A Partial Wall and $5.7 Billion Or Money Better Spent on National Security

"From day one I said that I was going to build a great wall on the SOUTHERN BORDER, and much more. Stop illegal immigration."

-- President Donald Trump

The debate about security on the southern border of this country is raging. President Trump now wants $5.7 billion for a physical wall (concrete or steel slats) on the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, other estimates for such a significant barrier range from $22 billion (Department of Homeland Security) to $70 billion (House Democrats).

Many feel a wall will do little to stop illegals, drugs, and terrorists from entering along the 1,954 miles border. Now, about 700 of those miles have some sort of barricade or fence. The rest of the border is rugged landscapes and natural barriers like the Rio Grande River.

What, exactly, is Trump's proposed “wall”? No one is certain. Even Trump’s visions for his proposed wall have changed over time – from the monolithic concrete vision for which he commissioned prototypes to “a see-through wall made out of steel.” In October 2018, Customs and Border Protection unveiled eight prototypes on for President Donald Trump's long-promised wall. What is the plan for his proposed $5.7 billion? Nothing is definite.

Here is what we do know about the wall straight from the mouth of the president. Trump said …

"A wall is better than fencing and it's much more powerful. It’s more secure.”The plans have evolved slightly. He admitted after his election in November that it may in fact be part wall and part fence. “I’m very good at this, it’s called construction,” he said at the time.

What else might the United States consider on the southern border for an as effective solution or for a more effective solution? What else can be done for as much or less money? Shouldn't other solutions be explored? Of course they should.

It should be noted that fewer Mexicans are being arrested at the U.S. border than any time in the recent past. The total number of people apprehended for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border has been steadily falling for almost two decades. In fiscal 2017, the Border Patrol made 130,454 apprehensions of Mexicans, a sharp drop from a peak of 1.6 million apprehensions in 2000. The decline in apprehensions reflects the decrease in the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S.

Studies confirm that today, the strongest pull for people crossing the border without authorization is the desire to be with family in the U.S. Stepped-up border security may make it more difficult and dangerous for people to successfully cross the border, but research has found that criminalizing unauthorized entry into the U.S. does not deter those fleeing violence

The reality is that Mexico already stops thousands of people from ever entering the U.S. by stopping them at its southern border. Since the Southern Border Plan launched, Mexico has deported more than half a million Central Americans, including almost 82,000 in 2017, according to data from Mexico's Interior Department. Since 2015, Mexico has deported more Central Americans annually than U.S. authorities have, in some years more than twice as many.

It is also true that Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol coordinate interdiction efforts, perform joint patrols, respond to border violence and pursue prosecution of criminals of transnational criminal organizations. However, experts warn that significant migration flows will continue until policymakers in the countries of origin and the international community address the poor socioeconomic and security conditions driving Central Americans to leave their homes.

It stands to reason that we will never realize a secure border with Mexico without investing in our border security technology and personnel, and extending our border security outward so American borders are the last line of defense, not the first. “Outward” means cooperating with the Mexican government to strengthen its own security deep within Mexico.

A physical wall of separation does nothing to better our relationship with Mexico. It does nothing to solve the problems of mass immigration. It does nothing to defend America beyond its own structural width, height, and length. The United States should capitalize on the fact that Mexico and the United States are great neighbors and trade partners, not quarreling neighbors, and certainly not enemies.

Do Nothing More

There are at least two major reasons for not adding substantial new resources. First, some experts believe an expanded temporary worker program (of the kind anticipated by S. 744) is a more cost-effective way to reduce attempted entries than increased border enforcement. As temporary workers arrive legally through the ports-of-entry, illegal entries will drop even more. The Border Patrol, in turn, will be able to focus more of its resources on stopping criminals and potential security threats and on interdicting the flow of illegal drugs across the border.

Every increase in border enforcement has made it more difficult for unauthorized seasonal workers to return to their jobs in the United States after going home for visits or holidays. So increasingly, these workers have remained in the United States. According to an INS study in the late 1990s, as many as half of those apprehended trying to enter the United States illegally were not new migrants – they were just trying to return to their residences in the United States.

