I'm a big fan of the EFF but this article basically comes down to "X Y and Z were designed to solve problem A and they were implemented poorly therefore problem A is unsolvable and no one should even try to address problem A"
This is especially ridiculous when the failures of X Y and Z came from administration issues (failures of oversight), picking shitty contractors, buying faulty equipment, etc. all of which are solvable/preventable.
The takeaway of these past failures shouldn't be that securing the border is impossible and not worth even attempting. The takeaway should be that programs need to be meaningfully and intelligently invested in (maybe going with the lowest bidder or your personal friends/donors isn't always a good idea), and that there needs to be oversight and accountability to make sure that those funds aren't being wasted or pocketed by corrupt public servants and private contractors to ensure that systems are implemented correctly and maintained.
Of course it's going to take "record-level funding" to implement a massive solution when previous attempts were entirely half-assed, designed to attract and allow for corruption, and then neglected. Congressional leaders and the American public should be shocked and outraged at the money that's been wasted and they should be working to design a system that avoids those pitfalls and actually does the job right. Ideally we should also be tracking down the people responsible for those past failures and holding them accountable too where it's possible.
> Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.
This article cites efforts of doing this all the way back to 1997. The critical problem is not that the cameras are literally broken, although they seem to have struggled with this, but the fact that the cameras have not shown to improve operational results.
An intelligently designed program would try to learn from these decades of trying the same thing unsuccessfully and try something else.
Before confidently claiming that the problem was the quality of the execution, you should try to present some evidence that this solution is a sensible one. Claiming it would work if it was better is something you can do indefinitely with no evidence.
The fact that past programs failed to collect good data or failed to make good use of the data they were getting does not imply that having data is unlikely to improve operational results.
I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity. We could hire humans to stand all day in watchtowers and scan for people sneaking in with just their human eyes, but (working) cameras have a lot of obvious advantages.
There is plenty of evidence and data showing that cameras can be a highly effective part of solutions to the problem of monitoring. There are countless companies, governments, and individuals using cameras right now with great success. Cameras are not an unproven technology and their usefulness is not theoretical.
I don't think that anyone would be opposed to a better option that would eliminate the need for cameras and sensors, but if one exists I've never heard of it. Cameras and sensors seem to be the best options we have. The cameras and sensors (when they were functioning) were never the problem with past systems. Those past problems were more like "We paid for a bunch of cameras but we never budgeted for anyone to respond to them, or to maintain them, or to maintain the systems we need to collect data from them". Those are all very solvable problems which shouldn't have happened in the first place.
I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity.
This is the goal of fewer people in power than you think, and keep in mind there is more border than the one between Mexico and the US. Most undocumented people have flown here and simply overstayed their visa. On the other hand, congress has been saber rattling about the southern border my entire life and has done little about it. It's useful as a wedge issue though, so from time to time, you'll see some spending a lot of money on walls and towers that just aren't very effective (and maybe callously separate some kids form their families).
On the other hand, undocumented people pay billions in taxes, work for cheap and make services (like dining, construction, landscaping, cosmetology, etc.) cheaper. The monied and political classes want to keep this status quo.
It's true that government has been willing to be lax in terms of border security because they want to exploit illegal immigrants as basically slave labor. Personally I think having a large underclass of easily exploitable poor people who don't have the rights and protections the rest of us enjoy is abhorrent and morally unjustifiable.
It has led to this situation where token gestures are made, largely to appease the Americans living in/near border towns and suffering under the weight of the negative consequences.
I don't know how long they'll be able to pay lip service to the problem though. There will be literal billions of climate refugees coming in the near future and they won't be economic migrants looking for higher wages. They will be genuinely desperate and for them getting past the border of another country will be a matter of survival. With a well secured border and carefully regulated immigration the US should be able to take a lot of those refugees in without being overwhelmed by them. If we're not prepared for it in advance, what we'll be left with will be far from the status quo the shortsighted have been trying so hard to preserve.
How does border security or limits on immigration prepare the US for taking in large numbers of climate refugees? The US's strengths when it comes to immigration is specifically that we're relatively easy to get into for a rich country, because we have a generous family reunification visa program, and thus have large support communities for basically every immigrant population you can think of.
In other words, the US is already way more prepared for climate refugees than, say, the EU is. Though, to be fair, the US is also going to have a lot of internal climate refugees, too.
Parent listed several benefits (to the rich or unethical) of illegal immigrants, and why the powers that be want to keep it that way.
You agreed that it's a precarious and generally bad situation for the immigrants to be in, and objected on moral grounds,
... but then jump straight to the negative affects that local citizens are supposedly suffering from, without actually listing any that are unique to those border towns.
Undercutting workers would be nationwide, as would any adverse affects on the healthcare system. Being in the states illegally means you avoid going back and forth across the border - so being in a border town doesn't strike me as relevant to a discussion about illegal immigrants.
So I'm earnestly asking, which issues affect border towns more than any other place in America, considering most illegal immigrants are overstaying visas instead of trying to sneak through the US-Mexico border?
Any large unexpected influx of people causes havoc on a city. It strains hospitals, social services, schools, etc. It's becoming a problem in places far from the border, but border towns at commonly used crossings get hit first, harder, and repeatedly. People overstaying their visa don't swarm into towns in massive numbers in short windows of time.
There is no shortage of news stories about the issues.
How can you make political hay out of a solved problem?
Solving it, now that would be a BIG PROBLEM!
If it's not immigrants then you would have to blame someone else and/or more explicitly cite race/ethnicity/religion.
Seriously, when you have a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years, that's both hilarious and dangerous.
> a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years,
Plus all of them somehow managing to cast totally-undetectable votes in elections, traveling to specific swing states, for no direct gain to themselves even though getting caught would mean deportation, while uniformly maintaining superhuman levels of discipline and secrecy. /s
Those are just a few of the ones who used their own names. An unofficial analysis by CBS "showed [at least] 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade [2006-2016]."
We know the problem exists. We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation, but the Democrats oppose that fiercely. They demand extensive evidence be provided before an investigation will be allowed, then ignore what evidence is available.
> Seems to me if you see someone crossing the border illegally that’s only really useful if you can apprehend them before you lose track of them.
Will nobody acknowledge how ridiculous a concept absolute security of a border is? Nobody would want what this would actual look like—extremely violent and expensive with little benefit to anyone.
You think it would be better to have an open boarder? No other country seems to think that's a good idea.
What do you think the ideal solution should look like? Keep in mind that you'll have to defend against or allow into the country economic migrants looking for higher wages, millions of truly desperate climate refugees who don't have homes to go back to, as well as terrorists and criminals.
No one in the EU has open borders. They have agreements with neighbors, much in the same way you can drive to a neighboring state in the US without much restriction, but interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border (and even with our northern border).
The relevant border policies inside the EU are literally called open borders. I don’t know what would you call open borders if not what we have between EU countries.
> interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border
EU internal migration is relatively non-controversial, at least after the UK left the bloc and people realized how much of a trainwreck leaving the EU would be. Brexit happened mainly because English speakers are painfully stubborn monolingualists.
On the other hand, EU external immigration is extremely controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-right that's polling extremely well, and the liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by basically copypasting their entire external immigration playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration debate boil down to "do we just turn away all asylum seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don't like too?"
The reason why this happened is that the EU suuuuucks at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that, like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those that didn't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US at least has family migration, which means we've spent the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience the EU's member states lack.
[0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and illegally) far-right biker gangs
Switzerland is part of the Schengen but not the EU, I guess Norway is in that boat also. If we are just talking about open borders, then it isn’t limited to the EU (the UK wasn’t in the Schengen even when it was in the EU).
Absolute border security - it is literally impossible by land/sea/air/tunnel to cross into the US territory from Mexico without rapid detection and response.
...
Open border - the US does not impede general traffic from Mexico, bringing certain goods remains illegal but enforcement of this is limited to additional penalties after apprehension.
We are pretty far from both of those right now. I don't think the person you initially replied to was arguing for an open border. But surely it's not an ideal use of resources to stop all of these border based crimes in real time?
Most people are not crossing illegally. Those that do are going to have to actively evade those consequences as long as they continue an unpermitted stay. How much of our GDP should we spend to move "up" that spectrum? What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do we face?
Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social services, housing, they all depend on planning for funding and to keep pace with population to avoid being overrun. Things are bad enough right now with the massive numbers of economic migrants coming into the country, but once there are literal billions of climate refugees things will be much worse unless we are prepared.
Now is the time to invest in the regulation of immigration and defense of our borders so that we can safely accommodate as many of the people climate change displaces as we can. We also need to be thinking about what climate change will do to populations within the US.
If you think it isn't worth the investment, even in low cost expenses like cameras, I can only imagine you aren't living near the boarder or aren't considering the refugee crisis that is coming.
NYC has a bunch of uniquely New York problems that make accommodating anyone - refugees or otherwise - impossible. It's some of the most expensive real estate in the world, in a city that's seeing huge population outflows, burdened by an extremely top-heavy city and state government. If you don't have a tax base, you can't accomodate anyone.
But there's plenty of America that isn't NYC.
Furthermore, Eric Adams is... ugh. How do I put it? The Wikipedia article on him has an above-the-fold mention of him doing community work with Nation of Islam[0], as an NYPD cop. He got elected because NY liberals would vote for Trump if he had a D next to his name. Furthermore, federal investigations have revealed he's a foreign agent of Turkiye and Erdogan, up to and including denying the Armenian Genocide[1]. He's hilariously incompetent and malicious at the same time.
[0] I mentioned this on a Discord call with a friend, who responded, "OH MY GOD, HE'S INTO THE BLITLER SHIT?"
Exactly. Once "the border" became politicized, very few people allow themselves to think in terms of a spectrum. They just stand up a straw man on either extreme end and argue against it.
Almost nobody is arguing for absolute open borders or absolute closed borders.
