the Wall."
Meanwhile, another 7,121 GoFundMe members have pledged $160,985 to a rival campaign raising money for ladders to climb over Trump's wall.
AFAIK, the "wall" is supposed to be built outside of official border crossing points. "Official" border crossings have used x-ray or similar scanners since at least 2012; they probably check for radiation too.
https://www.cnet.com/news/dhs-...
I'm not actually in favor of a wall, but Nauseating Nancy Pelosi seems to be discussing an entirely different issue. What's the long-term solution? Fix the broken immigration system, issue an amount of guest-worker permits that's sufficient to meet demand for immigration.
If we're going to build a "wall" along the border, I'm not sure that either a wall or high-tech will do much. Anyone willing to cross a hundred miles of desert isn't going to be fazed by another obstacle that's surmountable. Want to patrol the more rugged parts of the border? First build a road or track along it, then use Border Patrol mounted on horseback combined with drones with IR cameras. The terrain is such that mounted troops are actually more effective than motor vehicles or walls.
Do you really want to fly when air traffic controllers are working without pay and probably even more stressed out than usual? That's how mistakes happen and mistakes get people killed.
Notice I'm not weeping for the "papers please" TSA jobsworths, but things like air traffic control, FAA inspections, FDA inspections, Dept of Ag, are actually useful and desirable.
i can't speak to the murder statistics, but most fentanyl comes by ship from China these days. Most heroin that comes from "down South" probably comes in trucks or by ship, commingled with legitimate cargo.
How will a wall help with any of that? Most illegal immigration is the cumulative result of people overstaying visas. In other words entering through a port of entry and then just not leaving. Furthermore the rate of illegal immigration into the US has steadily declined over the years in total, and in particular from Mexico. Immigration from other non-North American countries has increased, but the overall rate seems to be declining.
This current so-called crisis in Tijuana has nothing to do with border walls or border security either. These are folks who will claim asylum at the port of entry. A giant wall across the border wouldn't change this situation.
Also, where will this wall be built? Are wall supporters ready to spend the money not only to build the wall but to buy the land? The vast majority of the land along the border is privately owned. Will the government just take the land? Steal it from Mexico? What about rivers? This doesn't seem to be very well thought out. Earmarking a huge amount of money for a project with no real plan doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I have to wonder who benefits from this wall's construction?
"Socialism" is what makes life in the "Capitalist world" good. Public roads, public education, subsidized medicine research, safety regulations, military, police, equality... All "socialist" ideas, borrowed and implemented in every place you'd want to live.
Crowdfunding the border wall might be a good idea. The irony of doing it that way is that it will show just how unpopular it is overall. I will bet that it will fail to reach the goal because only the lunatic fringe wants the wall built. As an NBC commentator noted, "It is a 13th century solution to a 19th century problem." Drugs will still make it into the United States by flying them via drones. Furthermore, those wishing to cross illegally need only to dig tunnels.
Tunnels take time to dig and create a single entry point that can be monitored more easily. Claiming a shovel makes the entire wall useless is an idiotic argument, especially when walls have been demonstrably effective where we already have them.
Take $20B out of the DoD budget and build a really awesome border wall.
Advantages:
* $20B that is spent domestically.
* $20B that builds things that last (ie not ordnance, bullets, etc.)
* Will pay for itself quickly with the reduction in human traffic across the border.
* Defense spending that saves lives instead of taking them.
Disadvantages:
* Keeps the flow of new Democratic voters reduced.
* Doesn't enrich the Military Industrial Complex.
* Forces the Chamber of Commerce to hire more native low skilled workers.
Huh, hard choice.
"Thats why walls work"
There's one thing I don't understand, though... I have clear memories of Trump stating it was going Mexico the one to pay for the wall so, what's the problem with the wall not having a line in USA's budget? Wasn't exactly that what Trump expected -and promised?
The "tired, your poor, your huddled masses" arrived in the USA legally at that time.
Entering the USA now as an illegal migrant now via some random location is not legal.
People with an approved reason to enter theUSA, move tot the USA will still be accepted.
People can still enter the USA at a legal crossing location as normal people do.
Present their documents issued and they are legally in the USA.
The wall keeps out criminals, drugs, illegal migrants by making them have to risk a legal crossing location.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Study walls and fence systems that work legally around the world.
Make sure the wall cant be climbed physically without effort and that all legal attempts to stay in the USA after such attempts fail.
Make sure any illegal migrant who attempts the get over the wall has no legal rights to the stay in the USA after that attempt.
That stops years and decades of legal court work in the USA after each and every attempt to get over the wall.
The illegal migrant is set back to there side of the wall and never allowed back into the USA.
Attempt to get over the wall and that is a crime and no further access to the US is ever permitted for any reason for that illegal migrant.
That will force all illegal migrants to have to buy fake random documents. Such new documents are now more easy to detect at any legal crossing location.
Wondering int the USA at some random location is no longer an option.
Demanding US legal protection later after wondering into the USA will not work.
Use all detection methods the US mil has to detect any new deeper tunnel attempts.
That removes the legal and easy attempts to cross into the USA illegally. All later US court and legal attempts to stay in the USA after getting over the wall.
That then allows more enfacement at ports, airports and all other legal entry locations.
Crime, illegal migration and drug imports are reduced.
Win, win, win.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Not to mention, almost ALL illegal immigrants are coming via airports comparatively. And SEVEN TIMES as many terrorism suspects are caught at the NORTHERN border than the Southern.
