1AC Borders
Contention 1: Harms
Border surveillance produces a site of perpetual warfare
Miller 13 (Todd, has researched and written about US-Mexican border issues for more than 10
years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and
Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now writes on border and immigration issues for
NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog Border Wars, among other places, “Surveillance
Surge on the Border: How to Turn the US-Mexican Border into a War Zone,” Truth Out, 7-11-13,
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17513-surveillance-surge-on-the-border-how-to-turn-theus-mexican-border-into-a-war-zone)//MJ
The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown “explosion-resistant” tower, 30 feet high
From a platform where,
assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering
the surveillance industry’s finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor,
chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, uparmored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons. Although at the time, headlines in the
and 10 feet wide, directly in the center of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show.
Southwest emphasized potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress’s “sequester,” the vast Phoenix
Convention Center hall -- where the defense and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) -- told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn’t about to go
anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were
about to be truly in the money thanks to “immigration reform,” no matter what version of it did or didn’t pass Congress. And it looks
like they were absolutely right. All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could help thwart
A border like the one just over 100 miles away between the
United States and Mexico, it seemed to say, was not so much a place that divided people in
situations of unprecedented global inequality, but a site of constant war-like danger. Below me were
massive attacks and fireball-style explosions.
booths as far as the eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert
camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering through a militarized border
zone with a Hollywood flair. To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your
hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what
such a drone would be used for. “To see what’s over the next hill,” he replied. Until you visit the yearly Expo, it’s easy enough to
forget that the
U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and spread of a
domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic
Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. Along with the claim that it offers a path to citizenship to
millions of the undocumented living in the United States (with many stringent requirements), in its more than 1,000 pages it
promises to build the largest border-policing and surveillance apparatus ever seen in the United
States. The result, Senator John McCain proudly said, will be the “most militarized border since the fall
of the Berlin Wall.” This “border surge,” a phrase coined by Senator Chuck Schumer, is also a surveillance
surge. The Senate bill provides for the hiring of almost 19,000 new Border Patrol agents, the
building of 700 additional miles of walls, fences, and barriers, and an investment of billions of
dollars in the latest surveillance technologies, including drones. In this, the bill only continues in
a post-9/11 tradition in which our southern divide has become an on-the-ground laboratory for
the development of a surveillance state whose mission is already moving well beond those
borderlands. Calling this “immigration reform” is like calling the National Security Agency’s
expanding global surveillance system a domestic telecommunications upgrade. It’s really all
about the country that the United States is becoming -- one of the police and the policed. But
whatever happens, it’s time to stop thinking of all this as “immigration reform.” It represents
what may be the most intense concentration of the surveillance state in a single location ever
witnessed -- a place where the Constitution has an asterisk, which means that anything goes and
dystopian worlds of all sorts can be invented. The Los Angeles Times has written that, if passed, the bill “would also
be a boost to defense contractors and an economic stimulus for border communities, creating thousands of jobs that could raise
home prices and spur consumer spending around border security stations.” It sounds like Keynesian economics, but of a whole
different sort. In a world where basic services are being cut, an emerging policing apparatus in the borderlands is flourishing. As
Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman reported at TomDispatch in February, since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent
In those
borderlands, we are seeing the birth of a military-industrial-immigration complex. It seems
destined to shape our future.
$791 billion on “homeland security” alone, an inflation-adjusted $300 billion more than the cost of the entire New Deal.
