Photo: Border Patrol Agent at the Canadian Border
Who says immigrants are costing the U.S. lots of money? Its actually quite the opposite. Companies and large corporations are making a fortune providing services and technology to the U.S. government to help protect "the frontier."
Its a money maker.
Some people are calling it "the immigration industrial complex."
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The Border Boondoggle
By Andrew Cockburn
Washington Post
Sunday, September 2, 2007; Page B01
The U.S. Border Patrol has just unveiled a total makeover of its traditional uniform. Shiny badges and other emblems of law enforcement are out. Our frontier troops will now have a look more in keeping with their role as frontier troops, with lightweight fatigues and better weapons. Agent Ramon Ramirez told the Associated Press that the new garb looks more military, "like you mean business."
When it comes to frontier security, business is booming all over.
In Stafford County, Va., a 50-man company called McQ has started work on a $100,000 contract to develop a "smart rock" for the Department of Homeland Security. McQ, whose motto is "Tough sensors for an insensitive planet," says that its rocks, embedded with acoustic and motions sensors, will be able to detect illegal immigrants and other miscreants sneaking across our borders.
The firm expects its contract for developing the rocks to grow to $1 million by fall -- a sure sign that while immigration "reform" bills may come and go, the threat of illegal immigration will continue to expand. This is a certainty not because of the state of the Mexican economy or because of government laxity here, but because border control is now an integral part of the military-industrial national security system, which has a long history of profiteering from purported dangers to our safety.
...Now, however, we are moving into an era of serious money, set to surpass previous border-control initiatives by a wide margin. All those extra Border Patrol officers may be expensive, but as any general or admiral worth his salt will tell you, it's technology -- the more complex and "state of the art," the better -- that really runs up the bills and brings home the pork.
This trend is typified by the soaring surveillance towers, not to mention soaring cost, of SBInet (as in Safe Border Initiative), a high-technology surveillance system managed by Boeing. It's being marketed as a "virtual fence" that will detect intruders from Mexico and ultimately Canada. The fence employs radar, cameras, acoustic and other surveillance technology sensors. These are all linked by a complex computer network that theoretically will enable agents in some distant command post to monitor any and all illegal incursions and take appropriate action, including broadcasting high-volume warnings from tower-mounted loudspeakers.
One useful indication of where all this is headed can be found in the Army's ongoing Future Combat Systems program, also managed by Boeing. This $168 billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots is theoretically able to automatically detect and target battlefield threats, making it so deadly to a foe, its proponents claim, that it may be possible to dispense with armor on U.S. military vehicles.
Conceptually and in other ways, FCS and SBInet have much in common. Both are based on the notion that technology can confer total awareness of a situation, leading to the automatic destruction of an enemy tank or the apprehension of a would-be tomato picker sidling across the border...
SBInet...was endorsed by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in 2005. The southern portion is projected to cost $7.6 billion by 2011. But Richard L. Skinner, DHS's inspector general, has reported that the cost could reach $30 billion. (Old Pentagon hands refer to this disparity between present and future costs as "front loading.") Boeing, the prime contractor, is largely being left to itself to define the program objectives. As the Government Accountability Office delicately reported earlier this year, the project's budget "lacked specificity" on "anticipated costs" and "expected mission outcomes," meaning that DHS has no idea what it will cost or what it will do...
For complete article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/31/AR2007083101464.html
Photo: Reuters http://www.insurancebroadcasting.com/062006-p3.jpg
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