> How would you propose to respond to detections, if the cameras all worked?
Facial-recognition scan plus rudimentary SIGINT to identify any e.g. cell phones or devices broadcasting a MAC address. I don't like it, less because of what it means at the border and more in that it requires, for step two, doing the same surveillance across the country. But it's not unsolveable. We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
> We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
I think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration. I fear that most people won't be personally impacted until the worst of it hits (due to climate change) and by then it'll be too late to make the sensible preparations needed to offset the coming refugee crisis.
I'm not a fan of domestic surveillance either, and hopefully we can place limits on its use internally to minimize the impacts to citizens within the US.
> think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration
Doubtful. Wealthy communities profit from the wage disparity and can afford to insulate themselves from the problem. And the voters most animated by this remain hyper-responsive to performative solutions.
As much as people hate the idea of a wall, and the entire concept has become politicized, it would make that process a lot easier, but the truth is that if you're going to monitor a border and prevent people from illegally crossing it, that will involve humans having to drive/fly out to wherever there are people who are illegally crossing in order to turn them away or arrest/process/deport them.
What would that mean in terms of camera coverage, and border patrol coverage?
Will the border patrol get there in, say, 20 minutes? And we have cameras covering all the land within 20 minutes of the border, so we don't lose them in that time?
Yeah, it'd mean you need enough camera to cover the area and you need to have enough people on the ground to reach the people crossing within a reasonable amount of time. There are somethings you can do to slow them down (walls for one) and things you can do keep an eye on them while people are being sent out to make contact (cameras, drones, planes, helicopters, satellites, etc.).
More people on the ground does cost money, but the good news is that those government jobs would be a real boon for people living near the border.
Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is? It's 100 miles from any border of the country [1]. What exactly counts as enough camera coverage? Should we just cover one border? Do we need to expand this to the Canadian border as illegal crossings increase up there as well? Should we blanket the majority of the population in these cameras now that we've established how big their jurisdiction is despite low evidence of their usefulness for their actual job?
> Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is?
Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is).
Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
It’s not plainly obvious at all. Because the border is fucking huge, surrounded by a vast, inhospitable desert. It can be tunneled under and/or more simply just trafficked through the formal crossings.
There are some areas where cameras make sense. There are some areas where guards make sense. There are vast tracts where it’s an idiotic idea.
The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
I had a great-grandfather that was sent along the Southern border to try to map it — he was a surveyor. A lot of times he'd be at the top of a canyon, and the next place to drop the pin would be at the bottom. He'd just chuck the pin into the canyon and mark the point as "passable by neither man nor mule".
People who've never visited the border — especially in the western bits of it — have very little idea how absolutely inhospitable it is.
The good news is that there aren't a lot of illegal crossings to worry about at those absolutely inhospitable "passable by neither man nor mule" locations. That means that they can be electronically monitored but otherwise more or less left alone while the focus can be on those areas where people absolutely can and regularly do cross.
I think passive surveillance with cameras in areas that are vulnerable to crossings but far less likely than other areas where we might want a stronger presence is extremely reasonable.
Without them you have massive blind spots which can be taken advantage of as soon as people realize that attempting illegal entry through the easier areas which are being monitored is likely to result in failure but there are locations which aren't being monitored in any way. The expected response to making it harder for people to cross illegally in one area is that they will try another place to do it.
Keeping an eye on those areas in the most cost effective way possible is the ideal. Keep in mind that the people illegally crossing today are mostly looking for higher paying work and citizenship for their children. Still they've already demonstrated that they can be very determined. The people crossing illegally tomorrow will be much more desperate and looking to survive. Intentionally leaving yourself blind to huge areas to save a few bucks on cameras is basically setting out a welcome mat.
The fact that the boarder is huge does not mean that monitoring it is not necessary or that it is impossible. The fact that tunnels exist doesn't either. We have the technology to detect tunnels and tunneling.
The fact that people sneak past at busy check points doesn't
make the situation not worth trying to address.
Every area where a person could cross can and should be monitored. Walls, cameras, drones, satellites, sensors, and guards are all valid tools for border protection. The question just comes down to where and how they are deployed and maintained.
> The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
No one so far has managed to come up with an anything better. Have you?
I’ve always thought the real answer was to stop the businesses from hiring people. Make an actually useful national ID system that employers can use to identify if someone is allowed to work in the US, and then come down like the hammer of god on anyone found to be employing people under the table.
People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the opportunity for people who enter without permission, and they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with more than just border crossings.
Yes, you could stop it at the point of demand. I remember AZ implemented eVerify or some such, don’t know what effect or loopholes it had. In Texas:
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
That’s Canada’s approach and it is super effective. But when you look at who those employers are in the USA, say hotels, farms, construction companies, etc… people who are basically stereotypical rich Republicans (and even a former president/presidential candidate), it makes sense that this solution will never be proposed here. It also explains why only ineffectual solutions are proposed, it isn’t meant to be solved as neither side really wants it to be solved.
I agree that that would stop a lot of the people crossing illegally today. It's a great idea! I wouldn't help with people crossing for criminal activity and it ignores the looming threat of billions of climate refugees coming because their survival depends on gaining entrance into another country.
There is actually a large volume of research on what would work better than walls and surveillance systems. Scaremongering politicians don’t care to mention it.
The number one observation is that ports of entries are the largest area for illegal entry and violence and drug smuggling. Expediting bureaucracy there and improving the staffing of these areas would be far more effective than cameras watching the desert or god forbid some idiot’s delusion of “walls”
I’m not even arguing the politics of this. Focus the efforts on areas that are actual sources of problems. Stop appealing to idiots who want imagery of guns and fortifications. That’s not effective operations. The southern border patrol is underfunded. Adding more people to help manage the hotspots is more effective than cameras in cold spots.
This is a bigger part of the answer than most realize.
The border is some of the most rugged and remote terrain on Earth. A lot (most?) of it is in country not well served by paved roads, cell service, electricity, etc. Even if you could have some sort of magic sensor network that alerted you with perfect accuracy every time someone crossed the border, the logistics of responding to every single crossing are incredibly hard. There are plenty of sections where there isn't even a road on the border.
How are you going to respond to a border crossing alert 10+ miles from the nearest agent, in terrain where it will take hours to get there by land?
By staffing agents closer than 10+ miles, building out the necessary infrastructure, and not waiting until after someone crosses the border to respond and head out in that direction.
It's wild that packs of migrants can travel over desert wastelands on foot and swim across rivers to cross over the border but it's seen as impossible to get a border control officer to them when we've got access to trucks, helicopters, drones, sensors, and all the advanced technology we could ever want at our disposal.
You keep saying to just do it, but it is clear that you don’t understand the reality of that environment. Have you been out to the remote parts of Arizona, Texas or New Mexico? I’ve spent a lot of time in that country and it is not for the faint of heart. Hikers and backcountry people go out there and get lost. SAR with helicopters, drones, horses, ATVs and a subject that WANTS to be found fail all the time. It can take years to find a body in an area with a 5 square mile radius.
Border patrol already has tons of access to all of the things you listed, and they can’t come close to keeping up. That’s because the task is incredibly difficult.
The solution you are describing requires tens of thousands of miles of additional access roads, hundreds of guard posts, electricity and plumbing for that, thousands of staff willing to live in remote places or commute for hours. And that’s just for the people to watch the border. Add in vehicles for all of them, thousands of sensor stations, monitoring facilities, an entire Air Force of helicopters. Realistically, you are looking at something that is going to look a lot like the logistics for the war in Afganistan. And with about the same expenses and chance of success.
It’s a bit like saying that going to the moon is as easy as sending a rocket up there.
I think it's "plainly obvious" the the people pushing for this keep repeating the same argument, that is, they have no argument, they just say "duh, obviously watchtowers work!".
This isn't evidence-based policy, this is literally the opposite.
Can you name one program similar in-scope anywhere that would achieve results in-line with what you could see here? A pilot study in one small area that measured impact and effects? No? Oh well its just "plainly obvious" right so who needs evidence?
This is cargo-cult nonsense, through and through. "See if we do the right mystical movements and arrangements then magically things will be fixed".
Do we need to bring up that even Israel, one of world's most militarized states, failed to leverage this technology despite arguably far stronger technological knowledge institutionally and far more flexible hand in security spending?
No, October 7th showed the same failures as it would for this border program. The problem is and never was about interdiction, the problem is the root-causes of these "threats" having nothing to do with physical human beings crossing a geographical space without being recorded on camera or a sensor.
Well, you’ve presented an elementary level view of the problem. The issue is that solving a problem effectively often requires defining the problem and its mechanics and drivers in greater detail to identify solutions that are to fit to address the nuances of the issue.
Otherwise you end up with billions of dollars spent on a useless wall.
> you’ve presented an elementary level view of the problem
I'm presenting the problem as it is understood by almost everyone who views the issue as a problem. The problem isn't ill defined: it's quite clearly defined. What we're disagreeing on is whether it constitutes the root problem. The EFF doesn't do itself any service by dismissing as ill-defined a perfectly well-defined problem when the disagreement is over whether it's a problem at all.
Put another way: if I say my problem is I'm seeing too many orange things, I think that problem is perfectly well defined. It's just not really a prolbem.
No, we are not disagreeing on whether it constitutes the root problem.
What I am saying is that there’s nuance to the mechanics of the problem that are important to acknowledge when forming an effective solution; and you’re just repeating yourself with no acknowledgement of the nuance and an appeal to the masses.
In the interests of optimization: maybe we could just not? Seems like the Occam solution here would just be to (1) rigorously enforce employment eligibility for all employers (not employees!), something that is done routinely at the salaried level already and has an existing bureaucracy in place and (2) hand out green cards like candy for people working positions for which there are openings. Problem solved, QED. No border towers needed, and "illegal" migration stops at exactly the level where it's required, because migrants obviously won't come in excess of the jobs available.
