Memorial for Failed Policy

A Memorial for a Failed Border Policy

Tom Barry, author of Border Wars weighs in on immigration reform that was recently passed with bi-partisan support in the Senate, but is stalled in the House of Representatives. (Published by MIT Press Blog,at 

http://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/memorial-failed-border-policy) 

You can easily miss it. The steel fence towers over the small memorial for Carlos Lamadrid, who the Border Patrol shot in the back as he climbed over the 18-foot steel-pillared fence. Under the Border Patrol's system of “threat assessment,” the 19-year old resident of the Sonora border town of Agua Prieta was considered a member of a “Transnational Criminal Organization” since he was trafficking drugs across the border.

Standing at the memorial constructed by family and friends, looking over at the U.S. homeland through the massive fence that marks the line between Agua Prieta and the small Arizona town of Douglas, is as good a place as any to reflect on the $45-billion “border surge” that is the sine que non of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, which recently passed the Senate with the support of 13 Republican senators.

For most close observers of the border security buildup since 2001, the border surge of hundreds of miles in additional border walls, a doubling of the Border Patrol, more Predator drones, and a new splurge in high-tech ground surveillance systems is overkill.

For many borderlanders in Arizona and in southern New Mexico (where I live), border security has devolved into a joke.  Many remark here in Douglas that “there are more Border Patrol agents than ocotillos,” (spindly, orange-blossomed, cactus-like desert plants). And in the El Paso sector, which extends along the New Mexico-Chihuahua border, it is commonly noted that the “Border Patrol are tripping over one another” because there are so many of them and so few immigrants trying to come across (average immigrant haul for each agent was 3.4 immigrants last year.)

You don’t have to be a political scientist to grasp that the proposed border surge is not about border security, homeland security, or even about another escalation in the drug war. Border security is primarily about politics, along with a helpful side of pork. Since 9/11 the link between the new border security buildup and counterterrorism within the newly created Department of Homeland Security has been all but lost—except for the Border Patrol slogan about constituting the frontline against foreign terrorists.

During the 2005-2007 immigration reform debate, the term “border security” (which replaced the pre-9/11 concept of border control and regulation) became almost exclusively focused on “securing the border” against the “invasion” and “infiltration” of immigrants crossing the border illegally to seek work or reunite with family. Immigrant reform proponents acceded to the demands of more border security— including the “virtual fence,” drones, and the “Secure Border Fence”—in the hope that billions of dollars more in border security would close the deal on immigration reform.  It didn’t, predictably, because the border hawks are virulently anti-immigrant and over-the-top nationalists.

After the immigration debate faded as a political possibility, the continuing border security buildup was driven in 2008-2012 by bipartisan (albeit largely Republican with some border Democrats seeking border security pork) demands to secure the border against transnational criminal organizations, spillover violence from drug wars, and narco-terrorists in Mexico. The Obama administration acceded with an array of new border security programs and emergency spending.

Today, in the heat of the new immigration reform debate, immigrants are once again the main target of the border surge—with the threat of terrorists long forgotten (but with the rhetoric of homeland security still very much operative). Meanwhile, it goes unmentioned that more than $100 billion in border security spending over the past decade has done nothing to stop the flow of illegal drugs, mostly marijuana, into the US.

Chris Lamadrid was a U.S. citizen living in Mexico but going to Cochise College in the Douglas area. Yes, he was smuggling marijuana into a state that, along with 19 others, permits the sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The first memorial for Lamadrid was built on the U.S. side of the fence since he was shot in the U.S. while trying to climb back to relative safety in Agua Prieta. But the Border Patrol demanded its removal.

Lamadrid was a casualty of a border policy shaped by politically hyped threat assessments that have resulted in a military-like approach to regulating the southwest border. What now constitutes immigration policy reform—language tellingly not even found in the title of the Senate bill—is a casualty of the failure to recognize that our post-9/11 border policy is as broken, counterproductive, and tragic as immigration policy itself.

Border Surge Misses Real Security Threat in Transborder West

What Border Security Threat?

Drones and Fences Won’t Secure Us

Against TransBorder Water Future Threat

It has long been said that topography doesn’t recognize border lines. Certainly, the transborder spread of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts cannot be denied. No matter how high nationalist fevers rise or how obstructive new border security infrastructure may be, the same deserts occupy both sides of the border.