Militarized surveillance leads to a significant number of deaths on the border
Johnson ’07 (Kevin R., Kevin R. Johnson is Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and
Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Davis , “Opening the Floodgates: Why America
Needs to Rethink its Immigration Policies, http://nyupress.org/books/9780814743096/) Franzy
In the 1990s, the U.S. government heightened immigration enforcement by massing forces
along its southern border with Mexico. These measures have resulted in a human toll that is
nothing less than horrific. A week rarely goes by without press reports of undocumented
Mexican immigrants who have died on the long, treacherous journey to the United States.93
The title of one November 2002 New York Times article tells it all: “Skeletons Tell Tale of Gamble by Immigrants.”94
Unfortunately, many migrants die in the desert seeking nothing more than to make a better life
for themselves and their families in the United States.95 The vast majority of the border crossers
in no way can be characterized as dangers to the national security or the public safety of the
nation. They are simply seeking economic opportunity in this country. Military-style operations
on the southwest border have channeled immigrants into remote, desolate locations where
thousands have died agonizing deaths from heat, cold, and dehydration.96 At various times, to
add to the danger, military forces have patrolled the border. In one infamous incident, Marines
a few years ago mistakenly shot and killed a teenage goatherder (and U.S. citizen), Esequiel
Hernandez, Jr. As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation attributed more than 3,000 deaths to a
single southern California border operation known as Operation Gatekeeper.97 Numerous other operations have
been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico border region. All have had similar deadly impacts. Despite
the death toll, the U.S. government continues to pursue enforcement operations with great vigor. Indeed, Congress
consistently enacts proposals designed to bolster border enforcement, with such proposals
often representing the only items of political consensus when it comes to immigration reform.
Operation Gatekeeper demonstrates the U.S. government’s callous indifference to the human
suffering caused by its aggressive border enforcement policy. In the words of one informed
commentator, “[t]he real tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is the direct link . . . to the
staggering rise in the number of deaths among border crossers. [The U.S. government] has
forced these crossers to attempt entry in areas plagued by extreme weather conditions and
rugged terrain that [the U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger.”98 In planning
Operation Gatekeeper, the U.S. government knew that its strategy would risk many lives but
proceeded nonetheless. As another observer concludes, “Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement
immigration policy financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly
violates international human rights because this policy was deliberately formulated to
maximize the physical risks of Mexican migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of
them would die.”99 Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of migrants as collateral damage in the “war” on
illegal immigration. Even
before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for committing human
rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.100 Created to police the
U.S.-Mexican border, the Border Patrol has historically been plagued by reports of brutality,
shootings, beatings, and killings.101 Amnesty International, American Friends Service Committee, and Human Rights
Watch have all issued reports documenting recent human rights abuses by the Border Patrol.102 Migrants face other perils on their
journey through the U.S.-Mexico border region. Criminals frequently prey upon unlawful entrants seeking to evade border
inspection. Robberies,
murders, and rapes of immigrants are commonplace. Lawlessness reigns
along the U.S.-Mexican border. Absent serious reform efforts, nothing seems likely to change.
Surveillance also leads to sexual violence and labor exploitation
Johnson ’07 (Kevin R., Kevin R. Johnson is Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and
Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Davis , “Opening the Floodgates: Why America
Needs to Rethink its Immigration Policies”, http://nyupress.org/books/9780814743096/) Franzy
For years, many migrants have depended on smugglers for passage into the United States.