Obviously that's not the actual problem you're trying to solve, because the actual problem is political and ethnographic (c.f. Musk's thread that this will be the "last election" because of something to do with demographic change). But this is HN, and it seems like it's worth discussing actual solutions.
The illegal immigration problem can't be solved purely by making sure that anyone coming into the country illegally cannot be employed. Too many jobs are paid under the table and while almost all of the people entering illegally today are economic migrants looking for higher paying jobs, in the very near future we'll be looking at floods of climate refugees who literally won't have homes to go back to. Having otherwise open borders or just handing out green cards to anyone who asks also fails to address security concerns. No matter what, we need to be able to monitor and regulate who is coming in to the country and what they are bringing in with them (drugs, weapons, human trafficking victims, etc).
I agree that we should be strongly enforcing employment eligibility as well and that it would do a lot of good, but doing that won't mean that we can just leave our borders open and unmonitored.
Seems, again, like you need to first define what "the immigration problem" really is. I mean, if you mean it like I think you mean it, the truth is a lot of us don't think that's a problem worth solving at all. This isn't the forum, obviously, but maybe step back and have some discussions across the aisle before planning out policy.
While I get where you're coming from, I think there's a middle ground that isn't just "let everyone in" or "shut it all down." One idea is a market-based immigration system—basically, you pay an entry fee to immigrate, which adjusts based on things like age. So younger people who have their whole working lives ahead of them would pay less, older folks would pay more.
This could replace the broken discretionary system we have now, where it’s all about family ties and not what we need economically. Plus, it would cut down on smuggling, raise a ton of revenue, and make immigration more efficient. It’s a practical way to let people in, without completely open borders, and would bring in the workers we actually need.
It’s not about scrapping border security—just rethinking how we approach immigration to make it work better for everyone.
Family reunification visas have helped America dodge several bullets when it comes to immigration. We're actually one of the easier countries to get admitted to, and we know how to integrate large numbers of unskilled migrants at scale. The trick is that family members already provide a support structure for new migrants, who integrate, and form the support structure for the next wave of migrants. Do this across every nationality ever and you have basically the US's current demography.
A "What we need economically" immigration system is what's currently eating the EU alive. EU countries basically don't do any work integrating immigrants, they expect everyone to be an economically desirable immigrant that can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Which is great until you have a refugee crisis, or two, and now your country's flooded with people you don't know how to integrate, your native population is turning hard-right, and the migrants are too but in just an ever so slightly different way that somehow makes them more of a threat to the right than left-wingers and liberals.
We already have a "market-based immigration system", it's called a "golden visa", except the cost tends to be in the six to seven figures. It's a way for really rich people to buy their way into a country, not a serious means to admit large numbers of economic migrants. The above also applies to points systems like Canada's, which selects for middle-income countries that have lots of university-educated English or French speakers. That's great if you want to import half of India and China, not so much if you want a diverse immigrant pool.
It seems like the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border and don't see the impacts, or are unaware of the impending crisis of billions of extremely desperate climate refugees, or don't consider the risks or criminals and terrorists entering and leaving the country without any record to be a legitimate concern.
> the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border
I used to live in New York. It didn't hit home until we had our own refugee crisis. This is absolutely something you don't get a handle on until you've seen it in person. (We also have a bad habit of conflating legal high-skilled immigration, legal low-skilled immigration, refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.)
With all respect, that sounds like a campaign speech, so I'm almost guaranteed to tune it out. Do you have links that quantify all that stuff to demonstrate why it's a problem?
It's not. This is a problem solved by reforming the immigration system. I'll let you try to figure out which of the two parties in power has stonewalled progress on that front for the last 30 years.
This article is a little schizophrenic. It calls the cameras "wasteful" and "snake oil", yet the referenced NBC article calls them "a crucial tool". It quotes reports about failures of old systems from Boeing and General Dynamics, then implies without evidence that the same criticisms apply to the newer Anduril "AST" systems. There is no allegation that the AST systems are broken at all.
In the NBC article, "crucial tool" is a non-technical phrase by the article writer, it is not the memo. [1]
The EFF article's expressed intent is first, that there's a history that goes beyond the NBC report. Then, that the history shows reports written by various governmental & non-governmental entities that the tools are not effective.
I'm genuinely curious why that felt schizophrenic. ex. to me, even if "crucial tool" was in a government memo, I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
[1] "Nearly one-third of the cameras in the Border Patrol’s primary surveillance system along the southern U.S. border are not working, according to an internal agency memo sent in early October, depriving border agents of a crucial tool in combating illegal migrant crossings."
> I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
They don't dispute that. That's what's so weird. The argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles, therefore all border surveillance tools are bad," but the article doesn't even manage to draw a line from the past, cancelled programs to the current program.
(labelling people A and B, because 1) there'd be layers of >, 2) I want to signal I'm not curious about you and me or a verbal battle, just how someone else reads the article in a way where EFF does not discuss if they are crucial tools)
A: "I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing [that the program is a crucial tool]"
B: "They don't dispute that"..."the argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles"
B's two clauses seemed to me to be in direct contradiction at first blush. Ex. "debacles", seems to indicate awareness that they were not "crucial tools"
My steelmanning is that debacle is only meant to cover they were costly. There's numerous bits of the article that go beyond cost. The EFF article cites, inter alia, GAO[1], DHS[2], and RAND[3] saying it wasn't shown to be effective.
[1] In 2017, the GAO complained the Border Patrol's poor data quality made the agency "limited in its ability to determine the mission benefits of its surveillance technologies. In one case, Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley claimed IFTs assisted in 500 cases in just six months. The problem with that assertion was there are no IFTs in Texas or, in fact, anywhere outside Arizona."
[2] CBP is not well-equipped to assess its technology effectiveness to respond to these deficiencies. CBP has been aware of this challenge since at least 2017 but lacks a standard process and accurate data to overcome it.
[3] RAND Corporation published a study funded by DHS that found "strong evidence" the IFT program was having no impact on apprehension levels at the border
One third of cameras not working might mean that there is no camera coverage (because the only working cameras are all pointed at a single storage shed), or it might mean that there is 100% coverage (because of redundancies in coverage.)
Its a data point, but without further context, you can't draw meaningful conclusions.
If I were to take a wild guess, one third of all security cameras in the world are probably not fit for purpose, and yet, the world keeps adding more and more of them. Smile, comrade.
I'm replying to reinforce that I'm curious about the schizophrenic interpretation.
I don't think working through this further conversations or sheds light.
IMHO it creates the same problem as the initial comment, though the avenue is different ("its too confusing to discuss because the EFF says they're ineffective, but the NBC article contains 'crucial tool" vs. "its not worth discussing because the memo in the NBC article can't be trusted, broken could mean anything")
I think you just have to accept that without an actual deep dive into this, you're not going to get the information necessary to have anything more than a vague 'someone told me something about something once' opinion.
It's one thing to argue about results, it's another thing to argue about the minutia of the process that gets those results, and who's at fault for what, and which parts of it need to be fixed up, and which are just not a large priority.
You don't need to be a subject matter expert to know that your city had a power outage, and be pissed about it.
You do need to be one, in order to have an informed opinion on how to best prevent the next one.
Net migration between the US and Mexico is small. Pew research numbers:
An estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the U.S. between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the U.S. for Mexico during that period. That translates to net migration of about 160,000 people from Mexico to the U.S., according to government data from both countries.
That's 160,000 net in-migration from Mexico over 5 years. How much would you spend to bring that to zero?
You might think a bunch of tech people would profile performance before deciding what to optimize.
If you mean people that lived in Mexico, that may be. If you mean people that crossed from Mexico into the US across the Southern Border, those numbers are dwarfed. These are just the numbers that we know for sure from observation or interaction[0]
Sounds like a job for the NSA. With their surveillance apparatus, data lake, and analysis tools, they'd be able to make quick work of tracking and apprehending illegal border entries...
That would be a much better way to spend their time and money than invading the privacy of actual US citizens.
I'm not American and a bit bemused by the US border but I note that when last year Texas put razor wire on the border to stop people crossing there was outrage from the federal government who sent people to cut it. The issue seems to be politics and policy as to whether you want people crossing or not rather than tech.
I was also surprised to see on 60 Minutes coach loads of middle class Chinese crossing the Mex/US border who'd bought some fly to the border and claim asylum in the US package. Immigration can be an odd business.
They (Congress? GAO? DHS? ) should have a separate department certify and monitor these sensors. Make it this department's sole job to keep this sensor network running properly.
It’s incredibly frustrating that at a certain size non-profits seemingly loose the ability to focus on the issues that built them. The EFF no business chiming in on immigration policies - sick to tech and information freedom.
Do you not understand that the tools the government uses to control non-citizens are turned inward all the time? Military tech is tech, surveillance tech is tech. They are not chiming in on 'immigration policies', they are chiming in on technology used to actually implement those policies. If all you care about is not having tracking pixels in your personal consumer browser you're going to miss the most dangerous encroachments on your freedom.
You are under the misapprehension that the US government is held back from tyranny by shitty technology. This is false - you could build a totalitarian dictatorship with near-absolute control with 1940s technology. Other states did.
>Military tech is tech
I want the US military to have the best guns, best tanks, best nukes, best drones, best planes, best satellites, best boats. And spoilers: they do. Yet somehow that has not encroached on our lives. Adding “best surveillance of our foreign borders” does not for a dictatorship make.
>They are not chiming in on ‘immigration policies’
I’m not sure how else you can read this statement in the concluding paragraph: “Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises.” Agree or disagree, this is pure domestic politics.
I donate fairly regularly to EFF but I don’t really have a problem with the government having cameras on the border to spot illegal migrants. That’s the kind of surveillance we actually need rather than combing through gmail and SMS messages between teenagers.
