The “virtual fence” aimed at stopping immigrants from crossing the nation’s 6,000 miles of international borders has finally been unplugged after the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars by global defense giant Boeing for a system that reportedly ‘developed new problems faster than the old ones could be fixed.”
On the basis of a highly critical Government Accountability Office report and Congressional unease about the failures of the “fence,” Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano cut $50 million out of Recovery Act funds allotted for the scheme. In the thick of media coverage of the health care fight and the March for America, news of its demise went largely unnoticed. Some $672 million has been wasted on twenty+ miles of virtual fence, and criticism of its effectiveness has been rampant since it was approved in 2005. Boeing came up with every excuse in its media playbook to thwart the criticism and the impact of last week’s decision, but in the end could not fend off the DHS cut.
The $50 million, however, will be redirected to more conventional border security plans and equipment, reflecting once again the endless and unsuccessful pursuit of an effective border enforcement strategy. With enforcement at the core of emerging comprehensive immigration reform proposals from the Democratic majority, the Department of Homeland Security faces formidable challenges in developing and implementing a strategy to curb border incursions, short of complete militarization.
Boeing’s iFence was but another step in the defense contractors’ long-festering border militarization process that grew out of the Bush Administration. From the construction of real fences out of the heavy steel plates used for temporary runways in Iraq to the incessant flying of drone aircraft, the southern border has become yet another tax dollar trough to feed the insatiable defense establishment, with little impact. The border will not be sealed, short of the erection of a massive and impenetrable wall stretching its width, and subsequently, enhanced naval patrols on two fronts to stop the flotillas that would surely follow as folk take to sea to go north.
The borders of nations are to be respected, in spite of their politically-machinated origins and histories.
The silly cries of the anti-immigrant movement, that those who work for comprehensive immigration reform are “open border advocates” belie their own inability to come up with workable border enforcement strategies. Increasingly, it appears that there are no workable enforcement strategies. As long as peoples struggle for survival under conditions of profound poverty; as long as the haves heap suffering upon the have-nots; as long as opportunity for survival lies but a few days travel away; as long as the human spirit thrives and yearns for life itself, there will be “illegal” border crossings. Short of bringing the standard of living of the world’s poorest peoples up to that of the West, the migration of peoples will continue unabated, unstopped, border or no border.
When poet Robert Frost wrote despairingly that “good walls make good neighbors,” he certainly did not have in mind the monstrous barriers that nations now erect to keep “the other” out. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” read the opening of his classic. Indeed, something there is that does not love a wall, nor will be excluded by it… the people themselves.