However, since the new border operations went into effect, heightened immigration restrictions
and bolstered immigration enforcement have caused a rapid increase in the fees charged by
smugglers. Smuggling fees increased from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. It now
is much more expensive to come to the United States than before the new border operations
went into effect in the 1990s.103 Some migrants lack the cash to travel. To pay for the trip, many
are forced to become indebted to their smugglers. Smuggling debts have been paid through
forced labor, thus taking the exploitation of undocumented workers to new and frightening
levels. Failure to work off the debts may result in brutal consequences. But a migrant’s ability to pay is
not the only problem with human trafficking. The passage itself is replete with hazards. Among the many
risks faced by migrants is the possibility of being abandoned. In May 2003, nineteen migrants,
including a five-year-old child, died of asphyxiation, heat exposure, and dehydration in the back
of a smuggler’s truck in South Texas. The smuggler had fled, leaving the migrants to die. One of the
dead “had worked five years in the United States before he returned to Mexico to fetch his children, hoping to provide them
comforts he could not give them in Mexico.”104 Today,
because of the money to be made in this black
market, criminal syndicates thrive in the trafficking of human beings. A product of ill-considered law
enforcement, these syndicates resemble the crime networks that emerged in response to the federal government’s efforts during
Prohibition’s ban on the commerce in alcohol. Criminal elements grew and asserted control over a new lucrative industry. But it gets
worse. Some
undocumented immigrants have been enslaved. Reports of slavery have increased
dramatically in the past few years. One 2005 report concluded as follows: Our research
identified 57 forced labor operations in almost a dozen cities in California between 1998 and
2003, involving more than 500 individuals from 18 countries. . . . Victims labored in several
economic sectors including prostitution and sex services (47.4%), domestic service (33.3%), mail
order brides (5.3%), sweatshops (5.3%), and agriculture (1.8%). . . . Victims of forced labor often
suffer severe hardships and deprivations. Their captors often subject them to beatings, threats,
and other forms of physical and psychological abuse. They live in conditions of deprivation and despair. Their
captors may threaten their families. Perpetrators exert near total control over victims, creating a situation of dependency. Victims
come to believe they cannot leave. . . . They
are terrified of their captors but also fear law enforcement, a
fear often based on bad experiences with police and other government officials in their
countries of origin.105 Today, in no small part because of the operation of the immigration laws,
cases of involuntary servitude regularly make the news.106
Curtailing surveillance is key – it’s the lynchpin of border militarization
Kalhan 14 (Anil, “IMMIGRATION SURVEILLANCE”, Maryland Law Review, Volume 74, Number
1)
These four sets of migration
and mobility surveillance functions—identification, screening and
authorization, mobility tracking and control, and information sharing—play crucial but
underappreciated roles in immigration control processes across the entire spectrum of migration and travel. In the
growing number of contexts in which immigration control activities now take place, enforcement actors engage in
extensive collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination of personal information, in order to
identify individuals, screen them and authorize their activities, enable monitoring and control
over their travel, and share information with other actors who bear immigration control
responsibilities. Initially deployed for traditional immigration enforcement purposes, and expanded largely in the name of
security, these surveillance technologies and processes are qualitatively remaking the nature of
immigration governance, as a number of examples illustrate.
Structural violence is the largest proximate cause of war- creates priming that
psychologically structures escalation
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and
Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized,
bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes,
Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side
(Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly”
working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that
overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that
characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form
of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable),
Absolutely central to our approach is a
blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close
attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of
everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More
rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).
important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often
forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and
dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible
genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics,
emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public
morgues. The
violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of
reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even
the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are
flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for
vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian
1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it
is absolutely necessary to make just
such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal
times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending
the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is),
an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal
practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough
citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in
the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for
managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute
the “small wars and invisible
genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California,
Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are
secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that
are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for
granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of
misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal”
social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of
everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace
- imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime
crimes suggests the
possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied
systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during
peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border
raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.”
Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal
“stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangleholds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-toidentify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace.
Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial
prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience.
The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the
mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of
mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for
the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic
minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is
essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise goodenough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic,
permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal
acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to
recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social
exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which
normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for
alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view
of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover
here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other
mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and
patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making
that
decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the
willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social
consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no
primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the
common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable
have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the
sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the
moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as
less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that
precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence.
Collective denial and misrecognition
are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional
roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for
example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic
priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to
Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of
violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu
hungry families.
(1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something
good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public
secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.”
Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in
systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in
social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies
“rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence,
and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point
(Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and
other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical
mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic
domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of
power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or
group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b)
that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence
which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative
experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What
makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that
mass violence is part of a
continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators,
collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even
justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools,
churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton,
ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing
certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social
parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday
life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house
gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
You should privilege everyday violence for two reasons- A) social bias
underrepresents its effects B) its effects are exponential, not linear which
means even if the only causes a small amount of structural violence, its
terminal impacts are huge
Nixon ‘11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3)
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need
to rethink-politically,
imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs
gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an
attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event
or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.