Before 1968, there was no numerical limit on immigration from Mexico (or the Western Hemisphere). Limiting legal migration from Mexico – while failing to establish a large-scale temporary worker program – changed a circular, mostly temporary, migration pattern into a flow that was north-bound and relatively more permanent. The unauthorized resident population from Mexico increased sharply after 1968 because the United States made it harder for migrants to circulate legally.

Previous estimates also raise the possibility that overstays from Mexico increase as border enforcement increases. In annual estimates derived by the INS from 1985 to 1992, Mexico was by far the leading country for overstays. From 1985 to 1992, total overstays in the United States were estimated to be about 269,000 per year. Of those, about 48,000 per year, or 18 percent, were from Mexico. Although no similar estimates have been made since 1992, the continuing buildup of border enforcement over the past two decades might have increased the annual number of overstays from Mexico. Additional increases in border enforcement are likely to yield diminishing returns at an increasing cost.

(Robert Warren, (Retired) Director, Statistics Division, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Donald Kerwin, Executive Director, Center for Migration Studies.)

Money For Mexico

If we use money to help raise living standards in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, we should reap benefits. Working with our neighbors south of the border to strengthen small- and medium-sized enterprises is labor well spent. These are the sectors that employ the largest number of people in Latin America.

We should also look for ways to make the money sent home by immigrants a transformative force for sustainable local development. Mexicans living abroad sent cash home in record numbers last year – $26.1 billion from January to November 2017, according to figures released by the central bank of Mexico. That's the most ever recorded and better than the $24.1 billion sent in 2016 over the same period.

Two main forces drove the trend: Mexico's weak currency, the peso, and President Trump's threat to slap a tax on cash shipments, known as remittances, sent from the U.S. to Mexico. Remittances are one of Mexico's top sources of foreign income, outpacing oil exports, which totaled $18.5 billion between January and October, according to the most recent figures available at the Bank of Mexico. Manufacturing exports are the top source of foreign income for Mexico. Remittances make up nearly 20 percent of GDP for Honduras and El Salvador, for instance. And in the case of Haiti they account for one-fourth.

In 2018, the United States pledged $5.8 billion in aid and investment for strengthening government and economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico. The U.S. State Departments said the money was used for the sake of “enhancing security, governance, and economic prosperity that can create greater opportunities and benefits for the people of the region” and help “jointly address the shared challenges of migration, narcotics trafficking, and the activities of trans-national criminal organizations.”

Newly inaugurated Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, “I have a dream that I want to see become a reality ... that nobody will want to go work in the United States anymore.”

The United States should also open the debate on the future of the Latin American countryside. We should spend additional resources to stop promoting export-oriented agribusiness and instead support small-farmer organizations in their call for food sovereignty. The right to regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives is the core principle of food sovereignty. We should also support fair trade, through which farmers receive fair compensation for their products.

Also, safety is enhanced when Mexico’s priorities are considered. Mexico’s state public-safety departments, Seguridad Publica, have preventive priorities and standards in place that add key perspective to the overall security challenge. The U.S. and Mexico’s bi-national definition of 21st century border management calls for upgraded communications equipment.

One of the recent shifts of the Merida initiative – a multinational effort led by the U.S. and Mexico to combat drug trafficking, money laundering and other types of organized crime – is a re-emphasis on the co-responsibility that both countries share in improving communications along the border.

Ports of Entry

The vast majority of heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine that crosses the U.S.-Mexico border does so at “ports of entry,” the 48 official land crossings through which millions of people, vehicles, and cargo pass every day. The port of entry infrastructure is dilapidated: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has identified about $5 billion in construction and renovation needs (a figure that includes some non-U.S.-Mexico border ports).

The White House border security proposals going through Congress seek to hire 500 Border Patrol agents and 1,605 ICE personnel in 2018. However, they suggest no increase for personnel at the ports of entry. Why? It seems funds should be allocated to construct, renovate, and better man these critical ports of entry.

