The Mexico-US border: A very lucrative theater of surveillance

In his essential book, The militarization of the US-Mexico border 1978-1992, Timothy J.

Dunn documents the increasing investment in border control by the US federal government during the eighties to stop Central American migration. Between 1978 and 1992 the Border Patrol team grew from 2,580 to 4,948, while its funding increased from US$78 to US$326 million.¹ Of that, the funding for border patrol agents increased by 92%, for border patrol by 317% and for deportations 355%. These operations and new laws produced even greater growth. Between 1992 and 2005 the number of Border Patrol agents doubled, reaching nearly 11,000, of whom 9,633 were on the southern border and only 1,031 on the northern border. There was another 83.5% increase in Border Patrol members between 2005 and 2014 on the southern border alone, where the legion grew to the 18,156 agents it currently has. In the 21 years between Operation Blockade and 2014, the number of Border Patrol agents on that border increased 427%, almost four times the 111%

increase it registered in the 44 years between 1941 and 1985.² Militarization of the border isn’t really new, but it was very gradual for most of the 20th century, making a substantial jump only in the early 90s, right after the fall of the Soviet bloc marked the end of what Eric Hobsbawm designated in his 1994 book by the same name “The Era of Extremes: The Short 20th Century.³

following 9/11 the US government spent $90 billion on border security, most of which came to rest in these companies’ bank accounts.¹

The market of fear and the Border Security Industrial Complex

The Border Security Industrial Complex is a term that parodies Eisenhower’s oft-quoted speech at the end of his presidential term on January 17, 1961. Current ties between the Pentagon and private contractors—such as Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, who provided military equipment and services in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—are a small example of how we haven’t yet turned the page of history warned by Eisenhower. The spy operations contracts he arranged flourished, protected by the almost non-existent restrictions of the Pentagon’s clandestine programs.²

What’s been imposed on the southwest US border is a war economy. The Sun Belt has become the Gun Belt: The Costa del Sol is now the Costa de Colt, producing, selling and using weapons in its territory. In 2002-2013, trade in guns and military services grew 45.5% worldwide, amounting to US$402 billion in sales. The United States is the world’s biggest dealer, absorbing more than half this trade. Six of the largest armaments and military services companies are headquartered in the US: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and United Technologies. A large part of their production is for domestic purchase—by the State—but not for domestic use: they’re for firing overseas.³ Some of these companies have invested in lobbying for more stringent migration laws and include reinforcing border militarization. Dennis L. Hoffman, a professor at Arizona State University specializing in the defense industry’s future market potential, has concluded: “This push towards border security fits very well with the need to create an ongoing stream of revenue.”⁴

The armaments companies are chasing after the DHS budget: US$61 billion dollars in 2014.⁵ The DHS has been contracting them since at least 2006, the year Boeing was chosen to build a virtual wall on the border. In 2013, The New York Times showed a photograph of a Border Patrol agent alongside a tower with radar facility, a laser pointer and surveillance cameras that work day and night. The ensemble was built and sold to the DHS by Boeing, the second largest

1 Miller, 2014, p.26.

2 Mazzetti, 2013, pp.102, 105 and 115.

3 Fleurant, 2013, p.3.

4 Lipton, 2013.

5 Planas, 2015.

armaments-producing company in the world and the largest producing military appurtenances and providing military services. It boasted of 168,400 employees in 2013 and a total sales volume of over US$86.6 billion, US$30.7 billion of it in armaments sales. Profits: US$4.585 billion.

The US armaments industry has suffered a decrease in sales since 2011 due to the decline in the Pentagon’s military spending. In this adverse climate, Boeing continued growing because it exploited another niche in the market: security on the southwest border.¹

Game of Drones: “Between dirty hands and empty bellies”

General Atomics, ranked 44th in the military industry’s market, negotiated a US$443 million contract with the DHS in 2015 so that its reconnaissance drones—field tested in mapping Iranian military bases—could comb the border.² This company positioned its brand in the border security niche with the provision of Predator and Reaper drones, devices the CIA used in 2006-2013 against the Al Qaeda³ high command and over 1,900 insurgents in tribal areas of Pakistan.⁴ Its new contracts are a window to the future of border vigilance. General Atomics has already sold 10 Predators B to CBP at a cost of $4,500 million. The cost of maintaining these drones in the air is US$3,234 an hour, bringing each one’s sustained flight for one year up to $28.5 million. CBP intends to have 18 drones in 2016 and 24 in subsequent years, according to the agreement signed in 2012 with General Atomics.⁵ Perhaps it’s banking on the 58% US public approval of the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the Pew Research Center.⁶

Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) included as wars both extermination processes and simple armed observation, which is what takes place on the border.⁷ That’s why it’s legitimate to point out that this war economy is creating war zones. That shift is evident in the treatment of migrants as enemies, patrolling increasingly being conducted as a military action and the border administered as an occupied zone. This dynamic’s end isn’t in sight, fueled as it is by numerous economic interests. Border Patrol and its activities are only a part of this industrial chain. Its steel links must provide some detainees—raids and immigration courts provide others—for the prison-industrial complex’s thriving migration branch, filling beds

1 Fleurant and Perlo-Freeman, 2014, pp.3-4.

2 Rogers, 2008, p.178.

3 Mazzeti, 2013, p.145.

4 Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p.23.