We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a
range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and
strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing
cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying
oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable
representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long
dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths
or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had
Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional
definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating
invading countries
with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions
of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate
conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event
focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to
posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting
stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow
violence is
often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can
fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life
become increasingly but gradually degraded.
The Control
The biopolitics of borders justifies the management of life and death, pushing
immigrants to extreme situations and insurmountable danger
Ajana ‘05 (Btihaj, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries Education Lead
(Digital Humanities, Surveillance, and Biopolitics),
http://www.sociology.org/content/2005/tier1/ajana_biopolitics.pdf) Franzy
The biopolitics of borders is precisely the management of that waiting-to-live, the
management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those who are forcibly placed in detention centres),
and at times, it is the management of death. The death of thousand of refugees and ‘clandestine’ migrants
drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait of Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the
world’s largest mass grave), asphyxiated in trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants
who died in 2000 inside an airtight truck at the port of Dover), crushed under trains (the case of
the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in the US-Mexican border for example). It is the
management of ‘bodies that do not matter’. It is the management of the bodies of those to
whom the status of the ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben, 1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management of those whose
death has fallen into the abyss of insignificance and whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand,
the biopolitics of borders is also the management of ‘life’; the life of those who are capable of
performing ‘responsible self-government’ (Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who can
demonstrate their ‘legitimacy’ through ‘worthy’ computer-readable passports/ID cards that
provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing of identity and citizenship at the
border. The juxtaposition of death and life at the borders is by no means an ad hoc occurrence but an
affirmation of the inadequate immigration policies and the ‘immanentist’ (Nancy, 1991: 3) politics of absolute
enclosure. From this emerges the issue of ‘sorting’ that may override the term ‘racism’ as long as it
is not designated to a specific race or insofar as it is ‘racism without race’ as Balibar prefers to put it.
Racism for Foucault (2003 [1976]: 255) (and here racism has a figurative function just as the
metaphors of leprosy and plague do) is that which creates fragmentation within the biological
continuum and caesuras within species-bodies so that biopolitical sorting and (sub)divisions
could take place between those who are deemed to be ‘superior’ and those who are made to be
perceived as the ‘inferior’ type all with the aim to preserve the ‘well-being’, ‘safety’, ‘security’
and ‘purity’ of the ‘healthy’ (powerful) population (‘virtues’ which are undoubtedly contributing to the
naturalisation and taken-forgrantedness of institutional racism, and the inscription of modes of exclusionary differentiations in many
subtle ways so that the need of accountability is made redundant.) Embedded
within this biopolitical
overdetermination is a murderous enterprise. Murderous not insofar as it involves extermination (although this
might still be the case) but inasmuch as it exerts a biopower that exposes ‘someone to death, increasing
the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so
on’ (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 256), and inasmuch as it is ‘based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence’
(Zylinska, 2004: 530); a symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of ‘naming’ as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida
argue ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’, ‘deportees’, ‘illegal immigrants’, etc) as well as a material one (for example, placing ‘asylum
seekers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ in detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to resuscitate the leftover of late
modernity and the residual of disciplinary powers that seek to eliminate and ostracise the unwanted-other through the insidious
refashioning of the ‘final solution’ for the asylum and immigration ‘question’. Such an image has been captured by Braidotti (1994:
20): Once, landing at Paris International Airport, I saw all of these in between areas occupied by immigrants from various parts of the
former French empire; they had arrived, but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones, waiting. The
dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the
margins and non-belonging can be hell. The
biopolitics of borders stands as the quintessential domain for
this kind of sorting, this kind of racism pervading Western socio-political imaginary and
permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial sovereignty despite its monolithic use of
euphemism. It is precisely this task of sorting and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border security and