Container Security Initiative

As terrorist organizations have increasingly turned to destroying economic infrastructure to make an impact on nations, the vulnerability of international shipping has come under scrutiny. Under the Container Security Initiative program, the screening of containers that pose a risk for terrorism is accomplished by teams of Customs and Border Protection officials deployed to work in concert with their host nation counterparts. The CSI was launched in 2002 by the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

It is imperative that we spend more money to strengthen the US Customs and Border Protection's Container Security Initiative to mitigate illicit trafficking. Ninety percent of the world’s freight now moves in a container. Developing enhanced container security standards will require actively enlisting the support of U.S. trade partners. The government must make trade security a global priority; the system for moving goods affordably and reliably around the world is ripe for exploitation and vulnerable to mass disruption by terrorists.

The intent of Container Security Initiative is to extend the zone of security outward so that American borders are the last line of defense, not the first. The Container Security Initiative (CSI) was launched in 2002 by the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Its purpose was to increase security for container cargo shipped to the United States. CSI is now operational at ports in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin and Central America. CBP's 58 operational CSI ports now prescreen over 80 percent of all maritime containerized cargo imported into the United States.

The rule of thumb in the inspection business is that it takes five agents three hours to conduct a thorough physical examination of a single full intermodal container. Last year nearly 20 million containers washed across America’s borders via a ship, train, and truck. Frontline agencies had only enough inspectors and equipment to examine between 1-2 percent of that cargo. The need for expansion of the initiative is obvious. Spending more money is a great investment.

Medicare Benefits in Mexico

One thing that would benefit both countries would be if U.S. retirees could use their Medicare benefits in Mexico. There is a lack of hard data on the exact number of Medicare-eligible retirees residing in Mexico, but it is at least in the tens of thousands and is certainly rising as the baby boom generation reaches retirement.

American taxpayers would likely benefit from a reduced total cost of Medicare: To the extent that extending Medicare to Mexico induces Medicare beneficiaries to substitute higher-cost U.S. health care services with lower-cost Mexican services, overall Medicare expenditures would be reduced.

Although such a proposal would meet with resistance from U.S. medical providers who fear the prospect of foreign competition and resistance from their political allies would surely denounce it as part of a larger plot to export aging Americans en masse, U.S. retirees are growing more diverse, and a large and growing number of them have origins in Mexico.

Many of these retirees would welcome the opportunity to reconnect with their ancestral homeland, provided that they wouldn't have to surrender the promise of high-quality medical care in their twilight years in the process. Of course, the benefits for Mexico would be immeasurable.

Taken together, Remain in Mexico and Medicare-in-Mexico would bind the U.S. and Mexico in a mutually beneficial relationship around immigration. Mexico would help the U.S. exert greater control over migration flows, and in exchange, the U.S. would make a serious commitment to fostering economic opportunity for Mexicans and Central Americans closer to home, thereby helping to keep families and communities intact. The presence of large numbers of older Americans in the region, meanwhile, will give the U.S. an even greater stake in helping maintain its security and prosperity.

“Alternative-To-Wall” Border Security

Tech companies are looking to cash in on border security. Companies like Quanergy and Anduril are working on electronic border solutions that would be more effective and cheaper for taxpayers than building a physical wall. Even many locals support electronic surveillance over a physical barrier. These state-of-the-art detection technologies

Electronic surveillance is more cost-effective despite concerns for the civil liberties of people living within its range. The new budget is allotting about $400 million for border technology, including about $50 million for new towers and $20 million for more ground sensors.

Already, aerostats (a kind of tethered blimp) used to guard forward operating bases in Afghanistan are watching remote sections of desert, and wheeled “MARCbots,” tested on the battlefield in Iraq, are scouring smuggler tunnels.

In recent years, Customs and Border Protection has been deploying an array of tools and technologies the Border Patrol believes is helping to solve its most difficult challenges. The most recent innovation, linking advanced cameras to high powered radar, is providing a new awareness of threats in this vast territory.

1. Border Crossings – Biometrics are noe incorporated into passports, making inspections by our CBP officers faster and more accurate. Automated Passport Control kiosks and the Mobile Passport Control smartphone app are also reducing wait times for busy travelers.

