México del Norte
Jorge Mújica Murias
mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com.mx

The Intelligent Border

It started about two years ago, and is called the “Intelligent Border Project,” a very commercial but full of sense initiative, so border merchants lose less money due to the long waiting lines at the border crossing. According to its organizers, merchants from both sides of the border lose each year around 8 billion 580 million dollar because their clients take hours to cross the line.

More time waiting to cross means less time shopping, and as the saying goes, “Time is Money”.

According to their numbers, at the Tijuana-San Diego crossing, the busiest in the world, with well over 10 million people, loses about 5 billion 100 million dollars a year. The close-by crossing at Mexicali-Imperial County loses 3 billion 300 millions every 12 months.

And let me repeat it, the “Intelligent Border” is a purely commercial project. To be a “partner” of the smart border you have to come down with 50 thousand dollars, which has not been an obstacle for a bunch of States and Counties. Another kind of “partner,” with less money but maybe more intelligence, are private companies serving as advisors to evaluate programs to shorten the waiting crossing times, and each one of them has to come up with 25 thousand dollars to have the right to speak their minds.

The last partners of the venture are private companies with real state interests in both sides of the border, who lobby and advocate on both sides of the border. These are the real heavy weight guys, investing about 6 billion dollars a year, which they hope to recover implementing measures to reduce the famous waiting times.

Part of the business partners is being used to design and engineer triple-lane crossing points, cash-only fast lines, community awareness programs about the “crisis in the border towns,” and to “educate and teach the community about the economic advantage of crossing rapidly and have an expedited commercial exchange between both nations.”

The Stupid Border

All that comes to mind because a few days ago the Obama regime finally, like the donkey in the fable, blew the right way and played the flute.

The boss of the so called Homeland Security office, Janet Napolitano, announced in a low publicity way, that she’s cancelling the high tech border Project, the so called “virtual fence”, in which the US government had put about one billion of taxpayers money. It had been started in 2006, by congressional decision, and it barely covered 53 miles at the border.

The “Virtual Fence” has a network of cameras, movement sensors and radars that supposedly would detect undocumented immigrants crossing the border, and the Border Patrol would be notified to immediately stop them. Instead, they got a bunch of “coyotes”, not the two-legged ones but the real four-legged animals, a ton of deer and rolling sagebrush, but few immigrants, at the cost of 15 million dollars a mile.

Those results lead us to the conclusion that the only intelligent guys in the project were the Presidents and CEO’s of Boeing, company who sold the government a ton of junk, making millions on the process. And they will keep making money, because they will continue “giving maintenance to the technology already installed.”

Of course, Republicans who approved the Project in the first place, are now complaining and criticizing Obama because he took “too long to cancel the Project”, and because he is “taking too long to decide what to do instead”. They want more personnel, new technology and equipment for the Border Patrol.

I say the Money would be better invested on the Intelligent Border Project. One billion dollars would suffice to put a bridge every mile across the border, or at least two in every border town and village, and maybe to triple the number of guys who ask you if you are a citizen at those bridges. That would promote business and improve social relations on both sides of the border, both badly needed in times of crisis and recession.

But I don’t think it will happen. A plan like that renders no profit to any congressman, the President or any executive. It would be viewed as a very farfetched idea, because no one in Washington is intelligent enough to appreciate it.