This article complains a lot about previous-generation, cancelled projects, but doesn't really investigate what's going on with the current surveillance towers or investigate anything at all, really. The linked NBC article explains that the FAA (WTF... yes, the airplane FAA) administer some surveillance towers, and that border patrol agents are mad that there's a big ticket backlog of broken ones to fix. That's pretty much it.
Nobody investigated enough to figure out things like:
* Why the FAA administer the towers and what the actual hold-up is towards getting a fix? Certainly at least the backstory should be public information.
* Why the towers are broken. This is probably sensitive information but I'm sure some of the disgruntled border patrol agents would be willing to have a chat about it.
* Is it a specific generation of tower that's broken? Is it some kind of backend issue, or just rot from deploying electronics into a hostile desert environment full of people trying to destroy them?
* How do the new "AI" towers work? They're probably just drawing boxes around people and items, no?
This is a disappointing and silly article, in my opinion. It doesn't convince me at all that border surveillance overall is a bad idea or a waste of money, just that some old programs turned into pork-barrel debacles. There's no fresh information or anything that would convince me either way on this issue.
The whole thing is kind of silly IMO, and all political theater.
What is the problem statement? If the problem statement is: people are coming into this country illegally, and we need to stop that, then the next question is: why are they coming here?
If the answer is: to find work because there are no opportunities at home - that's easy to solve. Anyone caught employing illegal immigrants gets mandatory prison time. You would find the work would very, very quickly dry up removing the basic reason for coming here.
Folks fleeing political violence aren't illegal, they have a valid political asylum claim and will be processed much quicker when the illegal folks are no longer flooding the border.
You can have a undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua mow you lawn or hire a fully compliant landscaping company- who will probably still employ an undocumented migrant.
I think the OP's point was that you are part of the problem, and that the landscaping CEO should go to jail.
I'm an American who has lived and worked in Mexico. I found it quite funny that the Mexicans i worked with always complained about the Guatemalans coming over the border and how they needed better border security.
i'm of the opinion that freedom and abortion rights are more important to Americans than being at population replacement rates so our only hope of surviving as a nation is with a huge influx of legal immigrants.
We need to build a border & make it much easier to become a US citizen while making it a felony for hiring an undocumented immigrant.
Joke aside, I don't think any of those are El Paso or Juarez. Top one is Nogales, the one with the Rio Grande has water in it so can't be El Paso, probably closer to Brownsville.
I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.
> I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
Right. Israel has towers like this. But theirs have guns.[1]
> Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises or pursuing foreign policy or immigration reform measures isn't as politically useful as promoting a phantom "invasion" that requires a military-style response. Another reason may be that tech companies and military contractors wield immense amounts of influence and stand to make millions, if not billions, profiting off border surveillance. The price is paid by taxpayers, but also in the civil liberties of border communities and the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants.
They are claiming it is an ineffective solution to the problem, conceptually, that is perpetuated by bad political and lobbyist incentives.
The position is not that it does not work well enough. The position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless of the quality of execution. Therefore we should stop allowing corrupt and fear mongering politicians from manipulating public optics to support these surveillance companies.
> The position is not that it does not work well enough. The position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless of the quality of execution.
That's definitely the implication, but it doesn't really substantiate this, as far as I can tell.
"Past iterations were filled with pork, therefore future ones must be as well, therefore this conceptually cannot work."
For example, the RAND study that they said showed "strong evidence" that IFTs were having no effect actually... doesn't say that at all.
IFTs actually lowered apprehension levels, to which RAND says, "we conclude that there is strong evidence for the presence of a deterrent effect as migrants choose to avoid areas surveilled by IFTs—a proposition for which there is also qualitative evidence outside the data."
Then it goes onto say that for every other technology type, they increased apprehension levels, i.e. they worked. They didn't seem clear on why IFTs behave differently.
There's a very simple and effective way to completely stop the immigration "crisis". The root cause is immigrating coming here for jobs.
Okay, now if you're an American company and you hire illegal immigrants, everyone goes to jail. Within a year, the problem will disappear.
Nobody would actually suggest this though, let alone the right. It's politically advantageous to keep around cheap pseudo-slave labor while simultaneously espousing semi-fascist narratives about "an enemy inside" (spooky!)
Many don't but many countries do. Take a look at a world map and then note how many other countries have such long borders with countries with whom they have some sort of adversarial risk with.
I took a very quick look and stopped after a couple dozen and still had plenty to go. This is a problem not remotely unique to the US.
The only land borders longer than the US-Mexico border are: US-Canada, Russia-Kazakhstan, Russia-Mongolia, Mongolia-China, Russia-China, Chile-Argentina, Bolivia-Brazil, India-China, and India-Bangladesh.
Furthermore, the disparity between the US and Mexico in GDP per capita is pretty stark--over a 3x difference, far more than any other pair of countries with such a long land border. The next largest difference is India-China, and that's not a pairing that's conducive to economic migration, unlike the US-Mexico border.
An onsite oil rig chemical engineer for https://www.slb.com/ starts at $17k/year in Mexico but $150k in USA for the same job doing one month on, two week off land rig rotations.
You make more money in the US working minimum wage than you do in most jobs in Mexico as a high skilled graduate of a good university like https://tec.mx.
Are you looking at single country pairings for the border size?
The closest comparison, both in border length and economic gap is EU/non-EU, when you look at the size of the border along the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
Another close comparison is South Africa, 4,862 km border (compared to US-Mexico at 3,145 km). Huge economic gap and even larger migration numbers.
Is the border an actual problem though? Specifically speaking to the US border.
Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average American holds?
I have not had a single issue with migration or an immigrant, ever. I've never met a single person, in the US, with a material issue related to migration or immigration. I have never felt worried about being near a migrant/immigrant based on who they are or their behavior.
> Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average American holds?
Per recent polling [1], it's the sixth most important issue. It's consistently been raised as one of the top concerns in polling data going back as far as I have political consciousness, although a decent part of the existence of that concern is effectively a dog whistle for racism.
> Is the border an actual problem though?
The border itself isn't the problem; the actual problem lays in the extremely fucked-up nature of the US immigration system (and the actual problems are almost nothing like what people are complaining about). Even for as long as immigration has been a major political concern in the US, the border "solutions" have for as long been lampooned for the fact that they are doing absolutely nothing to actually fix the problem, even as politicians double down on proposing harsher solutions to fix the thing that isn't the problem.
It is a problem if you want welfare and government health care programs. An influx of unskilled hungry huddled masses that don’t even pay into the tax system will drag everyone’s living standards down.
Even if they DO pay taxes it is likely that on average illegal immigration would burden the social safety net.
And none of this gets into the second order effects of immigrants increasing the supply of labor.
I don't follow this. I would imagine an influx of extremely cheap labor would raise everyone else's living standards, not lower them. Because everything is cheaper to produce. That's why Dubai has extremely extravagant places put right next to pseudo-slave's shanties.
Everyone? You can’t imagine a situation where the surplus from the cheap labor is captured by a few capitalists while the rest suffer?
I’m not saying that is happening but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it could happen.
Also if you actually have to interface with clearly illegal cheap labor (landscaping, construction, low quality catering) you’ll see the pattern: a kingpin immigrant who only hires other immigrants with little to no English and a preference for being paid in cash.
This seems in line with the EFF's principles - they've always been strongly against the use of electronics for surveillance. I agree with you that this article left me with a weird taste, though - in this case, I think that the thesis is flimsy and the research is poorly done, so it comes off as grinding an axe rather than taking a stand.
I'm a big fan of the EFF but this article basically comes down to "X Y and Z were designed to solve problem A and they were implemented poorly therefore problem A is unsolvable and no one should even try to address problem A"
This is especially ridiculous when the failures of X Y and Z came from administration issues (failures of oversight), picking shitty contractors, buying faulty equipment, etc. all of which are solvable/preventable.
The takeaway of these past failures shouldn't be that securing the border is impossible and not worth even attempting. The takeaway should be that programs need to be meaningfully and intelligently invested in (maybe going with the lowest bidder or your personal friends/donors isn't always a good idea), and that there needs to be oversight and accountability to make sure that those funds aren't being wasted or pocketed by corrupt public servants and private contractors to ensure that systems are implemented correctly and maintained.
Of course it's going to take "record-level funding" to implement a massive solution when previous attempts were entirely half-assed, designed to attract and allow for corruption, and then neglected. Congressional leaders and the American public should be shocked and outraged at the money that's been wasted and they should be working to design a system that avoids those pitfalls and actually does the job right. Ideally we should also be tracking down the people responsible for those past failures and holding them accountable too where it's possible.
The thesis of the article is:
> Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.
This article cites efforts of doing this all the way back to 1997. The critical problem is not that the cameras are literally broken, although they seem to have struggled with this, but the fact that the cameras have not shown to improve operational results.
An intelligently designed program would try to learn from these decades of trying the same thing unsuccessfully and try something else.
Before confidently claiming that the problem was the quality of the execution, you should try to present some evidence that this solution is a sensible one. Claiming it would work if it was better is something you can do indefinitely with no evidence.
The fact that past programs failed to collect good data or failed to make good use of the data they were getting does not imply that having data is unlikely to improve operational results.
I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity. We could hire humans to stand all day in watchtowers and scan for people sneaking in with just their human eyes, but (working) cameras have a lot of obvious advantages.
There is plenty of evidence and data showing that cameras can be a highly effective part of solutions to the problem of monitoring. There are countless companies, governments, and individuals using cameras right now with great success. Cameras are not an unproven technology and their usefulness is not theoretical.
I don't think that anyone would be opposed to a better option that would eliminate the need for cameras and sensors, but if one exists I've never heard of it. Cameras and sensors seem to be the best options we have. The cameras and sensors (when they were functioning) were never the problem with past systems. Those past problems were more like "We paid for a bunch of cameras but we never budgeted for anyone to respond to them, or to maintain them, or to maintain the systems we need to collect data from them". Those are all very solvable problems which shouldn't have happened in the first place.