While cameras are already used in much of CBP’s day-to-day operations, CBP was the first federal agency to conduct a large scale feasibility study to evaluate the use of body-worn cameras. Used properly, camera technology can support CBP’s mission and enhance transparency – establishing the facts surrounding a law enforcement encounter with the public, providing evidence of criminal activity, and even documenting excellent professional performance by law enforcement officers

2.. Sensor Towers – A technology already being utilized are sensor towers. Radar, infrared cameras, heat, and motion detection give border patrol agents an edge. These towers work together in a network, each within line-of-sight of at least one other. When people cross through their web of detection, the border patrol is alerted and real-time video is available. The radar and cameras transmit data over microwave link to the stations where agents determine an appropriate course of action. These new fixed towers, powered by solar panels and providing instantaneous integration of images and alerts to the control center, help close the final gaps for those trying a challenging end-around over and through the roughest terrain.

This solution is not without its challenges. Boeing won the contract in 2006, and the system was initiated across 53 miles of Arizona's Mexico border. But, early rollouts of the technology proved expensive and inaccurate. A test of SBInet, the early precursor to today’s technologies, exceeded its budget projections many times over.

So, a new approach, announced in 2011, combines proven mobile surveillance, thermal imaging, and tower-mounted video technology. The request for IFT proposals called for sensors able to detect "a single, walking, average-sized adult" and provide sufficiently high-resolution video of that adult at a range of up to 7.5 miles in daylight and darkness.

The $145 million contract was awarded to Elbit Systems of America, the Fort Worth, Texas–based subsidiary of Israel's Elbit Systems. Elbit has deployed hundreds of miles of border-monitoring systems between Israel and Palestine and also provided multisensor surveillance systems along Israel's border with Gaza and Egypt.

Now that the IFT has proved itself worthy, a second installation on the Arizona border is underway, with the ultimate plan of safeguarding the entire Mexico-facing stretch of Arizona's perimeter, pending congressional approval.

The IFT is only one part of the border patrol's effort to use technology to enhance security. The Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan, which includes the IFT, also uses remote video surveillance – day and night cameras for cluttered urban environments where radar is not as effective – and truck-mounted mobile sensors that can be moved when needed.

Another favorite Border Patrol phrase is “force multiplier,” a designation for any capability that increases the effectiveness of agents in the field. This may seem a simple change but it has been very effective. So the enthusiasm for the Arizona technology efforts is related to innovations that enable agents to do more while relieving them from time consuming and often fruitless work they had been doing.

“Before the deployment of the advanced technologies, agents could literally spend hours, if not shifts or days, tracking illegal border crossers or narcotics traffickers,” Division Chief Raleigh Leonard said. “Now time on task has been significantly reduced. With the benefit of these surveillance tools, an interdiction now typically takes an hour or less, when in the past it would take up to 8-10 hours.”

The result is that agents are spending less time tracking and watching and more time on other law enforcement activities.

Leonard says, “We are seeing a safer border environment, with far less activity related to narcotic trafficking and migrant crossings. I believe this can be attributed to hard-working agents supported by advanced detection technology and also supported by collaboration from a multitude of other agencies.”

And deeper into the future, Leonard said, he hopes that facial recognition technology can be adapted for border use to allow faster determination of threat levels. Knowing an individual in a remote area is a landowner can save time, but more critical would be to make an early determination that the camera is seeing a known smuggler with a violent criminal record. This would help determine how best to respond and better safeguard agents.

3. Drones – Drones have been used to provide a bird's-eye view of vast stretches of border, and in 2012, the agency deployed a military wide-area camera attached to an aerostat, an airship tethered up to 5,000 feet off the ground. Originally used in Afghanistan, these cameras are capable of capturing miles of terrain in a single hi-res image.

Flying at altitudes of 100 feet and far higher, the UAVs, or drones, can cover broad swaths of land and quickly detect activities that might be missed by fixed or mobile ground sensors, particularly in remote or mountainous areas.