surveillance are designed making ‘the management of misery and misfortune … a potentially profitable activity’ (Rose, 1999: 260)
and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism (Coward, 1999: 18) where ‘control’ and ‘security’ are resting upon
vast investments in new information and communications technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the
infiltration and ‘riskiness’ of the ‘unwanted’. For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ (2002), the
UK government outlines a host of techniques and strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening security including the use of
Gamma X-ray scanners, heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in vehicles. Other
surveillance techniques involve the use of biometrics which consists of an ‘enrolment phase’
(European Commission, 2005: 46) where physical attributes such as fingerprints, DNA patterns, retina, iris, face, voice, etc are used
to collect, process, and store biometric samples onto a database for subsequent usage during the ‘recognition phase’ in which these
data are matched against the real-time data input in order to verify identity. Authorities have been keen on integrating biometric
identifiers into ID cards and passports as a means of strengthening security, enhancing modes of identification and facilitating the
exchange of data between different countries. Further application of biometrics in information sharing can be seen in the EU-wide
database EURODAC (Koslowski, 2003: 11), used to store the fingerprints of asylum applicants in order to prevent multiple
applications in several member states or what is referred to as the so-called ‘asylum shopping’. Added to that, the employment of a
broad array of private actors (employers, banks, hospitals, educational institutions, marriage register offices, etc) to perform the role
of ‘gatekeepers’ (Lahav, in Koslowski, 2003: 5) (or more accurately, ‘borderkeepers’) and reinforce immigration controls from within
the internal and ubiquitous borders, constituting ‘a multiplicity of points for the collection, inscription, accumulation and distribution
of information relevant to the management of risk’ (Rose, 1999: 260), and the administration of life and death.
This surveillance causes two forms of biopolitical control in the form of extreme order
and extreme exclusion.
Ajana 2005 (Btihaj Ajana. Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries @
King’s College London. “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of Sociology thw_)
In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two major forms through which discipline and surveillance were
exerted. The first being the spatialisation of the plague-stricken town by means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as
surveillance involves ‘tactics of
individualizing disciplines’ (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of ‘permanent
registration’ (registering the details of each inhabitant of the town) as well as mechanisms of distribution (in
which each inhabitant is related to his [their] place, his [their] body and his condition) so that the
placing individuals within enclosures and under severe and permanent supervision. Such
disease is met by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out of the ‘mixing’ of bodies, be these living or dead. The second
organisational form is that of the treatment of the leper which, unlike ‘the plague and its segmentations’, functions by means of
separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through mechanisms of
‘branding’, ‘dichotomisation’ and ‘exile-enclosure’. From these two different images (plague and
leprosy) which underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault goes on to explain the two ways of
exerting (political) power: discipline on the hand (as is the case with the plague), and exclusion on the
other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and despite the difference of the two modes, they are ‘not incompatible ones’
(Foucault, 1995: 199) for power functions by way of excluding the ‘infected’ (here, the image of the leper stands as an emblematic
figure of ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘madmen’, etc, just as the image of the plague symbolises ‘all forms of confusion and disorder’) and
individualising the excluded so much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are treated as plague victims (all
those who are caught up within disorderly spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent amalgamation of the two forms, and according
to Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is par excellence ‘the architectural figure of this composition’ (1975: 200). Bentham’s utilitarian
plan for a prison which is based on an
observing supervisor placed in a central tower and who can see without
being seen, serves as a compelling paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the
compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002: 244) explains, the model of the
Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) ‘is rigidly regimented and controlled’ (as is
the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea that ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall
tower at the centre does not necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that ‘collective’ individualities are overridden by
separated ‘individualities’ (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims – the trinity of segmentation, individualisation and separation)
and that
power is ‘unverifiable’ (uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what
makes the model of Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural apparatus. Power does not
need to be enforced but merely ‘internalised’ through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such
mechanisms render the observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one
subjected to power. Not that the Panopticon is merely a method of observation devoid of other disciplinary modes of power
but it is also a machine that could be used to ‘carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals’ (Foucault,
