This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
For most Americans these days, our southern border with Mexico means just one thing: a political battlefield of the first order, Republicans versus Democrats, Us versus Them. After all, immigration the nightmare of them invading us has been a winner for the Trumpist Republican Party for years now. I'm sure you remember the Donald's "big, fat, beautiful wall" that was going to leave even China's Great Wall in the dustbin of history. During his 2016 run for the presidency, he swore he'd build it once in office, never stopped talking about it, and yet somehow it never got built, not really. No wonder the Liar-in-Chief of the House Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, the man who had evidently never heard of a tape recorder (until it recorded him), promptly headed for the border to lie and lie again when his own set of post-January 6th tall tales hit the media.
In a country whose history is in so many ways a story of immigrants even the Native Americans arrived here by foot or boat once upon a distant time not to speak of disputes about them and attacks on them, it should be no surprise that the border once again looms large in an election year. And in this century, on a planet where, thanks to war (both America's recent ones and the present Russian one), economics, and climate change, all too many people have been forced from their homes and turned into refugees, it's an issue that's only likely to grow ever more poisonous in the coming years.
In election 2022, you're bound to hear an awful lot of Trump-style ranting about how Joe Biden and crew are trying to fill our land with immigrants and even how they may use their illegal votes to steal elections. So it's good to have a sane voice yes, I'm speaking of TomDispatch regular Todd Miller, who also writes a weekly post for the Border Chronicle remind us of a few salient border realities that have remarkably little to do with the political tirades we regularly hear.
As he explains today, by the end of its term in office the Biden administration will probably have hold your hats! pumped more money into border security than Donald Trump did. (Be shocked, truly shocked!) And amid all the endless uproar, the only ones for whom border security really seems to work (other perhaps than Republican politicians) are the companies that are part of what Miller has long termed the border-industrial complex. They're making money hand over fist from the "crisis" there and never want it to end. So why not spend a little time with Miller considering, up close and personal, what the real American border "crisis" is and who profits the most from it. Tom
The Border-Industrial Complex in the Biden Era
Robotic Dogs and Autonomous Surveillance Towers Are the New Wall
By Todd Miller
First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol's all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peà ±a Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.
I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I'd been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault's panopticon in other words, I wasn't sure whether I was being watched or not. But I suspected I was.
After all, that tower's cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth "100 agents." In the term of the trade, the technology was a "force multiplier." I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn't just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.
During Donald Trump's years in office, the media focused largely on the former president's fixation with the giant border wall he was trying to have built, a xenophobic symbol so filled with racism that it was far easier to find people offended by it than towers like this one. From where I stood, the closest stretch of border wall was 10 miles to the south in Nogales, a structure made of 20-foot-high steel bollards and covered with coiled razor wire. (That stretch of wall, in fact, had been built long before Trump took office.)
What I was now witnessing, however, could be called Biden's wall. I'm speaking about a modern, high-tech border barrier of a different sort, an increasingly autonomous surveillance apparatus fueled by "public-private partnerships." The technology for this "virtual wall" had been in the works for years, but the Biden administration has focused on it as if it were a humane alternative to Trump's project.
In reality, for the Border Patrol, the "border-wall system," as it's called, is equal parts barrier, technology, and personnel. While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that's increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.
As March ended, one week before my camping trip, I saw it up close and personal at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas.
"Robots That Feel the World"
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