Republicans are ideological morons by choice. Kick them to the curb, let them be in whatever swamp they want to run, but they suck at governance. The shutdown over BS proves it undeniably.
Arizona had 240 illegal immigrant inmates incarcerated in federal prison for homicide related charges. California had 2430, Florida had 480, New York had 1350, and Texas had 900
That's some interesting math considering that it's more than the total number of inmates in federal prison for homicide charges.
Virtual walls are expensive to buy and maintain. Its not like the cameras will be simple IR illuminated CCD style you buy at a big box store. They'll be high resolution with thermal imaging. They have to survive difficult environmental conditions. Hundreds of miles of fiber optics and fiber switchgear. Expensive servers and front-end clients. Federal contractors to maintain it all.
Versus a physical barrier CBP can drive by and inspect for damage on occasion.
Versus a Virtual Fence, they're not much of a deterrent. "Woooo, I'm so scared of being caught on video. OMG! What if they use facial recognition that isn't used in my home country?" vs "Hmm... 30ft wall, spikes and/or barbwire... Maybe I should just use an actual border crossing?"
If your donors include many defense contractors, which system are you going to pitch?
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
If we would simply sit on the sidelines for the next " War on X ", we could easily build that wall 10x over.
Folks talk about how it would be a waste of money to build it, yet where is all that outrage when the US is spending TRILLIONS of dollars in the never ending conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. etc. ?
Taxes are crowdfunding v 1.0
and overstay their visit. But even if the goal is no longer to stop the flow of illegals (which is how The Wall was sold to me) but instead of make border patrol's life easier it's no good. For one thing there's ladders. For another it's pretty easy to climb a fence.
As others have pointed out Israel doesn't have a lot of wall or fence. Unless you're gonna station somebody at every inch of fence they're just gonna go over it. Israel's solution is snipers and a willingness to kill. I suppose we could do that.
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When you fly into the US, you come through the border (immigration), and your identification, papers, and more are scrutinized. Would you support doing so for everyone who enters across a border? If they can bypass that check - should we let them do so?
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Gonna have to ask for a citation of that. We know about 600,000 overstay their visa (because we check them at the border - the airport), and we know we catch 300,000 illegally crossing the US-Mexico border. How many do we NOT catch? Any numbers for that?
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Physical barriers only work when the delay they add is proportional to the response time, or when the barrier improves the response time.
Police response time to your house is often only a matter of minutes. A door lock works because either it adds a few minutes of delay for the thief trying to bypass it stealthily (giving neighbors or homeowners a chance to spot the intrusion and call police) , or because it draws attention if you bypass it quickly (neighbors or homeowner hear door kicked in or window being broken). Even a 15 second delay may be all it takes for a homeowner to run and retrieve a gun from a safe.
Walls/fences work in urban areas because they prevent casual flow of people back and forth, and because they are well monitored. The 15 seconds it takes someone to scale a fence is plenty of time to mobilize the guards and intercept. These are the areas where we already have walls/fences built.
Out in the desert, even if you know the exact moment that someone breaches the border, the response time can be hours. Adding 5 or 10 minutes for someone to scale the wall is trivial. If you can track down and intercept someone who breached the border 1 hour 50 minutes ago, you can almost surely track down someone who breached the border 2 hours ago.
Yes. We will need more border patrol agents. Thankfully we have ~40 times the population, so having a population of 330 million supporting border agents for 2000 miles of border should be easier than a population of 8.7 million supporting border agents for 440 miles of border. And ours just want to sell drugs, not kill us. So they see survival - not being caught and/or killed - as more important.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I wish we would debate immigration itself and not get stuck in the weeds discussing walls, whether drugs or illegal immigrants come over the border frontier or airports and shipping containers, or whether they're all criminals, and all the other fringe elements of the debate.
I think there are serious questions about the economic impact of high levels of impoverished immigrants. They burden school districts, local social welfare systems, low-income housing, etc. Does their very low wage employment, even in an ideal situation where they are W-2 workers, actually pay off their added economic burden, or are they actually subsidized, perhaps even for a long time -- like a generation. Or even longer, since we know that escaping poverty is hard.
Our social welfare system does a very marginal job of serving US citizens, it seems unlikely to expand sufficiently to cover significant numbers of poor migrants and serve US citizens. This seems like a real issue to me.
Then there are real questions about the US job market and corporate hiring policies for non-impoverished immigrants. Very few of them are "rock star" types, most of them are cheap filler for corporate jobs that actually seems to harm skilled US workers.
The murder statistics are nonsense. Saying "Mexicans murder people in America, therefore we should have a wall", is as silly as saying "Californians murder people in Nevada, therefore we should have a wall".
No, it's not silly. Because Californians living legally in the US are different than people who we should be preventing from being here when they cheat to do so. If we can reduce some of the tens of thousands of crimes committed in the US by those who are illegally present, that's tens of thousands of crimes fewer we have to deal with. People who end up alive, instead of dead.
Let me guess. You're going to say that there are simply a fixed number of crimes, and if the illegals who commit thousands and thousands of violent felonies every year weren't in the country, then law-abiding citizens would step up and commit those crimes instead? Do you realize how absurd your position on this actually is? How about we just use that old liberal/progressive staple: "If we can save just one life by [banning/regulating/taking-away-liberty-in-some-way], then it's worth doing." So, if we can prevent thousands of violent felonies from being committed by people, many of whom have been repeatedly deported and who simply walk back across the border because there's nothing stopping them or even slowing them down, doesn't that more than qualify for a Progressive "Think Of The Children" blessing for whatever method contributes to that end? No? I see.
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