5 Miller, 2014, p.28.

6 Pew Research Center, May, 2015.

7 Clausewitz, 2007, p.21.

mandated and budgeted for by law: 34,000 of them, on average. Reducing the number of detainees would result in budgetary reduction, which ICE wants to avoid at all costs. And, so far, the detainees are paying this cost, facing onerous bureaucratic procedures aimed at prolonging their captivity until Migration hunts down another one to fill the bed. The private prison industry is investing in towns from New Mexico to New Jersey, which are eager for detention centers to be installed so federal money will flow their way, creating jobs.¹ Many others are also involved in the border vigilance industry with solid—and also liquid—financial interests: the wall’s construction companies, those who train patrol officers, those who develop vigilance technologies and others.

All prosper. However, some Border Patrol results are inversely proportional to their budgetary voracity. Rousing panic about an unprotected border, the DHS makes scurrilous appeals on its webpage to raise public support for its corporate sustainability.² A question emerges: Does curbing migration really depend on increased budget and patrols?

How can so much ineffectiveness be explained?

In 1956 C. Wright Mills warned that the military “has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations now has the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain.”³ Border Patrol presents this same clumsy efficiency of a sprawling domain. Its border vigilance has undergone qualitative transformation and obtained quantitative staff and budgetary support without achieving the promised increase in effectiveness. On the contrary, there’s been a remarkable decrease in its performance.

In 1926 Border Patrol made 22,326 detentions on the southwest border and apprehended 33,159 immigration law violators on both borders⁴; with 104 agents at the time, that means a productivity of 319 apprehensions per agent.⁵ Productivity remained steady over the decades, with 322 in 1992 and 352 in 1993. Since then—precisely when the number of agents multiplied and its budget soared—productivity plummeted. In two decades (1993-2012), the southern border’s number of agents and budget respectively increased 438.5% and 874%. In contrast, effectiveness recorded an inverse growth rate: in 2012, Border Patrol agents on this same border only made 29% of the 1993 captures and their productivity was only 5.5% of 20 years earlier, going from 352 to 18 per agent. This means that the cost of each capture went from $150 in 1993 to

1 Miller, 2014, p.230.

2 Kerlikowske, 2015.

3 Wright Mills, 2000, p.7.

4 Hernández, 2010a, p.52.

5 Hernández, 2010a, p.37.

$2,754 in 2012, if calculations were based on a single agent’s $53,000 salary and immigrants were the Border Patrol’s exclusive mission.¹ But the increased bureaucracy and the cost of the vigilance technologies provided by the large armaments companies, among other direct and indirect costs, means that the cost of each capture actually rose from $300 to almost $10,000.² No private company could support such dire extravagance for long. The strongest and most sustained budget increase was between 2006 and 2013, which is also the period of greatest decline in productivity.

Although Border Control had been showing signs of declining productivity since 1993, it was precisely in 2001—the 9/11 year—that its budgetary endowment parted company from effectiveness and crossed over to declining achievements and growing budget.

Source: Own calculation based on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics³

1 GAO, July 2005, p.9.

2 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, http://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/media-resources/stats

3 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, http://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/media-resources/stats

Source: Own calculation based on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics¹

Despite the much-vaunted Central American exodus, the fall in productivity continued.

The average patrol agent needs almost two weeks to make an apprehension.² The apprehension rate varies according to sector and station, ranging from 50 apprehensions in Río Grande Valley to 4.2 in El Paso. In the latter, each agent needs three months to identify and detain an undocumented person, a rate presumably reflecting the migrant flow.³ The hypothetical correlation between apprehensions and illegal crossings is the main premise in concluding that the decline in captures is due to a decline in migration flow caused by the economic crisis and the persuasive effect of border patrolling, a theory held by governmental consultants⁴ and echoed by civil society organizations.⁵ But if there’s truly a dwindling flow, why increase patrol agents? The truth is that this theory doesn’t hold up if we compare apprehension figures and the number of undocumented persons as calculated by the Pew Research Center, an institution that bases its migration flow calculations on its own surveys and not on apprehensions. There is no such correlation. The numbers of undocumented migrants are decreasing not necessarily because fewer are arriving but because those who already did are gradually becoming legalized through temporary or permanent residence, through DACA, TPS, etc.