1975: 203) within a variety of institutional spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is, hence, the way in
which the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates different technologies and spaces of surveillance and
discipline that Foucault places the notion of disciplinary society under the umbrella of panopticism in order to capture the
diagrammatic strategies underlying power relations and in
which ‘positions’ and ‘identities’ are fundamental
features vis-à-vis the functioning of ‘panoptical’ surveillance.:
The extreme order is achieved by the creation of a homogenized identity—
bodies are classified into hierarchical schemes by processes of racialization and
sexualization
Lulbheld 2 (Elthne, ”Entry Denied Controlling sexuality at the Border”, book)
Historically. sexuality,
gender, race, and class were explicitly considered when U.S. officials made
decisions about whom to admit and exclude. But contrary to both conservative and liberal critics. I suggest that
these were never self-evident attributes that people already "had." Rather, Foucault's framework suggests that
immigration-control practices, down to their most mundane procedural details, produced and naturalized
these identities. Therefore, sexuality-and by extension, race. gender, and class-have been central to
immigration control since its inception not because these are essential or biological identities
that can be discovered within individual bodies. but because sexualization. racialization, and so
on are larger social processes whose presence is made evident by the classification of bodies
into hierarchical schemes. Such classification schemes. which were rooted in histories of
imperialism and modern state formation. ensured that those granted admission were
incorporated into relations of surveillance and discipline within the United States. Although
immigration officials no longer explicitly categorize bodies within racial taxonomies or automatically exclude lesbians and gay men.
that does not mean that racialization, sexualization. and other similar processes have been abolished. Nor does it mean that there
are no longer disparities inimmigration access on the basis of sexuality, race, and other categories. On the contrary. David Reimers's
research compellingly suggests that even when
1965.lawmakers nonetheless
racial criteria were excised from immigration law in
intended for neutral admission criteria to have distinctly racial
effects. By replacing the discriminatory national origins quota system with preferences that were based mainly on family ties.
lawmakers expected that "the great bulk of immigrants henceforth will not merely hail from the same parent countries as our
present citizens' but will be their closer reletives.w In other words, although
openly racist provisions were
removed, the law was nonetheless intended to uphold the virtual exclusion of immigrants of
color. Reimer's argument echoes the decades of research on equal access to education and employment, which shows that
seemingly neutral bureaucratic requirements often generate racist, hetero sexist, and classist
effects. Various architects of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) apparently understood and tried to manipulate this
fact. But even if they had not intended to discriminate, the 1965 INA might still have had discriminatory consequences. As Naomi
Zack explains, "much institutional [discrimination] in the United States at this time is not intentional" but is nonetheless evident
when one examines the outcomes, rather than intentions, of particular policies." Thus, to suggest that the seemingly neutral
provisions of immigration law mark the "end" of immigration discrimination ignores both Reimers's specific research on the 1965
INA and the voluminous general scholarship on institutional discrimination .
Foucault's work particularly contributes
to our understanding of how immigration inequalities are institutionally reproduced by drawing
attention to supposedly neutral, mundane practices of inspection and regimes of knowledge
that actually discipline and subject immigrants in racializing, sexualizing, and other ways.?"
Consequently, rather than proclaiming the demise of discrimination in immigration access, we would be better served by
developing more complex and nuanced accounts of how sexualization, racialization, and other
processes continue to be imposed and contested at multiple levels in the immigration system
today, including through inspection procedures and knowledge regimes. The importance of such
analyses inheres not only in the scale and impact of contemporary immigration, but also in the
fact that relations of power and inequality at the border cannot be separated from inequitable
global relations that structure migration patterns or from social hierarchies within the United
States. Finally, Foucault draws attention to the ways that inspection procedures and decision-making at the
border are tied to record-keeping and writing practices that comprise "a means of control and a
method of domination,"?' As he explains, inspection is accompanied by "a system of intense
registration and of documentary accumulation'v- These writing practices at once constitute each
individual as a "describable, analysable object" and as part of a larger corpus of knowledge that
involves "the measurement of overall phenomena, the characterization of collective facts, the
calculation of gaps between individuals, of their distribution in a given 'populanon."'» This knowledge
is used for distinctly disciplinary ends. Foucault's analysis of how official immigration records function as essential elements of a
larger disciplinary system has important implications for immigration scholarship. At the very least, it suggests that scholars need to
critically evaluate how the written materials on which we draw are part of, and therefore help to reproduce, the disciplinary
apparatus that subjectifies immigrants. Equally, methods for reading official documents against the grain, utilized by scholars such as
those engaged in subaltern studies, may prove to have great relevance for immigration scholarship too.