I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring that border is a necessity.
This is the goal of fewer people in power than you think, and keep in mind there is more border than the one between Mexico and the US. Most undocumented people have flown here and simply overstayed their visa. On the other hand, congress has been saber rattling about the southern border my entire life and has done little about it. It's useful as a wedge issue though, so from time to time, you'll see some spending a lot of money on walls and towers that just aren't very effective (and maybe callously separate some kids form their families).
On the other hand, undocumented people pay billions in taxes, work for cheap and make services (like dining, construction, landscaping, cosmetology, etc.) cheaper. The monied and political classes want to keep this status quo.
It's true that government has been willing to be lax in terms of border security because they want to exploit illegal immigrants as basically slave labor. Personally I think having a large underclass of easily exploitable poor people who don't have the rights and protections the rest of us enjoy is abhorrent and morally unjustifiable.
It has led to this situation where token gestures are made, largely to appease the Americans living in/near border towns and suffering under the weight of the negative consequences.
I don't know how long they'll be able to pay lip service to the problem though. There will be literal billions of climate refugees coming in the near future and they won't be economic migrants looking for higher wages. They will be genuinely desperate and for them getting past the border of another country will be a matter of survival. With a well secured border and carefully regulated immigration the US should be able to take a lot of those refugees in without being overwhelmed by them. If we're not prepared for it in advance, what we'll be left with will be far from the status quo the shortsighted have been trying so hard to preserve.
How does border security or limits on immigration prepare the US for taking in large numbers of climate refugees? The US's strengths when it comes to immigration is specifically that we're relatively easy to get into for a rich country, because we have a generous family reunification visa program, and thus have large support communities for basically every immigrant population you can think of.
In other words, the US is already way more prepared for climate refugees than, say, the EU is. Though, to be fair, the US is also going to have a lot of internal climate refugees, too.
Parent listed several benefits (to the rich or unethical) of illegal immigrants, and why the powers that be want to keep it that way.
You agreed that it's a precarious and generally bad situation for the immigrants to be in, and objected on moral grounds,
... but then jump straight to the negative affects that local citizens are supposedly suffering from, without actually listing any that are unique to those border towns.
Undercutting workers would be nationwide, as would any adverse affects on the healthcare system. Being in the states illegally means you avoid going back and forth across the border - so being in a border town doesn't strike me as relevant to a discussion about illegal immigrants.
So I'm earnestly asking, which issues affect border towns more than any other place in America, considering most illegal immigrants are overstaying visas instead of trying to sneak through the US-Mexico border?
Any large unexpected influx of people causes havoc on a city. It strains hospitals, social services, schools, etc. It's becoming a problem in places far from the border, but border towns at commonly used crossings get hit first, harder, and repeatedly. People overstaying their visa don't swarm into towns in massive numbers in short windows of time.
There is no shortage of news stories about the issues.
Examples:
https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2023-05-01/texas-bord...
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/03/texas-cities-confron...
https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/small-south-te...
https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/humanitarian-crisis-the-m...
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/21/texas-migrants-borde...
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/19/1232383832/schools-face-big-c...
https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/eagle-pass-texas-declares-stat...
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167645456/border-towns-are-f...
How can you make political hay out of a solved problem?
Solving it, now that would be a BIG PROBLEM! If it's not immigrants then you would have to blame someone else and/or more explicitly cite race/ethnicity/religion.
Seriously, when you have a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years, that's both hilarious and dangerous.
> a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have illegally entered the country in the last 4 years,
Plus all of them somehow managing to cast totally-undetectable votes in elections, traveling to specific swing states, for no direct gain to themselves even though getting caught would mean deportation, while uniformly maintaining superhuman levels of discipline and secrecy. /s
Not "totally-undetectable". Nineteen foreign nationals were caught voting in 2016 in North Carolina alone.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/19-aliens-charged-voter-fr...
Those are just a few of the ones who used their own names. An unofficial analysis by CBS "showed [at least] 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade [2006-2016]."
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/2-investigators-chicago...
We know the problem exists. We won't know how widespread the problem is without a thorough nationwide investigation, but the Democrats oppose that fiercely. They demand extensive evidence be provided before an investigation will be allowed, then ignore what evidence is available.
electoral votes and number of representatives are allocated based on census numbers, which have nothing to do with citizenship status /!s
Seems to me if you see someone crossing the border illegally that’s only really useful if you can apprehend them before you lose track of them.
How would you propose to respond to detections, if the cameras all worked?
If you take a step back, cameras merely recording when and where people cross the border can still be very useful.
That way you can move your enforcement crews to where most people enter. That won't catch all, of course, but should be more performant than guessing.
> Seems to me if you see someone crossing the border illegally that’s only really useful if you can apprehend them before you lose track of them.
Will nobody acknowledge how ridiculous a concept absolute security of a border is? Nobody would want what this would actual look like—extremely violent and expensive with little benefit to anyone.
You think it would be better to have an open boarder? No other country seems to think that's a good idea.
What do you think the ideal solution should look like? Keep in mind that you'll have to defend against or allow into the country economic migrants looking for higher wages, millions of truly desperate climate refugees who don't have homes to go back to, as well as terrorists and criminals.
No one? the EU seems to have done well with all of their member states opening boarders to theirs neighboring members.
No one in the EU has open borders. They have agreements with neighbors, much in the same way you can drive to a neighboring state in the US without much restriction, but interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border (and even with our northern border).
> No one in the EU has open borders.
The relevant border policies inside the EU are literally called open borders. I don’t know what would you call open borders if not what we have between EU countries.
> interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border
This is undeniable.
EU internal migration is relatively non-controversial, at least after the UK left the bloc and people realized how much of a trainwreck leaving the EU would be. Brexit happened mainly because English speakers are painfully stubborn monolingualists.
On the other hand, EU external immigration is extremely controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-right that's polling extremely well, and the liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by basically copypasting their entire external immigration playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration debate boil down to "do we just turn away all asylum seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don't like too?"
The reason why this happened is that the EU suuuuucks at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that, like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those that didn't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US at least has family migration, which means we've spent the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience the EU's member states lack.
[0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and illegally) far-right biker gangs
Switzerland is part of the Schengen but not the EU, I guess Norway is in that boat also. If we are just talking about open borders, then it isn’t limited to the EU (the UK wasn’t in the Schengen even when it was in the EU).
Consider the spectrum:
Absolute border security - it is literally impossible by land/sea/air/tunnel to cross into the US territory from Mexico without rapid detection and response.
...
Open border - the US does not impede general traffic from Mexico, bringing certain goods remains illegal but enforcement of this is limited to additional penalties after apprehension.
We are pretty far from both of those right now. I don't think the person you initially replied to was arguing for an open border. But surely it's not an ideal use of resources to stop all of these border based crimes in real time?
Most people are not crossing illegally. Those that do are going to have to actively evade those consequences as long as they continue an unpermitted stay. How much of our GDP should we spend to move "up" that spectrum? What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do we face?
> What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do we face?
Just ask any city that has had to deal with a massive unexpected influx of people. Try NYC for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social services, housing, they all depend on planning for funding and to keep pace with population to avoid being overrun. Things are bad enough right now with the massive numbers of economic migrants coming into the country, but once there are literal billions of climate refugees things will be much worse unless we are prepared.
Now is the time to invest in the regulation of immigration and defense of our borders so that we can safely accommodate as many of the people climate change displaces as we can. We also need to be thinking about what climate change will do to populations within the US.
See for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/clim...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-america-3-millio...
If you think it isn't worth the investment, even in low cost expenses like cameras, I can only imagine you aren't living near the boarder or aren't considering the refugee crisis that is coming.
NYC has a bunch of uniquely New York problems that make accommodating anyone - refugees or otherwise - impossible. It's some of the most expensive real estate in the world, in a city that's seeing huge population outflows, burdened by an extremely top-heavy city and state government. If you don't have a tax base, you can't accomodate anyone.
But there's plenty of America that isn't NYC.
Furthermore, Eric Adams is... ugh. How do I put it? The Wikipedia article on him has an above-the-fold mention of him doing community work with Nation of Islam[0], as an NYPD cop. He got elected because NY liberals would vote for Trump if he had a D next to his name. Furthermore, federal investigations have revealed he's a foreign agent of Turkiye and Erdogan, up to and including denying the Armenian Genocide[1]. He's hilariously incompetent and malicious at the same time.
[0] I mentioned this on a Discord call with a friend, who responded, "OH MY GOD, HE'S INTO THE BLITLER SHIT?"
[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/10/04/eric-adams-brooklyn-turki...
Speaking of Hitler, denying the Armenian Genocide is a thing Literally Hitler Literally Joked About
Exactly. Once "the border" became politicized, very few people allow themselves to think in terms of a spectrum. They just stand up a straw man on either extreme end and argue against it.
Almost nobody is arguing for absolute open borders or absolute closed borders.
Patiently waiting for the list of successful countries that don't control access to their resources via borders.
> How would you propose to respond to detections, if the cameras all worked?
Facial-recognition scan plus rudimentary SIGINT to identify any e.g. cell phones or devices broadcasting a MAC address. I don't like it, less because of what it means at the border and more in that it requires, for step two, doing the same surveillance across the country. But it's not unsolveable. We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
> We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
I think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration. I fear that most people won't be personally impacted until the worst of it hits (due to climate change) and by then it'll be too late to make the sensible preparations needed to offset the coming refugee crisis.
I'm not a fan of domestic surveillance either, and hopefully we can place limits on its use internally to minimize the impacts to citizens within the US.
> think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration
Doubtful. Wealthy communities profit from the wage disparity and can afford to insulate themselves from the problem. And the voters most animated by this remain hyper-responsive to performative solutions.