1 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, http://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/media-resources/stats

2 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2013.

3 Schladen, 2014.

4 Haddal, 2010, p.14.

5 Meyer, 2013.

Source: Own calculation based on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Pew Research Center statistics¹

Like any other figure concerning a somewhat clandestine population, this data has to be taken as a rough guide.² And apprehension data must be taken with no less care: the figure shows events, not individuals. Congressional consultants favoring migration controls contemplate that apprehensions may over-represent the number of people crossing³, but seem to ignore that they may also underestimate it: migrants sometimes manage to use blind spots for a long time before Border Patrol detects them. They also sometimes make fewer crossings per year, as was the case with temporary Mexican migrants who changed status to being permanent migrants. They’re an example of why the number of unauthorized crossings can diminish but not the number of unauthorized migrants who cross each year. Douglas Massey, a US sociologist specializing in immigration, noted that Mexicans have stopped visiting their families for Christmas and Easter.⁴ He also showed that in the 1990s one in every three migrants returned to Mexico every year, which implies that 70% of Mexican migrants returned within five years.⁵ Here we have an unsuspected and ironic effect of migration control: temporary migration changing into permanent settlement. The costs and dangers of crossing the border lead many migrants to opt for a permanent crossing. We would therefore have fewer migrants crossing but more unauthorized migrants.

An additional element in the fallibility of apprehensions as an indicator of flow is the fact that Mexico’s National Migration Institute recorded an increase of 121% in the flow of Central

1 Passel, Cohn, Krogstad, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2014, p.14.

2 Passel and Cohn, 2008.

3 Haddal, 2010, p.12.

4 Massey, 2011.

5 Massey, 2005, p.9.

Americans between 2002 and 2005.¹ Yet in that period, apprehensions of Central Americans by Border Patrol increased by only 26%.² What was the real flow: 121% or 26%? From these figures and considerations we can infer an indisputable fact: if the flow has declined, it hasn’t necessarily done so in the same proportion as apprehensions. Other explanations for Border Patrol’s declining productivity are needed. I’ll discuss some explanations by way of hypothesis. The first is a variant of what economists call the fallacy of composition³, which in this case is expressed as the impossibility of 18,546 agents making 6.5 million apprehensions where 3,444 agents made 1.2 million. It isn’t only because the migrant flow isn’t that big or because inevitably there’s been a decline in flow—in which case the increase in agents would be superfluous—but because the increase in agents doesn’t directly and necessarily translate into more thorough and widespread coverage. Irrespective of increases in the number of agents, inhospitable areas will remain poorly patrolled and migrants will continue entering using false or authentic but rented passports, or other fraudulent means of seeking vigilance-free access. A large staff increases the probabilities of agents being situated in safe areas and less rational use being made of man-hours. It’s proven that the number of agents doesn’t affect some crossing strategies (false documents, tunnels, secondary roads)⁴ and that not enough hours are spent patrolling the border.

Patrolling has many weak points. The checkpoints aren’t permanent and Border Patrol doesn’t even record the hours an agent spends at a specific checkpoint.⁵ Federal investigations have shown that migrants wait in the area covered by Border Patrol for the 8-hour closing—which takes place every fortnight—so as to cross without risk of being captured.⁶

Golash-Boza argues that a mere increase in agents isn’t enough, because ICE is working flat out but lacks vehicles, and detention centers as well as the judges, lawyers and other migration laws operatives needed to increase deportations.⁷ But the reality is simpler: there aren’t enough detentions. It’s not just about a predictable decline of marginal utility—there wasn’t a proportionate increase in captures for each agent added⁸—but of absolute utility: there’re more agents and fewer captures. Only a vigilance-obsessed State can afford to ignore the curve of the

1 Rodríguez, Berumen and Ramos, 2011, p.2.

2 Casillas, 2012, pp.52-53.

3 “The fallacy of assuming that what holds for individuals also holds for the group or the entire system.”

Samuelson and Nordhaus, 2010, p.662.

4 Seghetti, 2015, p.3.

5 GAO, 2005, pp.6 y 52.

6 GAO, July 2005, p.25.

7 Golash-Boza, 2009, p.11.

8 Krugman and Wells, 2006, p.271.

marginal product of labor: the relationship between costs and the amount of labor. A rational businessman, eager to maximize his profits, would choose the number of employees whose marginal product of labor equals the market’s wage rate.¹ Instead of that, Border Patrol increases the number of agents and uses new technologies that—against all predictions—need more staff:

20 Border Patrol agents are needed to operate a single drone² and up to 2,000 analysts are required to process the information it collects.³ Border Patrol is in no way governed by capital’s logical paradigm: the cost-benefit calculation. Its possibilities of maintaining this sprawling domain policy is played out in an arena that has nothing directly to do with economic logic.