Still, the border wall and fortified ports-of-entry tend to diminish consciousness about the shared environment. What is more, the border fortifications do obstruct traditional wildlife corridors -- making the border quite real, for the first time, for deer, mountain lions and antelopes, for example. Although border infrastructure may scar the crossborder landscape with roads and ditches, the topography on one side remains a close reflection of the other side. The border has a greater impact on water flows, as each border state and nation fights to channel and retain water, rather than allowing it to flow across state and national borders. Governance mechanisms such as the International Boundary and Water Commission and inter-state accords manage these conflicts and demands, thereby underscoring how political geography has altered the traditional patterns of transborder surface water flows.

New U.S. initiatives associated with immigration reform proposals aim to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with more hulking fences, high-tech surveillance, sensors, and drones -- all to “secure the border” against a dramatically diminishing flow (lowest in four decades) of south-north immigrants, and costing at least $30 billion in additional border security funding.

Generally unnoticed in this border security buildup is the rapid onset of a new transborder security threat. Not immigrants, not terrorists, not drugs, not spillover violence. Rather frightening changes in the deserts, in the mountain flora, in the surface water flows, in the falling levels of reservoirs, and in the disappearing aquifers and underground water basins.

This is not a south-north threat to security but one that shares common ground -- the vast transborder aridlands that include, on the U.S side, Colorado, New Mexico, West Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California. On the Mexico side of the border, Durango, Chihuahua, western Coahuila, Sonora, Baja California Sur, and Baja California Norte face the same transborder threat.

Decades ago close observers presciently predicted (notably Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert published in 1986 -- or more than a century before by explorer John Wesley Powell) that the region’s reckless development was not sustainable -- given limited and nonrenewable water resources. In large part, the water crises reverberating throughout the Transborder West were threatening the models of economic development and human settlement in the region prior to the ever-more apparent scourges of climate change.

Clearly, any thoughtful observer could see that Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, Juárez, Hermosillo, Chihuahua City, and many other urban surges are not sustainable -- whether observed in 1980 or in 2013. These and other desert cities were not extensions of natural oases but artificial creations dependent for their survival on imported water and unsustainable exploitation of groundwater reserves.

Climate change has accelerated and compounded the looming threat of over-allocated water flows and rapidly depleting underground accumulation of largely fossil water. In the last couple of decades, drought cycles have become more intense and longer lasting. Rising temperatures linked to human-caused climate change also mean that accumulated water is evaporating more quickly and that the transpiration patterns developed by regional flora over the millennia no longer guarantee survival for ecosystems in prolonged periods of drought.

The Tarahumara Aren’t Running

The Tarahumara Aren’t Running:

Standing Firm at Copper Canyon

Randall Gingrich and Tom Barry

Coming to Santa Fe from Sierra Tarahumara

When: Tuesday, June 18

           

Time: 4 PM

Where: Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse

             202 Galisteo Street

              Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Tarahumara of the Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon) aren’t running. Many know of the Tarahumara or Rarármuri (“those who walk/run well”) from reading Born to Run and other accounts of their long-distance running feats.

Now, instead of running, the Tarahumara are taking a firm stance against a government-sponsored megatourism project. With the assistance of the Defensa Tarahumara network and Tierra Nativa in Chihuahua City, Tarahumara communities are resisting a culturally and environmentally destructive plan to bring luxury hotels, a golf course, and “adventure tourism” ventures to their homeland in the Sierra Tarahumara.

In February a couple hundred Tarahumara marched to the Palacio del Gobierno in downtown Chihuahua to demand that the state government end its tourism project, which is stealing their land, contaminating their water, and threatening their livelihoods. They joined a protest organized by mestizo farmers and ranchers who were demanding that the killers of assassinated water-rights activists be brought to justice. The newly mobilized Tarahumara brought their complaints to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington in March, which insisted that the Mexican government respond to the Tarahumara complaints.

Randall Gingrich, founder and director of Tierra Nativa, will present a video about the threats to the culture and environment of the Sierra Tarahumara  -- and the current unprecedented resistance. Over the past two decades, Tierra Nativa has supported Tarahumara opposition to illegal logging and mining operations. The latest threat is “Adventure Tourism” including cable rides, golf courses, and luxury hotel complexes – without adequate water supplies and with resulting sewage contaminating the Barranca del Cobre. Gingrich has been key to the success of several Tarahumara communities in mounting legal actions to stop the megatourism project – both in international forums and in state and federal courts.

Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington. A longtime New Mexico resident, Barry is researching a book on climate change and the water crisis in the greater transborder region. In close collaboration with Defensa Tarahumara, Barry is writing a chapter on climate change induced water crisis in the Sierra Tarahumara and an investigative essay on the megatourism project. Barry is the author of numerous books on Mexico, Central America, and U.S. foreign policy, including the Challenges of Cross-Border Environmentalism and Border Wars.

If you are interested in supporting the work of Tierra Nativa and the TransBorder Project, learning more about these issues, or arranging media interviews, contact:

Randall Gingrich

randy@tierranativa.org

Tom Barry

tombarry@ciponline.org

575-313-4544

Border Drones Fly into Fight Over Immigration

Border Drones Fly Into Fight Over Immigration

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

by TED ROBBINS

June 11, 2013 4:51 PM

The runways at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., are busy. This is where the Army tests its military drones, where it trains its drone pilots and where four Customs and Border Protection drones take off and land.

From here, the CBP drones survey the Arizona-Mexico border — mainly looking for immigrants and drug smugglers.

In a hangar next to the runway, Customs and Border Protection officer David Gasho swivels a globe hanging from a drone's underbelly. The globe contains a $2 million surveillance package — a night camera, a day camera, a low-light camera and laser target illumination. The drone's biggest selling point is that it can stay in the air for 20 hours.

Given budget problems, Gasho says, there isn't enough money to keep them up that long.

"We are barely hanging on five days a week, 16 hours a day here," he says. "It is very tight to do what we're doing right now."

Yet the immigration bill now under consideration by the U.S. Senate calls for drones to fly 24/7. Supporters say that means more drones are needed. But critics argue there's no evidence the drones already flying are cost-effective.

'Going To Come At A Cost'

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, wants more drones on the border. But Cuellar, co-chairman of the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus — yes, drones have their own caucus — acknowledges it's an expensive proposition.

"For all those folks that've been emphasizing border security, keep in mind that it's going to come at a cost," he says. "And we've just finished cutting $3 billion from Homeland Security under sequester."

Each Predator drone now costs about $18 million to buy fully equipped and about $3,000 an hour to fly. CBP is now testing a sophisticated radar system called VADER (Vehicle And Dismount Exploitation Radar) that costs about $5 million a year to operate. It has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At congressional hearing in April, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others seemed sold on adding VADER. McCain asked Randolph Alles, the head of the CBP's Air and Marine operations: "Don't you believe that VADER plus drones could be absolute vital tools in attaining effective control of our border?"

Alles responded: "I think, sir, it will help us characterize what the border looks like."

Why More Drones?

The real problem, say critics like Tom Barry, an analyst at the liberal Center for International Policy, is that no one has demonstrated that drones are worth the cost. Barry points to a study last year by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general that criticized the border drone program for a lack of accountability.

"I'm indignant, really, in the sense that billions of dollars have been spent since the late '90s on these high-tech systems without the appropriate cost-benefit evaluations," he says.

Even CBP says it has more economical alternatives. It has been trying out a Cessna aircraft with a camera that costs one-tenth of what the Predator drone camera costs. The agency also relies on ground-based tools, such as camera and radar towers.

The Senate immigration bill does include those tools for increased border surveillance, but it singles out drones for constant flight.

Bryan Roberts, who used to evaluate border and immigration programs for the Department of Homeland Security, points out that even 24/7 surveillance won't actually catch anyone.

"The surveillance technology helps you find people and it helps you get agents to people quickly," says Roberts, who's now with a private consulting firm. "But [to] actually track down and arrest people requires having people on the ground."

To catch 90 percent of all illegal crossers — which is what the Senate bill demands — Roberts says the Border Patrol would have to triple the number of agents on the ground from 20,000 to 60,000.

That's an enormous undertaking not in the legislation. Barry of the Center for International Policy says it's because the bill is more about politics than stopping illegal immigration.

"The border security is fear-based and also plays to the needs of a growing homeland security military complex that is benefitting from these billions of dollars spent," he says.

Barry and others say the emphasis should shift from border security to interior enforcement, such as employer verification. That, they say, would catch those crossing illegally, the people employing them, and those who entered legally and overstayed their visas.

But the politics seem clear — an immigration bill is unlikely to pass without more drones.