By sending border patrol out to collect them.
As much as people hate the idea of a wall, and the entire concept has become politicized, it would make that process a lot easier, but the truth is that if you're going to monitor a border and prevent people from illegally crossing it, that will involve humans having to drive/fly out to wherever there are people who are illegally crossing in order to turn them away or arrest/process/deport them.
What would that mean in terms of camera coverage, and border patrol coverage?
Will the border patrol get there in, say, 20 minutes? And we have cameras covering all the land within 20 minutes of the border, so we don't lose them in that time?
Yeah, it'd mean you need enough camera to cover the area and you need to have enough people on the ground to reach the people crossing within a reasonable amount of time. There are somethings you can do to slow them down (walls for one) and things you can do keep an eye on them while people are being sent out to make contact (cameras, drones, planes, helicopters, satellites, etc.).
More people on the ground does cost money, but the good news is that those government jobs would be a real boon for people living near the border.
Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is? It's 100 miles from any border of the country [1]. What exactly counts as enough camera coverage? Should we just cover one border? Do we need to expand this to the Canadian border as illegal crossings increase up there as well? Should we blanket the majority of the population in these cameras now that we've established how big their jurisdiction is despite low evidence of their usefulness for their actual job?
[1] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
> Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is?
Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is).
Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
Dispatch a drone to follow until agents can respond?
this is a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one.
for instance, face recognition works, especially if we are tolerant of a very small % of false positives.
It’s not plainly obvious at all. Because the border is fucking huge, surrounded by a vast, inhospitable desert. It can be tunneled under and/or more simply just trafficked through the formal crossings.
There are some areas where cameras make sense. There are some areas where guards make sense. There are vast tracts where it’s an idiotic idea.
The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
I had a great-grandfather that was sent along the Southern border to try to map it — he was a surveyor. A lot of times he'd be at the top of a canyon, and the next place to drop the pin would be at the bottom. He'd just chuck the pin into the canyon and mark the point as "passable by neither man nor mule".
People who've never visited the border — especially in the western bits of it — have very little idea how absolutely inhospitable it is.
The good news is that there aren't a lot of illegal crossings to worry about at those absolutely inhospitable "passable by neither man nor mule" locations. That means that they can be electronically monitored but otherwise more or less left alone while the focus can be on those areas where people absolutely can and regularly do cross.
Or they could be ignored entirely and resources could be diverted into more effective measures
Do you see the nonsense of your own argument? You’re advocating for surveillance installations into a place that you think is easily ignored
I think passive surveillance with cameras in areas that are vulnerable to crossings but far less likely than other areas where we might want a stronger presence is extremely reasonable.
Without them you have massive blind spots which can be taken advantage of as soon as people realize that attempting illegal entry through the easier areas which are being monitored is likely to result in failure but there are locations which aren't being monitored in any way. The expected response to making it harder for people to cross illegally in one area is that they will try another place to do it.
Keeping an eye on those areas in the most cost effective way possible is the ideal. Keep in mind that the people illegally crossing today are mostly looking for higher paying work and citizenship for their children. Still they've already demonstrated that they can be very determined. The people crossing illegally tomorrow will be much more desperate and looking to survive. Intentionally leaving yourself blind to huge areas to save a few bucks on cameras is basically setting out a welcome mat.
The welcome mat is not the lack of cameras on a barren deathscape of desert.
The welcome mat is the understaffed border control ports of entry where the majority of problems arise.
Cameras in the desert address only the uninformed fantasy of how illegal immigration works.
I'd agree that the lack of adequate enforcement at ports of entry is a major part of the problem and it would be good to correct that as well.
The fact that the boarder is huge does not mean that monitoring it is not necessary or that it is impossible. The fact that tunnels exist doesn't either. We have the technology to detect tunnels and tunneling. The fact that people sneak past at busy check points doesn't make the situation not worth trying to address.
Every area where a person could cross can and should be monitored. Walls, cameras, drones, satellites, sensors, and guards are all valid tools for border protection. The question just comes down to where and how they are deployed and maintained.
> The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.
No one so far has managed to come up with an anything better. Have you?
I’ve always thought the real answer was to stop the businesses from hiring people. Make an actually useful national ID system that employers can use to identify if someone is allowed to work in the US, and then come down like the hammer of god on anyone found to be employing people under the table.
People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the opportunity for people who enter without permission, and they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with more than just border crossings.
Yes, you could stop it at the point of demand. I remember AZ implemented eVerify or some such, don’t know what effect or loopholes it had. In Texas:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...That’s Canada’s approach and it is super effective. But when you look at who those employers are in the USA, say hotels, farms, construction companies, etc… people who are basically stereotypical rich Republicans (and even a former president/presidential candidate), it makes sense that this solution will never be proposed here. It also explains why only ineffectual solutions are proposed, it isn’t meant to be solved as neither side really wants it to be solved.
I agree that that would stop a lot of the people crossing illegally today. It's a great idea! I wouldn't help with people crossing for criminal activity and it ignores the looming threat of billions of climate refugees coming because their survival depends on gaining entrance into another country.
There is actually a large volume of research on what would work better than walls and surveillance systems. Scaremongering politicians don’t care to mention it.
The number one observation is that ports of entries are the largest area for illegal entry and violence and drug smuggling. Expediting bureaucracy there and improving the staffing of these areas would be far more effective than cameras watching the desert or god forbid some idiot’s delusion of “walls”
I’m not even arguing the politics of this. Focus the efforts on areas that are actual sources of problems. Stop appealing to idiots who want imagery of guns and fortifications. That’s not effective operations. The southern border patrol is underfunded. Adding more people to help manage the hotspots is more effective than cameras in cold spots.
This is a bigger part of the answer than most realize.
The border is some of the most rugged and remote terrain on Earth. A lot (most?) of it is in country not well served by paved roads, cell service, electricity, etc. Even if you could have some sort of magic sensor network that alerted you with perfect accuracy every time someone crossed the border, the logistics of responding to every single crossing are incredibly hard. There are plenty of sections where there isn't even a road on the border.
How are you going to respond to a border crossing alert 10+ miles from the nearest agent, in terrain where it will take hours to get there by land?
By staffing agents closer than 10+ miles, building out the necessary infrastructure, and not waiting until after someone crosses the border to respond and head out in that direction.
It's wild that packs of migrants can travel over desert wastelands on foot and swim across rivers to cross over the border but it's seen as impossible to get a border control officer to them when we've got access to trucks, helicopters, drones, sensors, and all the advanced technology we could ever want at our disposal.
You keep saying to just do it, but it is clear that you don’t understand the reality of that environment. Have you been out to the remote parts of Arizona, Texas or New Mexico? I’ve spent a lot of time in that country and it is not for the faint of heart. Hikers and backcountry people go out there and get lost. SAR with helicopters, drones, horses, ATVs and a subject that WANTS to be found fail all the time. It can take years to find a body in an area with a 5 square mile radius.
Border patrol already has tons of access to all of the things you listed, and they can’t come close to keeping up. That’s because the task is incredibly difficult.
The solution you are describing requires tens of thousands of miles of additional access roads, hundreds of guard posts, electricity and plumbing for that, thousands of staff willing to live in remote places or commute for hours. And that’s just for the people to watch the border. Add in vehicles for all of them, thousands of sensor stations, monitoring facilities, an entire Air Force of helicopters. Realistically, you are looking at something that is going to look a lot like the logistics for the war in Afganistan. And with about the same expenses and chance of success.
It’s a bit like saying that going to the moon is as easy as sending a rocket up there.
I think it's "plainly obvious" the the people pushing for this keep repeating the same argument, that is, they have no argument, they just say "duh, obviously watchtowers work!".
This isn't evidence-based policy, this is literally the opposite.
Can you name one program similar in-scope anywhere that would achieve results in-line with what you could see here? A pilot study in one small area that measured impact and effects? No? Oh well its just "plainly obvious" right so who needs evidence?
This is cargo-cult nonsense, through and through. "See if we do the right mystical movements and arrangements then magically things will be fixed".
Do we need to bring up that even Israel, one of world's most militarized states, failed to leverage this technology despite arguably far stronger technological knowledge institutionally and far more flexible hand in security spending?
No, October 7th showed the same failures as it would for this border program. The problem is and never was about interdiction, the problem is the root-causes of these "threats" having nothing to do with physical human beings crossing a geographical space without being recorded on camera or a sensor.
> an ill-defined problem
The problem is unauthorized border crossings. What about that is ill defined?
Well, you’ve presented an elementary level view of the problem. The issue is that solving a problem effectively often requires defining the problem and its mechanics and drivers in greater detail to identify solutions that are to fit to address the nuances of the issue.
Otherwise you end up with billions of dollars spent on a useless wall.
> you’ve presented an elementary level view of the problem
I'm presenting the problem as it is understood by almost everyone who views the issue as a problem. The problem isn't ill defined: it's quite clearly defined. What we're disagreeing on is whether it constitutes the root problem. The EFF doesn't do itself any service by dismissing as ill-defined a perfectly well-defined problem when the disagreement is over whether it's a problem at all.
Put another way: if I say my problem is I'm seeing too many orange things, I think that problem is perfectly well defined. It's just not really a prolbem.
No, we are not disagreeing on whether it constitutes the root problem.
What I am saying is that there’s nuance to the mechanics of the problem that are important to acknowledge when forming an effective solution; and you’re just repeating yourself with no acknowledgement of the nuance and an appeal to the masses.
> there’s nuance to the mechanics of the problem that are important to acknowledge when forming an effective solution
Sure. I'm saying that is irrelevant to whether it is an "ill-formed problem."
In the interests of optimization: maybe we could just not? Seems like the Occam solution here would just be to (1) rigorously enforce employment eligibility for all employers (not employees!), something that is done routinely at the salaried level already and has an existing bureaucracy in place and (2) hand out green cards like candy for people working positions for which there are openings. Problem solved, QED. No border towers needed, and "illegal" migration stops at exactly the level where it's required, because migrants obviously won't come in excess of the jobs available.