A drone crew consisting of a pilot, a sensor operator, and a radar operator controls the aircraft and relays information about suspected crossings to the U.S. Border Patrol. In September 2017, CBP began testing smaller hand-launched drones, including AeroVironment’s Raven and Puma small unmanned aircraft systems. In the summer of 2016, the agency solicited offers for small drones with facial recognition capability. The agency will finish its review of the hand-launched systems in spring 2018.5

With some unmanned aerial vehicles at the border starting at $18 million apiece, their performance has implications for taxpayers as well as national security. First results of drone use are less than promising – from 2013 to 2016, the U.S. Border Patrol attributed fewer than 8,000 of its 1.7 million apprehensions to drones. Reports show that $5,878 per flight hour was spent to operate Predator-Bs in fiscal 2015.

A real worry Americans have about unmanned aircraft systems is that their use effectively puts anyone living near the border under a state of perpetual surveillance for no reason other than their geographical location – a clear violation of their 4^th Amendment rights?

4. Smart Wall – Based on this administration’s budget, each mile of physical border wall would cost $24.5 million. According to leading technology entrepreneurs, utilizing off-the-shelf technology to build a Smart Wall would bring the cost-per-mile down to less than $500,000.

The device, called an expendable unattended ground sensor (E-UGS), will automatically alert a workstation or mobile phone when a human walks within 30 meters of it. The UGS can act as an invisible trip wire, or a surreptitious doorbell, and can be linked to trigger cameras, drones, or remote-controlled weapons. This technology has been proven in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors' operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed. The target would never know how he or she was discovered.

Robert Jones, chief of the counter threat technology operations at Applied Research Associates, a major defense contractor, says that ARA could be in for a windfall in government contracts.

Pathfinders can either be scattered, like a minefield, or used in a targeted area – say a fork in the road. As a person walks down the path, the sensors go off like a game of connect-the-dots. When the path splits, the Pathfinder on the right detects movement, which lets observers know which direction the target is going and, over time, could reveal large travel patterns.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. The “Pathfinder” is a device that’s inexpensive enough to deploy and forget about. Where early generations cost thousands of dollars a pop, the Pathfinder retails for $499, or $549 for a slightly larger version about the size of a thermos.

Conclusion

A wall is not the only answer or even the best answer to increasing border security. Lest we forget – Congress set aside $1.2 billion for a 700-mile border fence in 2006. It ended up spending $3.5 billion for construction of the current combination of pedestrian fences and vehicle impediments. In 2009, the Border Patrol estimated it would need to spend an average of $325 million per year for 20 years to maintain these barriers. The Congressional Research Service found that by 2015, Congress had already spent $7 billion on the project, more than $11.3 million per mile per decade.

The fence is routinely climbed or otherwise circumvented. The GAO reported in 2017 that both pedestrian and vehicle barriers have been defeated by various methods, including using ramps to drive vehicles "up and over" vehicle fencing in the sector; scaling, jumping over, or breaching pedestrian fencing; burrowing or tunneling underground; and even using small aircraft.

A report in May 2008 by the Congressional Research Service found "strong indication" that illegal border-crossers had simply found new routes. A 2017 Government Accountability Office(GAO) report, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, found that from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2015, the U.S.-Mexico border fence had been breached 9,287 times, at an average cost of $784 per breach to repair.

After promising voters that Mexico would pay for the border wall, the president has sought $25 billion from Congress to fund the project. And, a 14-mile "border wall construction project" along the border in San Diego was announced in June 2018. The project actually will replace an "eight-to-10 foot high scrap metal wall with an 18-to-30 foot bollard-style wall topped off with an anti-climbing plate." The cost will be $147 million for 15 miles of construction. That is $9.8 million a mile. The total length of the U.S.–Mexico border is 1,954 miles. Go figure the real cost of construction, then add maintenance and security.

There must be definite, detailed plans for border security. Instead of just accepting the notion that more walls will be effective, Congress should study all possible solutions that could improve security, and they should spend money wisely with an eye on the future. 

Trump has approached the argument with blinders – he wishes to fulfill a campaign promise. He says, “This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve.” If you stubbornly accept that the border wall is “right” without examining reasons why so many believe it is “wrong,” you simply ignore the common good of human beings. It is imperative to understand the welfare of two countries ... one very rich and one pitifully poor … one bent on fearful nationalism and one desperately seeking to fulfill a dream of prosperity.