Yves here. Even without images, this article gives a vivid picture of how the Biden Administration has continued and extended the Trump border wall project…not with brick and razor wires and searchlights but with high tech surveillance and hardware, including those horrid robot dogs. They’ll be perfected on illegal migrants before they are turned loose in American cities.
By Todd Miller. Original published at TomDispatch
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 Peña 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”
The golden chrome robotic dog trotted right up to me on the blue carpet at the convention center hall. At my feet, it looked up as if it were a real dog expecting me to lean over and pet it. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, this “dog” will someday patrol our southern border. Its vendor was undoubtedly trying to be cute when he made the dog move its butt back and forth as if wagging its tail (in reality, two thin, black antennae). Behind the vendor was a large sign with the company’s name in giant letters: Ghost Robotics. Below that was “Robots That Feel the World,” a company slogan right out of the dystopian imagination.
According to its organizers, this was the most well-attended Border Security Expo in its 15-year history. About 200 companies crowded the hall, trying to lure officials from CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border sheriffs’ departments, and international border forces into buying their technologies, sensors, robots, detectors, and guns. As I stood staring at that surreal dog, behind me the company Teledyne Flir was showing off its video surveillance system: a giant retractable mast sitting in the bed of a black pickup truck. On the side of the truck were the words “Any Threat. Anywhere.”
Another company, Saxon Aerospace (its slogan: “Actionable Intelligence, Anytime, Anywhere”), had a slick, white, medium-sized drone on display. One vendor assured me that the drone market had simply exploded in recent years. “Do you know why?” I asked. His reply: “It’s like when a dog eats blood and gets carnivorous.”
Elsewhere, the red Verizon Frontline mobile command-and-control truck looked like it could keep perfect company with any Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle unit; while Dell, the Texas-based computer firm, displayed its own frontline mobile vehicle, promising that “whether you’re providing critical citizen services, innovating for the next generation, or securing the nation, we bring the right technology… and far-reaching vision to help guide your journey.”
And don’t forget 3M, which has moved well beyond its most famous product, Scotch tape, to provide “rugged and reliable equipment across DoD [Department of Defense], DoJ [Department of Justice], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and U.S. state and local agencies.” Top defense contractors like Airbus (with a shiny black helicopter on display in the center of the expo hall) were also present, along with top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems.
Just the day before the expo opened, the Biden administration put out its fiscal year 2023 budget, which proposed $97.3 billion for the DHS, that agency’s largest in its two-decade history. The Customs and Border Protection part of that, $17.5 billion, would similarly be the most money that agency has ever received, nearly $1.5 billion more than last year. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement received just a marginal increase, it will still get $8.5 billion. Combine just those two and that $26 billion would be the highest sum ever dedicated to border and immigration enforcement, significantly more than the $20 billion that the Trump administration started out with in 2017. As DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, such a budget will help secure our “values.” (And in an ironic sense, at least, how true that is!)
“Notably,” Mayorkas added, “the budget makes smart investments in technology to keep our borders secure and includes funding that will allow us to process asylum claims more efficiently as we build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”
What Mayorkas didn’t mention was that his border plans involve ever more contracts doled out to private industry. That’s been the case since 9/11 when money began to pour into border and immigration enforcement, especially after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With ever-growing budgets, the process of privatizing the oversight of our southern border increased significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. (The first Border Security Expo was, tellingly enough, in 2005.) The process, however, soared in the Obama era. During the first four years of his presidency, 60,405 contracts (including a massive $766 million to weapons-maker Lockheed Martin) were issued to the tune of $15 billion. From 2013 to 2016, another 81,500 contracts were issued for a total of $13.2 billion.
In other words, despite his wall, it’s a misconception to think that Donald Trump stood alone in his urge to crack down on migration at the border. It’s true, however, that his administration did up the ante by issuing 87,293 border-protection contracts totaling $20.9 billion. For Biden, the tally so far is 10,612 contracts for $8 billion. If he keeps up that pace, he could rack up nearly $24 billion in contracts by the end of his first term, which would leave Trump’s numbers and those of every other recent president in the dust.
If so, the contracts of the Trump and Biden administrations would total nearly $45 billion, slightly surpassing the $44.3 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement from 1980 to 2002. In the media, border and immigration issues are normally framed in terms of a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. While there is certainly some truth to that, there are a surprising number of ways in which both parties have reached a kind of grim border consensus.