Obviously that's not the actual problem you're trying to solve, because the actual problem is political and ethnographic (c.f. Musk's thread that this will be the "last election" because of something to do with demographic change). But this is HN, and it seems like it's worth discussing actual solutions.
The illegal immigration problem can't be solved purely by making sure that anyone coming into the country illegally cannot be employed. Too many jobs are paid under the table and while almost all of the people entering illegally today are economic migrants looking for higher paying jobs, in the very near future we'll be looking at floods of climate refugees who literally won't have homes to go back to. Having otherwise open borders or just handing out green cards to anyone who asks also fails to address security concerns. No matter what, we need to be able to monitor and regulate who is coming in to the country and what they are bringing in with them (drugs, weapons, human trafficking victims, etc).
I agree that we should be strongly enforcing employment eligibility as well and that it would do a lot of good, but doing that won't mean that we can just leave our borders open and unmonitored.
> The immigration problem can't be solved
Seems, again, like you need to first define what "the immigration problem" really is. I mean, if you mean it like I think you mean it, the truth is a lot of us don't think that's a problem worth solving at all. This isn't the forum, obviously, but maybe step back and have some discussions across the aisle before planning out policy.
While I get where you're coming from, I think there's a middle ground that isn't just "let everyone in" or "shut it all down." One idea is a market-based immigration system—basically, you pay an entry fee to immigrate, which adjusts based on things like age. So younger people who have their whole working lives ahead of them would pay less, older folks would pay more.
This could replace the broken discretionary system we have now, where it’s all about family ties and not what we need economically. Plus, it would cut down on smuggling, raise a ton of revenue, and make immigration more efficient. It’s a practical way to let people in, without completely open borders, and would bring in the workers we actually need.
It’s not about scrapping border security—just rethinking how we approach immigration to make it work better for everyone.
Family reunification visas have helped America dodge several bullets when it comes to immigration. We're actually one of the easier countries to get admitted to, and we know how to integrate large numbers of unskilled migrants at scale. The trick is that family members already provide a support structure for new migrants, who integrate, and form the support structure for the next wave of migrants. Do this across every nationality ever and you have basically the US's current demography.
A "What we need economically" immigration system is what's currently eating the EU alive. EU countries basically don't do any work integrating immigrants, they expect everyone to be an economically desirable immigrant that can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Which is great until you have a refugee crisis, or two, and now your country's flooded with people you don't know how to integrate, your native population is turning hard-right, and the migrants are too but in just an ever so slightly different way that somehow makes them more of a threat to the right than left-wingers and liberals.
We already have a "market-based immigration system", it's called a "golden visa", except the cost tends to be in the six to seven figures. It's a way for really rich people to buy their way into a country, not a serious means to admit large numbers of economic migrants. The above also applies to points systems like Canada's, which selects for middle-income countries that have lots of university-educated English or French speakers. That's great if you want to import half of India and China, not so much if you want a diverse immigrant pool.
It seems like the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border and don't see the impacts, or are unaware of the impending crisis of billions of extremely desperate climate refugees, or don't consider the risks or criminals and terrorists entering and leaving the country without any record to be a legitimate concern.
> the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border
I used to live in New York. It didn't hit home until we had our own refugee crisis. This is absolutely something you don't get a handle on until you've seen it in person. (We also have a bad habit of conflating legal high-skilled immigration, legal low-skilled immigration, refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.)
With all respect, that sounds like a campaign speech, so I'm almost guaranteed to tune it out. Do you have links that quantify all that stuff to demonstrate why it's a problem?
Massive numbers of people suddenly showing up in your town is a real problem:
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632902/major-cities-are-s...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-cope-4...
Climate refugees are coming and it's a problem:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/world/climate-global-displace...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...
https://www.wired.com/story/migration-climate-environment-re...
It doesn't seem like this is a problem solved by trying to put up walls and pay for more law enforcement officers and military equipment.
It's not. This is a problem solved by reforming the immigration system. I'll let you try to figure out which of the two parties in power has stonewalled progress on that front for the last 30 years.
This article is a little schizophrenic. It calls the cameras "wasteful" and "snake oil", yet the referenced NBC article calls them "a crucial tool". It quotes reports about failures of old systems from Boeing and General Dynamics, then implies without evidence that the same criticisms apply to the newer Anduril "AST" systems. There is no allegation that the AST systems are broken at all.
In the NBC article, "crucial tool" is a non-technical phrase by the article writer, it is not the memo. [1]
The EFF article's expressed intent is first, that there's a history that goes beyond the NBC report. Then, that the history shows reports written by various governmental & non-governmental entities that the tools are not effective.
I'm genuinely curious why that felt schizophrenic. ex. to me, even if "crucial tool" was in a government memo, I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
[1] "Nearly one-third of the cameras in the Border Patrol’s primary surveillance system along the southern U.S. border are not working, according to an internal agency memo sent in early October, depriving border agents of a crucial tool in combating illegal migrant crossings."
> I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
They don't dispute that. That's what's so weird. The argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles, therefore all border surveillance tools are bad," but the article doesn't even manage to draw a line from the past, cancelled programs to the current program.
(labelling people A and B, because 1) there'd be layers of >, 2) I want to signal I'm not curious about you and me or a verbal battle, just how someone else reads the article in a way where EFF does not discuss if they are crucial tools)
A: "I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing [that the program is a crucial tool]"
B: "They don't dispute that"..."the argument boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel debacles"
B's two clauses seemed to me to be in direct contradiction at first blush. Ex. "debacles", seems to indicate awareness that they were not "crucial tools"
My steelmanning is that debacle is only meant to cover they were costly. There's numerous bits of the article that go beyond cost. The EFF article cites, inter alia, GAO[1], DHS[2], and RAND[3] saying it wasn't shown to be effective.
[1] In 2017, the GAO complained the Border Patrol's poor data quality made the agency "limited in its ability to determine the mission benefits of its surveillance technologies. In one case, Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley claimed IFTs assisted in 500 cases in just six months. The problem with that assertion was there are no IFTs in Texas or, in fact, anywhere outside Arizona." [2] CBP is not well-equipped to assess its technology effectiveness to respond to these deficiencies. CBP has been aware of this challenge since at least 2017 but lacks a standard process and accurate data to overcome it. [3] RAND Corporation published a study funded by DHS that found "strong evidence" the IFT program was having no impact on apprehension levels at the border
One third of cameras not working might mean that there is no camera coverage (because the only working cameras are all pointed at a single storage shed), or it might mean that there is 100% coverage (because of redundancies in coverage.)
Its a data point, but without further context, you can't draw meaningful conclusions.
If I were to take a wild guess, one third of all security cameras in the world are probably not fit for purpose, and yet, the world keeps adding more and more of them. Smile, comrade.
I'm replying to reinforce that I'm curious about the schizophrenic interpretation.
I don't think working through this further conversations or sheds light.
IMHO it creates the same problem as the initial comment, though the avenue is different ("its too confusing to discuss because the EFF says they're ineffective, but the NBC article contains 'crucial tool" vs. "its not worth discussing because the memo in the NBC article can't be trusted, broken could mean anything")
I think you just have to accept that without an actual deep dive into this, you're not going to get the information necessary to have anything more than a vague 'someone told me something about something once' opinion.
It's one thing to argue about results, it's another thing to argue about the minutia of the process that gets those results, and who's at fault for what, and which parts of it need to be fixed up, and which are just not a large priority.
You don't need to be a subject matter expert to know that your city had a power outage, and be pissed about it.
You do need to be one, in order to have an informed opinion on how to best prevent the next one.
Net migration between the US and Mexico is small. Pew research numbers:
An estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the U.S. between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the U.S. for Mexico during that period. That translates to net migration of about 160,000 people from Mexico to the U.S., according to government data from both countries.
That's 160,000 net in-migration from Mexico over 5 years. How much would you spend to bring that to zero?
You might think a bunch of tech people would profile performance before deciding what to optimize.
If you mean people that lived in Mexico, that may be. If you mean people that crossed from Mexico into the US across the Southern Border, those numbers are dwarfed. These are just the numbers that we know for sure from observation or interaction[0]
[0]https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...
Sounds like a job for the NSA. With their surveillance apparatus, data lake, and analysis tools, they'd be able to make quick work of tracking and apprehending illegal border entries...
That would be a much better way to spend their time and money than invading the privacy of actual US citizens.
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I'm not American and a bit bemused by the US border but I note that when last year Texas put razor wire on the border to stop people crossing there was outrage from the federal government who sent people to cut it. The issue seems to be politics and policy as to whether you want people crossing or not rather than tech.
I was also surprised to see on 60 Minutes coach loads of middle class Chinese crossing the Mex/US border who'd bought some fly to the border and claim asylum in the US package. Immigration can be an odd business.
Sounds like Palmer Luckey is putting that Oculus money to good use. Article mentions Anduril Industries.
They (Congress? GAO? DHS? ) should have a separate department certify and monitor these sensors. Make it this department's sole job to keep this sensor network running properly.
I wonder whether they are simply having cables cut, getting painted over, shot at or any of the other obvious ways to disable an unguarded camera.
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It’s incredibly frustrating that at a certain size non-profits seemingly loose the ability to focus on the issues that built them. The EFF no business chiming in on immigration policies - sick to tech and information freedom.
> sick to tech and information freedom
Do you not understand that the tools the government uses to control non-citizens are turned inward all the time? Military tech is tech, surveillance tech is tech. They are not chiming in on 'immigration policies', they are chiming in on technology used to actually implement those policies. If all you care about is not having tracking pixels in your personal consumer browser you're going to miss the most dangerous encroachments on your freedom.