Added to the reasons given for the decline in apprehensions is that migrants and their coyotes are always searching for paths untraveled by agents. They relocate to areas where vigilance is more complicated. They take advantage of the reduction in air patrols.⁴ They find small roads and local byways where they can dodge the patrols. They change their routes faster than Border Patrol changes its strategies. And this partly explains why more agents and more migrants aren’t mutually exclusive: patrol agents weren’t situated on the migrants’ new routes, where there were more Central Americans. Judging by the apprehensions of non-Mexican undocumented migrants—of which Central Americans are the majority—the Río Grande Valley sector (which covers McAllen and Brownsville) has risen in importance as a port of entry: 10,742 to 192,925 captured by border patrols in 2000 and 2014. The Tucson sector—whose main customs point is in Nogales—rose from 2,201 to 19,045. Laredo jumped from 3,336 to 17,509.⁵ The Río Grande Valley sector is also, along with Big Ben, the one with the highest percentage of known successful entries: 39% in 2009 and 31% in 2013.⁶ Migration hasn’t shown the same flexibility in moving its troops: it stubbornly stays in Tucson, where it had 4,052 agents in September 2014, and doesn’t patrol much in the Rio Grande Valley sector, where it only placed 3,064 agents.⁷

Guided by the volume of apprehensions in 1998-2012—a period when Tucson was the main unauthorized port of entry—Border Patrol placed 22% of its agents there in 2014 and made 18% of its captures, while the 17% of its agents placed in the Rio Grande Valley were responsible

1 Krugman and Wells, 2006, p.537.

2 Miller, 2014, p.28.

3 Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p.24.

4 Seghetti, 2014, p.19.

5 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, http://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/media-resources/stats

6 GAO, 2012, pp.74-82. Meyer and Isacson, 2015, p.17.

7 Meyer and Isacson, 2015, p.7.

for 53.5% of the apprehensions on the southwest border. In 2003-2006, the numbers of Mexicans captured averaged over 1 million a year and in 2014 just 226,771. But in 2003-2014, captures of Guatemalans went from 10,355 to 81,116; Hondurans from 16,632 to 91,475 and Salvadorans from 11,757 to 66,638.¹ Those of Nicaraguans rose from 1,055 to 2,712 in 2003-2013.² In 2014, the numbers of Central Americans apprehended exceeded those of Mexicans for the first time in Border Patrol history.³ If captures are an indication of flow, as the official position claims, Border Patrol should have located its agents at the crossing points of the group of nationalities with increasing entries. But it continues over-patrolling Tucson, as in the old days (1995-2010) of high Mexican migration and numerous crossings in this area.

Another far from negligible element explaining Border Patrol’s poor performance is corruption, facilitated by the fact that agents usually patrol alone and their closest colleague may be 10-20 miles away.⁴ Border expert Tony Payán argues that US agents’ corruption—although less widespread and systematic than in the Mexican police—has a huge impact: one corrupt Border Patrol agent is enough to enable the introduction of tons of drugs generating hundreds of millions of dollars for a cartel.⁵ The corruption of US agents is much more profitable than that of Mexicans.

If we apply Payán’s findings about drug trafficking to migrants, we can see that one agent making deals with a few coyotes can clear the way for thousands of migrants in a matter of days or even hours. This is the subject of the film “The Border” (1982), where agent Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson) faces a group of corrupt Border Patrol colleagues in El Paso who have a trafficking network and detain and kill the competition’s traffickers.

Attrition among patrol agents has shown an upward trend since 1995, adding more than a little grain of sand to Border Patrol’s desert of effectiveness. The dropout rate averaged 5% in 1990-1994 but exceeded 10% in 1995-2001. The following year it jumped to 18%. In 2005 it fell to 4%, only to rise back to 10% in 2007-2009. The slight increase in agents in 2011-2013 and decrease from 2013 to 2014 wasn’t scheduled but followed the impact of attrition⁶: the new contracts didn’t add agents; they merely replaced those who had decided to stop being “the US

1 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2014, p.1.

2 Simanski, 2014.

3 Krogstad and Passel, 2014.

4 Department of Homeland Security, OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL, CBP Use of Force Training and Actions To Address Use of Force Incidents, p.3.

5 Payán, 2006, p.876.

6 Haddal, 2010, pp.34-35.

Im Dokument The Disobedience of the Masses: Unauthorized Migration of Central Americans to the United States as an Act of Civil Disobedience (Seite 129-142)