As Maryland Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House appropriations committee, said ever so beamingly on a screen at that Expo conference, “I have literally put my money where my mouth is, championing funding for fencing, additional Border Patrol agents, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.” And as Clint McDonald, a member of the Border Sheriff’s Association, said at its opening panel, the border is “not a red issue, it’s not a blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
When I asked the Ghost Robotics vendor if his robo-dog had a name, he replied that his daughter “likes to call it Tank.” He then added, “We let our customers name them as they get them.” While we were chatting, a prospective customer asked, “What about weapons mountable?” (That is, could buyers weaponize that dog?) The vendor immediately assured him that they were already working with other companies to make that happen.
Later, when I asked Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about the surveillance dogs, he downplayed their significance, stressing the media hype around them, and saying that no robo-dogs were yet deployed anywhere on the border. Nonetheless, it was hard not to wander that hall and think, This, much more than a wall, could be our border future. In fact, if the “big, beautiful” wall was the emblem of Donald Trump’s border policy, then for the Biden moment, think robo-dogs.
Border Security Is Not a “Pipe Dream”
The night before I stood on that hill in Arizona, I had heard people passing through the campsite where my son and I were sleeping in a tent. Their footsteps were soft and I felt no fear, no danger. That people were coming through should hardly have been a surprise. Enforcement at our southern border has been designed to push such border-crossing migrants into just the sort of desert lands we were camping in, often under the cover of night.
The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands. Those soft footsteps I heard could have been from asylum seekers fleeing violence in their lands or facing the disaster of accelerating climate change — wilted crops and flooded fields — or economic dispossession in countries where foreign corporations and local oligarchies rule the day. Or all of that combined.
For years, I’ve been talking to migrants who crossed isolated and hazardous parts of the Arizona desert to bypass the walls and guns of the Border Patrol.
I thought of them when, on the last day of that Border Security Expo, I watched Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, a new border surveillance company, step up to the podium to introduce a panel on “The Digital Transformation of the Border.” The 20-something Luckey, already worth $700 million, had floppy brown hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He told the audience of border industry and Homeland Security officials that he was wearing shades because of recent laser surgery, not an urge to look cool.
He did look cool, though, as if he were at the beach. And he does represent the next generation of border tech. Since 2020, his company has received nearly $100 million in contracts from Customs and Border Protection.
His introduction to the panel, which sounded to me more like a pitch for financing, offered a glimpse of how the border-industrial complex now works. It was like listening to a rehearsal for the lobbying appearances he and his company would undoubtedly make in Congress for the 2023 budget. In 2021, Anduril spent $930,000 lobbying on issues that mattered to its executives. It also gifted political candidates with nearly $2 million in campaign contributions.
Luckey’s message was: fund me and you’ll create a “durable industrial base,” while ensuring that border security will not be a “pipe dream.” Indeed, in his vision, the new border-surveillance infrastructure he represents will instead be an autonomous “pipeline,” delivering endlessly actionable information and intelligence directly to the cell phones of Border Patrol agents.
I was thinking about his pitch again as I stood atop that hill watching the border apparatus quickly mobilize. I was, in fact, looking at yet another Border Patrol vehicle driving by when I suddenly heard a mechanical buzzing overhead that made me think a drone might be nearby. At our southern border, the CBP not only operates the sizeable Predator Bs (once used in U.S. military and CIA operations abroad), but small and medium-sized drones.
I could see nothing in the sky, but something was certainly happening. It was as if I were at the Expo again, but now it was real life. I was, in fact, in the middle of the very surveillance-infrastructure pipeline Luckey had described, where towers talk to each other, signal to drones, to the all-terrain vehicle unit, and to roving Border Patrol cars.
Then the buzzing sound abruptly stopped as a CBP helicopter lifted into the air, its loud propellers roaring.
The Real Crisis
After that dramatic helicopter exit, I wondered if there was indeed a border emergency and finally decided to get in my car and see what I could find out, leaving my son with our friends. As I rounded a corner, I came across Border Patrol agents and vehicles at the side of the road with a large group of people who, I assumed, were migrants. About four individuals had already been put in the back of a green-striped Border Patrol pickup truck, handcuffed and arrested. They had the tired look I knew so well of people who had walked an entire night in an unknown, hazardous landscape, had failed, and were now about to be deported. The agents of the ATV detail were lounging around in their green jumpsuits as their quads idled, as if this were all in a day’s (or night’s) work, which indeed it was.