You are under the misapprehension that the US government is held back from tyranny by shitty technology. This is false - you could build a totalitarian dictatorship with near-absolute control with 1940s technology. Other states did.
>Military tech is tech
I want the US military to have the best guns, best tanks, best nukes, best drones, best planes, best satellites, best boats. And spoilers: they do. Yet somehow that has not encroached on our lives. Adding “best surveillance of our foreign borders” does not for a dictatorship make.
>They are not chiming in on ‘immigration policies’
I’m not sure how else you can read this statement in the concluding paragraph: “Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises.” Agree or disagree, this is pure domestic politics.
I donate fairly regularly to EFF but I don’t really have a problem with the government having cameras on the border to spot illegal migrants. That’s the kind of surveillance we actually need rather than combing through gmail and SMS messages between teenagers.
These are selfish self-centered statists who cosplay as libertarians because they just want to buy weed and watch porn without the government knowing.
This article complains a lot about previous-generation, cancelled projects, but doesn't really investigate what's going on with the current surveillance towers or investigate anything at all, really. The linked NBC article explains that the FAA (WTF... yes, the airplane FAA) administer some surveillance towers, and that border patrol agents are mad that there's a big ticket backlog of broken ones to fix. That's pretty much it.
Nobody investigated enough to figure out things like:
* Why the FAA administer the towers and what the actual hold-up is towards getting a fix? Certainly at least the backstory should be public information.
* Why the towers are broken. This is probably sensitive information but I'm sure some of the disgruntled border patrol agents would be willing to have a chat about it.
* Is it a specific generation of tower that's broken? Is it some kind of backend issue, or just rot from deploying electronics into a hostile desert environment full of people trying to destroy them?
* How do the new "AI" towers work? They're probably just drawing boxes around people and items, no?
This is a disappointing and silly article, in my opinion. It doesn't convince me at all that border surveillance overall is a bad idea or a waste of money, just that some old programs turned into pork-barrel debacles. There's no fresh information or anything that would convince me either way on this issue.
> Boeing was the main contractor blamed for SBINet's failure
Why is this not surprising anymore?
The whole thing is kind of silly IMO, and all political theater.
What is the problem statement? If the problem statement is: people are coming into this country illegally, and we need to stop that, then the next question is: why are they coming here?
If the answer is: to find work because there are no opportunities at home - that's easy to solve. Anyone caught employing illegal immigrants gets mandatory prison time. You would find the work would very, very quickly dry up removing the basic reason for coming here.
Folks fleeing political violence aren't illegal, they have a valid political asylum claim and will be processed much quicker when the illegal folks are no longer flooding the border.
You can have a undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua mow you lawn or hire a fully compliant landscaping company- who will probably still employ an undocumented migrant.
I myself have paid handymen under the table.
I think the OP's point was that you are part of the problem, and that the landscaping CEO should go to jail.
I'm an American who has lived and worked in Mexico. I found it quite funny that the Mexicans i worked with always complained about the Guatemalans coming over the border and how they needed better border security.
i'm of the opinion that freedom and abortion rights are more important to Americans than being at population replacement rates so our only hope of surviving as a nation is with a huge influx of legal immigrants.
We need to build a border & make it much easier to become a US citizen while making it a felony for hiring an undocumented immigrant.
In the photos, are those normal people's homes around those dystopian towers?
Or are they government-owned buildings, like on a military base?
A lot of people live on the borders. On both sides.
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Joke aside, I don't think any of those are El Paso or Juarez. Top one is Nogales, the one with the Rio Grande has water in it so can't be El Paso, probably closer to Brownsville.
I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.
> I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
Right. Israel has towers like this. But theirs have guns.[1]
[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-remote-occupation-wome...
> Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises or pursuing foreign policy or immigration reform measures isn't as politically useful as promoting a phantom "invasion" that requires a military-style response. Another reason may be that tech companies and military contractors wield immense amounts of influence and stand to make millions, if not billions, profiting off border surveillance. The price is paid by taxpayers, but also in the civil liberties of border communities and the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants.
They are claiming it is an ineffective solution to the problem, conceptually, that is perpetuated by bad political and lobbyist incentives.
The position is not that it does not work well enough. The position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless of the quality of execution. Therefore we should stop allowing corrupt and fear mongering politicians from manipulating public optics to support these surveillance companies.
> The position is not that it does not work well enough. The position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless of the quality of execution.
That's definitely the implication, but it doesn't really substantiate this, as far as I can tell.
"Past iterations were filled with pork, therefore future ones must be as well, therefore this conceptually cannot work."
For example, the RAND study that they said showed "strong evidence" that IFTs were having no effect actually... doesn't say that at all.
IFTs actually lowered apprehension levels, to which RAND says, "we conclude that there is strong evidence for the presence of a deterrent effect as migrants choose to avoid areas surveilled by IFTs—a proposition for which there is also qualitative evidence outside the data."
Then it goes onto say that for every other technology type, they increased apprehension levels, i.e. they worked. They didn't seem clear on why IFTs behave differently.
Is there some better way to say "a security theater sculpted out of political pork"?
I dunno. That phrase sounds like poetry to me, why improve it?
Waste.
"Fraud and corruption"
"United States Federal Government"
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There's a very simple and effective way to completely stop the immigration "crisis". The root cause is immigrating coming here for jobs.
Okay, now if you're an American company and you hire illegal immigrants, everyone goes to jail. Within a year, the problem will disappear.
Nobody would actually suggest this though, let alone the right. It's politically advantageous to keep around cheap pseudo-slave labor while simultaneously espousing semi-fascist narratives about "an enemy inside" (spooky!)
I mean whose going to report the company?
Probably need to give the first person to report a company (that is then successfully prosecuted) some reward like citizenship.
Many countries don't have 2000 mile long borders.
Many don't but many countries do. Take a look at a world map and then note how many other countries have such long borders with countries with whom they have some sort of adversarial risk with.
I took a very quick look and stopped after a couple dozen and still had plenty to go. This is a problem not remotely unique to the US.
The only land borders longer than the US-Mexico border are: US-Canada, Russia-Kazakhstan, Russia-Mongolia, Mongolia-China, Russia-China, Chile-Argentina, Bolivia-Brazil, India-China, and India-Bangladesh.
Furthermore, the disparity between the US and Mexico in GDP per capita is pretty stark--over a 3x difference, far more than any other pair of countries with such a long land border. The next largest difference is India-China, and that's not a pairing that's conducive to economic migration, unlike the US-Mexico border.
Here's an example I've seen with my own eyes.
An onsite oil rig chemical engineer for https://www.slb.com/ starts at $17k/year in Mexico but $150k in USA for the same job doing one month on, two week off land rig rotations.
You make more money in the US working minimum wage than you do in most jobs in Mexico as a high skilled graduate of a good university like https://tec.mx.
Are you looking at single country pairings for the border size?
The closest comparison, both in border length and economic gap is EU/non-EU, when you look at the size of the border along the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
Another close comparison is South Africa, 4,862 km border (compared to US-Mexico at 3,145 km). Huge economic gap and even larger migration numbers.
I'm counting long borders as borders between country A and multiple other countries, with a focus on notable security issues[1] related to borders.
One timely example might be Ukraine, with the Belarus/Russia border, where Belarus is a proxy for Russia.
1. Contraband, espionage, aggression, anti-proliferation, proxy attacks, etc etc.
Is the border an actual problem though? Specifically speaking to the US border.
Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average American holds?
I have not had a single issue with migration or an immigrant, ever. I've never met a single person, in the US, with a material issue related to migration or immigration. I have never felt worried about being near a migrant/immigrant based on who they are or their behavior.
> Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average American holds?
Per recent polling [1], it's the sixth most important issue. It's consistently been raised as one of the top concerns in polling data going back as far as I have political consciousness, although a decent part of the existence of that concern is effectively a dog whistle for racism.
> Is the border an actual problem though?
The border itself isn't the problem; the actual problem lays in the extremely fucked-up nature of the US immigration system (and the actual problems are almost nothing like what people are complaining about). Even for as long as immigration has been a major political concern in the US, the border "solutions" have for as long been lampooned for the fact that they are doing absolutely nothing to actually fix the problem, even as politicians double down on proposing harsher solutions to fix the thing that isn't the problem.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-t...
I guess you could guage how necessary it is based on your opinion of how useful you find customs, import/export restrictions, etc.
It is a problem if you want welfare and government health care programs. An influx of unskilled hungry huddled masses that don’t even pay into the tax system will drag everyone’s living standards down.
Even if they DO pay taxes it is likely that on average illegal immigration would burden the social safety net.
And none of this gets into the second order effects of immigrants increasing the supply of labor.
I don't follow this. I would imagine an influx of extremely cheap labor would raise everyone else's living standards, not lower them. Because everything is cheaper to produce. That's why Dubai has extremely extravagant places put right next to pseudo-slave's shanties.
Everyone? You can’t imagine a situation where the surplus from the cheap labor is captured by a few capitalists while the rest suffer?
I’m not saying that is happening but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it could happen.
Also if you actually have to interface with clearly illegal cheap labor (landscaping, construction, low quality catering) you’ll see the pattern: a kingpin immigrant who only hires other immigrants with little to no English and a preference for being paid in cash.
The "few capitalists" in this scenario is the domestic people.
Makes for an excellent easy-to-sell bogeyman, though.
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> impression it was just about software/computer freedom
This is an article about computer software being used to surveil civilians. (Many people consider government surveillance to be a freedom issue.)
This kind of concern has aligned with the EFF's mission for as long as it has been around.
This seems in line with the EFF's principles - they've always been strongly against the use of electronics for surveillance. I agree with you that this article left me with a weird taste, though - in this case, I think that the thesis is flimsy and the research is poorly done, so it comes off as grinding an axe rather than taking a stand.
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It's a political advocacy organization so it would be very strange if it was not politically 'biased'.
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