Despite poor results, Texas governor sticks to plans to broadcast border surveillance images on the Internet
Despite negative results, the governor of the southern US state of Texas is sticking to his plan to have the border with Mexico monitored by cameras and to post the images on the Internet. Late last year, Rick Perry had awarded a multi-million dollar grant to a related test project. While the Republican Party politician gave a positive assessment after a month, a local newspaper came to a different conclusion. The El Paso Times had requested records of the test run using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Only ten arrests of illegal immigrants have been made as a result of the surveillance. With a total of 12.000 arrests of illegal immigrants in the region in November 2006 alone, that’s less than 0.1 percent.
The Texas Border Watch Test Site was funded by the 3. until the 30. November last year online. During this time, images from eight surveillance cameras were transmitted 24 hours a day on the Internet. At the end of the test, advocates of continuous surveillance proudly documented the result: 221.562 users had registered on the site, to the total of 27 million accesses had been 13.000 e-mails received.
Total runtime of the test site since 3. Nov., 3pm CST: 639 hours total hits since the 3. Nov., 3 p.m. CST: 27.923.387 total number of registered users since the 3. Nov., 3 p.m. CST: 221.562.
Documentation after end of test run
Perry then announced his support for permanent border surveillance via the Internet. Earlier, he had repeatedly attacked the U.S. federal government in Washington for doing too little to monitor the border with Mexico.
Critics criticize waste of millions in funds
After the "El Paso Times" published the actual results of the test (here in a report by the US news agency AP), Perry was allowed to reconsider his initiative. The eight cameras had shown, among other things, a parking lot and a lake, the paper reported in January, to document the official results en detail. In addition to the ten arrests, a drug find was made and a smuggling route was interrupted. Ob diese Ergebnisse die Kosten in Hohe von 200.000 US-Dollar rechtfertigen, die fur die „Texas Border Watch Test Site“ verwandt wurden, ist strittig: „Mir scheinen 20.000 dollars per illegal worker is a lot of money," criticized Norma Chavez, a Democratic Party delegate from El Paso
Das Buro des Gouverneurs begegnete der Kritik umgehend. The important thing is not how many criminals have been arrested, but how many have been stopped. This is similar to the neighborhood watch programs that have been in place in other parts of the United States for decades.
The defense is questionable in several respects at once. Neighborhood programs rely on voluntary support from residents; Perry’s "Border Watch" program reportedly costs millions of dollars – for an apparent sense of security. But even beyond that, the defense of the project is debatable. For one thing, in Perry’s government discourse, immigrant workers from Latin America are equated with criminals. This is increasingly being criticized even within the U.S. On the other hand, the number of "stopped criminals" cannot be recalled. If political opponents oppose expanding the programs, they can be accused of minimizing the (perceived) threat to residents. Populism as it lives and breathes.
Control against social differences
So far, Governor Perry has asked the state’s Congress for the release of funf million dollars. This money was to be used to set up hundreds of cameras along the border. The plan is flanked by semi-military programs such as Operation Wrangler, for which Perry requested $100 million in January. The military operation follows on directly from Operation Rio Grande, which prepared a permanent paramilitary control of the border.
These massive attempts to close the border to Mexico for illegal immigrants is a result of Washington’s economic policy. Since Mexico on 1. Since January 1994, when the US became part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the social situation in the neighboring country has deteriorated massively. Especially in agriculture hundreds of thousands of jobs have been destroyed, because the Mexican farmers could not defend themselves against the cheap imports from the north. A direct consequence is the gross labor migration from the South to the USA. 1.2 million people are estimated to die each year, 300 of them trying to find a perspective in the North. By comparison, 125 people lost their lives at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, according to the Berlin Wall Documentation Center.
Cameras or no cameras – the situation on the southern border of the USA will continue to worsen as long as Mexico and the Central American countries are denied economic prospects through agreements such as NAFTA or its counterpart, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The militarily massive and ultimately helpless attempts to curb labor migration are the first indications of the backlash that has reached the United States after years of neoliberal restructuring.