I remembered then hearing those footsteps as my son slept soundly and thought: The border is not in crisis. That’s impossible. The border’s inanimate. It’s the people walking through the desert — the ones who crept past us and those in the back of that truck or soon to be put in other trucks like it, arrested so far from home — who are actually in crisis. And it’s a crisis almost beyond the ability of anyone who hasn’t been displaced to imagine. Otherwise, why would they be here in the first place?
The ongoing border-crisis story is another example of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once would have called an “upside down” world, so twisted in its telling that the victim becomes the victimizer and the oppressor, the oppressed. If only there were a way we could turn that story — and how so many in this country think about it — right-side up.
As I was mulling all of that over, I suddenly noticed the omnipresent “eye” of the Elbit Systems tower “staring” at me again. Its superpower cameras were catching the whole scene. Perhaps its radar had detected this group to begin with. After all, the company’s website says, “From the darkest of nights to the thickest of brush, our border solutions help predict, detect, identify, and classify items of interest.” Not people, mind you, but the handcuffed “items of interest” in the back of that truck.
As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered a moment at that Expo when a man from the Rio Grande Valley asked a panel of Department of Homeland Security officials a rare and pointed question. Gesturing toward the hall where all the companies were hawking their wares, he wondered why, if there was so much money to be made in border security, “would you even want a solution?”
The long uncomfortable silence that followed told me all I needed to know about the real border crisis in this country.
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I do not want the undocumented people here. They should not be here. I also do not want over eight thousand people to die slow, horrible deaths because they were shepherded into the worst parts of the desert all while the CBP continues to destroy the water and food left in the desert for people to find. In way, we already have death squads, don’t we?
Countries that are economically ruined by the United States are sending migrants to my country to take jobs, bust unions, and drive down wages with them having to endure possible enslavement, kidnapping, or worse by the gangs along the way. The Mexican government also treats Central Americans much to same way as the American government treats both. Bigotry. It’s universal. And just as we have all this money to constantly create coups, get sweat heart deals for corporations, and generally lay political and economic waste to most countries south of the Rio Grand, we also have oodles of money for a wall that would not be needed if just left those countries alone. But where is the profit in that?
“Countries that are economically ruined by the United States are sending migrants…”
And that is the part that rarely gets mentioned in the discussions on immigration policy – the fact that people migrate to the US because the US has destroyed their countries – militarily, economically, or both. Most people don’t want to permanently move from the country where they were born, leaving everything familiar behind. They do it because they’re desperate, not because “they love our freedoms”.
Those who are so opposed to immigration should also be vehemently anti-war and anti-imperialist if they wanted to be consistent.
My small city took out a bond to build a couple new schools in recent years, and we spent a lot of money to make sure the new schools could handle any population growth over the next few decades, even though their hadn’t been much over the last few. That seemed like a reasonable idea – better to have extra room than not enough.
But my area somehow got the reputation as a “sanctuary city” so when immigrants get to the Texas border, they specify Maine as the place they want to go, and for various reasons our small city has taken in far more immigrants in recent years than anywhere else in the state to the point where these new schools are now over capacity already. The first ones from Ukraine showed up recently. The superintendent has had to plead with the state to stop sending immigrants because we can’t handle any more.
My ancestors, like most USians’, were immigrants to the US, and I might like to become an immigrant to another country myself some day. But there are realities on the ground that need to be dealt with and there isn’t unlimited capacity. I believe my small city has apartments for rent in the low single digits currently – there is currently nowhere for people to go, and housing costs are astronomical.
US imperialism needs to stop so that those who would like to immigrate can do so orderly, peacefully, and out of a genuine desire to be in the US, not out of desperation and fear of death or immiseration in their home country. Instead we get the hell on earth described above.
They won’t, because there is nothing thought through about it. It is just knee jerk reactionism, and the politicians feed upon that.
That said, we should not blame people for the reactionism. Between perhaps multiple jobs and various other demands, making up a deep, coherent, principled opinion about everything happening is nigh impossible.
The real problem is that politics have turned into marketing with a different name tag. It is shallow, slogan focused and pathos driven.
Thanks for this, Yves. This is one I had no idea of and I have no words, really, even though nothing like this should surprise me anymore. Perfectly inhuman, or inhumane, whichever you prefer. Or how about just sickening? Another moneymaker for public/private, or shall we say private, underwritten by public? I’d say the boulder is rolling down the hill so fast, Sisyphus is smashed.
Everywhere we look: imigration, war, health caré, environment, económic, gender and racial injustice, rampant government and corporate corrupción, and on and on. Something is rotten,, but not just in Denmark. It is all conected. What to do about It? Where to start? Its the PMC, its the knuckle draggers, the kleptocrats, the Trumps. Back years ago Poco nailed It: “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
The mention of an Israeli company in the piece conjured up an image in my mind of “America: The New and Improved Apartheid State.” In our case, the Apartheid is based on economic status. Call it “Neo-liberal Apartheid.”
