On the US/Mexican border there were a total of 2,268 Border
Patrol agents in 1980; by 2012 the Border Patrol had funding for 21,370 agents,
nearly 10 times as many as 20 years earlier. The Border Patrol's annual budget
was $263 million in 1990; by 2014 it had jumped thirteen-fold to $3.6 billion.
The US had already built 651 miles of fencing as of February
2012 and the estimated cost of the fence's construction and its maintenance
over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion.
The government has been imposing criminal sentences on
border crossers since 2005; the program, code-named "Operation
Streamline," had processed 208,939 people by the end of 2012. While it's
hard to estimate the total bill for Streamline, it could be costing us as much
as $300 million a year just through the increase it has created in the federal
prison population.
Why do some US politicians constantly call for more border
enforcement. One obvious reason is it is quite profitable for powerful business
interests. In September 2006, for example, the Boeing corporation won a
contract worth an estimated $2.5 billion to set up the "Secure Border
Initiative Network" (SBInet), a web of new surveillance technology and
sensors with real-time communications systems. After spending $1 billion on
this "virtual fence," the government scrapped the project in January
2011, saying it "does not meet current standards for viability and cost
effectiveness." A growing number of Border Patrol agents and their
increasing militarization translates into a higher demand for more guns and
other equipment from the "defense” industries. This is especially
important as the US military reduces its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"So as the wars are winding down, we're trying to find more applications
for this technology here in the US," a division manager from the Applied
Research Associates firm explained to the Huffington Post in April.
Increased border enforcement also means increased
incarceration for immigrants and this means more business for the private “for-profit”
prison industry. In the decade leading up to 2013, just three of these
companies poured out some $45 million in various lobbying efforts. Recipients
of funds from the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's
largest private prison company, include such rabidly anti-immigrant Republicans
as Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.
Creating anxiety about immigration has political uses as
well. As Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, observed, "Politicians find
the symbolic trope of an 'invasion of illegal aliens' too useful to give
up." Xenophobic and irrational fears of invasion, violation and disease
from foreign and dark-skinned people have historically provided a good tool for
distracting the US population from the real failures of the political and
economic system. In August 2014, Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey, then a member
of the House of Representatives, suggested that Central American minors might
be carrying the Ebola virus. Gingrey, formerly a practicing physician, should
have known that no Ebola cases had ever
been reported in Latin America. Donald Trump and right-wing columnist Ann Coulter
slanders all immigrants as thieves, rapists and murderers, pandering the same
part of the national psyche as white racists' fraudulent rape charges against
African Americans, the rationalization for thousands of lynchings in the 19th
and 20th centuries.
Forgotten are the At least 5,607 people died while
attempting to enter the country between 1994 and 2008, many buried in unmarked
mass graves. University of California, San Diego professor Wayne Cornelius has
noted that the death toll at the border just in the decade from 1993 to 2003
was more than 10 times as high as the number of people killed trying to cross
the Berlin Wall in its 28-year history. The deaths have continued even as the
rate of border crossings fell: an average of 360 people died this way each year
in 2010 and 2011. This is the real border crisis, and we shouldn't ignore an irrational
enforcement policy killing hundreds of innocent human beings each year for the
supposed crime of wanting to get a job or to reunite with friends and family.
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