As the recent imbroglio concerning abortion “rights” in America shows, hard won gains can be lost again. When, not if, these “border surveillance technologies” are deployed against citizens, we will be living in the embodiment of Bentham’s Panopticon. That earlier iteration of the concept was designed to manage a prison and it’s inmates. Substitute a nation for a prison and “You are Here.” “Would you like to know more?”
See, our future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdrjzE1SE58
As the man said, “fundamentally, nothing will change”. Just the attention of the population at large will be pointed to other – more important – issues: Did Elon Musk own AOC on Twitter? What were the Kardashians wearing at the Met Gala?
I believe in about a decade our attitude toward migrants will change. We have an aging population. This will result in a worker shortage. With low birth rates these needed workers will come from immigrants.
My guess is that the demographic decline of “core Americans” will exacerbate political questions around American national identity. There is polling data on questions like “I don’t even recognize my own country anymore” with high levels of approval for that statement, that sentiment is not going anywhere. Putnam found immigration correlates with lower social cohesion, so it gradually unravels any sense of social solidarity. One real, but unnoticed, racial disparity is that combat deaths are overwhelmingly white and male. If we are realistic in that purpose of the state is about the projection of force, what happens to a state when it can’t recruit people to fight on its behalf? I note the US army just cut their size significantly this year because they recognized they have no chance in hell of meeting their recruitment goals. Perhaps we should say good, but the future belongs to the countries that can recruit an effective, high morale fighting force.
There are benefits to immigration, but large levels of immigration, especially with demographic declines in the core population, come with a lot of serious and socially destabilizing consequences which should not be glibly dismissed. My guess is that we are witnessing a political wave of nativism, and it will continue and grow until demographics stabilize. Hopefully things don’t end up in a situation like Lebanon.
I have to say that while it may turn out to be true, I really don’t like that argument at all.
First of all, do we have a worker shortage or is there possibly a surplus of “entrepreneurs”? If we have fewer people, they should require fewer things and therefore fewer workers to produce them.
But the main thing I don’t like about that argument is what it implies. I have heard it for years in Maine as we have about the oldest population of any state. I think most people who suggest this are truly well meaning, but I also don’t think they are talking about needing immigrants to be in the C suites of Fortune 500 companies. They are afraid that as they age there won’t be enough nursing home attendants, hospital workers, etc. Those industries don’t pay very well thanks to the capitalists in charge. And thanks in large part to capitalism again, families move around within the US more than they used to so aren’t nearby to take care of each other any more. So the implication is that we need low paid workers to do the crap jobs to keep our wealthier elderly comfortable in their convalescence. To me that sounds like an aristocracy in need of peasants, or worse, slaves, and I don’t like it one bit.
And please don’t take my comment personally jb63 – I’ve enjoyed your comments here for years. I had in mind specific people whom I know and who have made similar arguments, and they’ve always rubbed me the wrong way, despite the well-meaning intentions.
Maybe. USA is this weird nation where traditions go to die.
Not sure if it was here or some other site, but i recently ran into a story from someone with a background from India but living in USA. I think one of this siblings was getting married, and they had some relatives coming over. And one of his elderly aunts that did so exclaimed how wonderful it was to see a traditional Indian wedding again, as that as something that rarely happened any more back there.
And from personal observation, something similar can be seen with descendants of those that came over from Scandinavian nations. Hand crafts like rose painting is far more a thing among those descendants than it is back in Scandinavia as best i can tell.
The federal government has an Everify system, which they could mandate on all employers, and they could conduct audits and fines and enforcement proceedings against employers, and then the only jobs for the undocumented would be cash/under the table, which could also be stomped on with enforcement of tax laws and labor laws. Its not to say that there is no need for border enforcement given all the illegal drugs coming through, but they can kill the domestic demand for undocumented labor easily, if they actually cared, without a wall or evil robots.
It looks like they have adopted the Pentagon model with a whole series of lucrative contracts, consultants, shows, etc. but there is a danger. If through technology they eventually manage to actually seal that border, then what? How are American companies gong to get their cheap workers that have no rights? Fruit and vegetables may be left to go rotten and unpicked on the fields and orchards. Budgets will get blown out as companies are forced to hire actual Americans. Worse, they may have to raise those wages and improve those conditions before Americans bother to apply for those jobs. The humanity!
Remotely operated pickers?
Not sure where i ran into it, but i recently saw an image of a fast food place where the orders were received by someone sitting in a call center somewhere in South America.
If Meta’s VR tech etc get good enough, maybe we will see the fruits etc being picked using remotely operated robotic torsos.
Obviously the slogan for the dogoids should be “Robots that the world feels.”
The creators and investors always assume they will only be used on the poors. But it would be great to see them stalking around an office building, sniffing the comms searching for insider trading, tax evasion, etc.
The office people could give them cute names like “Schedule D” or “1099”. Only seems fair.
We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet… wait a few more years as the tropics become increasingly uninhabitable due to lofty wet bulb readings.
Ralf Nader’s pilot issue of “The Capitol Hill Citizen” covered this. The paper could use some improvements in my opinion, but it a good start. http://www.capitolhillcitizen.com They are looking for stories and advise.
nafta set off the stampede, and nafta billy clinton knew it would.
nafta billy clinton began the draconian clamp down of immigrants because he knew that free trade causes human degradation
nafta hillary cllnton started the wall, not trump, because free trade causes immense human misery
President Clinton set the stage for President Obama’s record-breaking deportations and booming immigrant detention situation, and Hillary Clinton has enabled it with her own rhetoric about sending a message to people fleeing violence in Central America.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-clintons-have-failed-latinos-on-immigration-reform/
Op-Ed
The Clintons Have Failed Latinos on Immigration Reform
By
Adriana Maestas,
teleSUR
Published
April 24, 2016
…
——————-
“There is a great deal of psychological comfort to be found in a
fully fledged ideology such as free trade because it removes the need
for critical thought.
The ideology is used as an algorithm. All the
individual has to do in any situation is to ask what the ideology
requires by way of action.
The fact that the action may be harmful or
the ideology objectively at odds with reality is emotionally
unimportant for the individual. What matters is that an answer has
been found which is compatible with the ideology. This is especially
appealing to the less intellectually curious.
Psychologically, political ideologies are akin to religion and their
practitioners behave in an essentially religious manner. For example,
in the case of free trade, its disciples chant “let the market
decide” in the manner of Christians saying “God will provide.”
Those amongst the elite who are not true believers in free trade
will, in most cases, toe the ideological line because they deem it
prudent to do so for their own careers and security. The few who
speak out against it are simply sidelined.”
———————
http://www.cjd.org/paper/NAFTA.html
Immigration
NAFTA Key to Immigration Problems in the United States
By Dawn McCarty
Dawn McCarty teaches at the University of Houston-Downtown.
“The causes of the changes in immigration patterns are varied and
complicated, but the key factor is the policies associated with the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Nowhere is this clearer
than in the rural, agricultural areas of Mexico, where working-age men
and, increasingly, single women are scarce, unable now to make the
living that their ancestors had made for centuries on land they used
to own. Protected by the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, ejido lands, as
they are called, belonged to the people in common and could not be
sold. Communally owned lands that giant agribusiness interests could
not legally buy was the polar opposite of the free-market ideology of
NAFTA. Against years of precedent, then-President Salinas managed to
change the Mexican Constitution in 1992 so that ejido lands could be
made the “private” property of individual members of the collective,
who then could sell their plot of land to private individuals. This
privatization of ejido land was a critical component of NAFTA, since
these communal lands comprised 29,000 communities and three million
producers, encompassing 75% of all agricultural production at the time
(Davis, Stecklov & Winters 2002).”
” Free trade has destroyed their economic system, leaving them the choice of
migration or watching their family slowly starve.”
———
http://warofillusions.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-real-causes-of-illegal-mexican-immigration/
The real causes of illegal Mexican immigration
June 2, 2008 — Stefan Fobes
Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA’s Disastrous Impact on Mexican
Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
“The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one
symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs — not maximum
profits– are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a
massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker
program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.”
———————–
remember, nafta billy clinton was at a college the other day taking questions from future sociopaths in how to conduct foreign policy.
the longer nafta billy is allowed into the halls of americas civil society, the more carnage that type produces.
as long as americas elites never have to pay for their “CRIMES”, we will get one nafta billy clinton after another.
Trumps mistake in getting his wall built was that he did not leave enough pork on the table for the contractors. One needs to Go Big on these projects, If only he had taken the hint from the F-35 project, and if only he had got Raytheon, Boeing, BAE Systems, maybe Palantir 8to be in with the young folks) on the sensor-effector side his wall would have been unstoppable.