A2 DA things – the DA gets its impact off of enemy images, and those are self
fulfilling
However, biopolitics ensures that the normalized identity does not prevent the
immigrants from being dichotomized into the “evil” foreign as opposed to the
“secure” domestic. This process creates the boundaries that justify killing in the
name of saving life. This society of control spreads across the globe as the
domestic populous becomes ever more isolated. Those binaries create
opposing identities that dehumanize all Others and induce unending conflicts
Talbot 8 (Stephen Talbot @ the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, 21 March
2008“'Us' and 'Them': Terrorism, Conflict and (O)ther Discursive Formations”
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/1/17.html thw_)
This, according to Coleman is the ‘fundamental aspect of the in-group’s identity’ (17). Identity
creation through
negation entails making a statement of in-group’ identity with reference to what it is not, or does
not consist of, for example ‘I am a Christian, not a Muslim.’ Strategies employed in the negation of the Other
also include: marginalisation of ethnic and religious groups through naming; racialisation;
criminalisation; and stigmatisation. Response strategies of the ‘out-group’ include: collective
resistance to ascribed identities; group empowerment; demands for collective group rights
(territorial claims) in an attempt to secure greater autonomy, legitimisation and social control
(Rummens, 2001, p.18).¶ 6. ‘The outgroup images become negative, homogeneous, abstract and stereotypical’…particularly in
regards to the productions of ‘enemy
images’ which ‘contain an emotional dimension of strong dislike…these images tend
to become self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing, serving important interests and needs’ (Coleman, 2004, pp.17-18;
Stein, 1999; Toscano, 1998).¶ 5.15 Implicit within ‘Us/Them,’ ‘East/West,’ ‘Good/Bad’ and ‘Self/Other’ binaries is the notion that
opposing identities are relatively homogenous. The
use of these non-specific yet all-inclusive tags also serves
to dehumanise and depersonalise a highly abstracted Other. In turn, depersonalisation allows social
stereotyping, group cohesiveness and collective action to occur. The construction of absolutist discourses of this kind are an
important vehicle for understanding conflict:¶ ‘[a]lthough generally described as integrated and homogenous, communities as
loci of production, transmission, and evolution of group membership foster
conflict through the negotiation and
manipulation of social representations’ (LCC, 2001, p.6).¶ 5.16 Here, the demarcation of the common
enemy/Other assists with the mobilisation of one group against another (Aho, 1994). Identity
demarcation of this kind further allows the mobilisation of audiences to carry out conflict. President Bush
for example has made many references to ‘evil doers’. He has been quoted as saying ‘we're on the hunt...got the evildoers on the
run...we're bringing them to justice’ and ‘they kill without mercy because they hate our freedoms...’ (Sample, 2006, The White
House, 2001). The
emotive language used in ‘speech acts’ of this kind are designed to elicit ‘ingroup’ distinctiveness and cohesion through the negation and disparagement of the ‘out-group’
(terrorist organisations). The use of terms ‘evil doers,’ ‘them,’ and ‘they’ are interesting however in the sense that they refer to an
enemy that extends beyond the confines of terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda.¶ 7. ‘A clear and simplified depiction of good (us)
and evil (them) that serves many functions’ (Brown and Gaertner, 2001; Coleman, 2004, p.18).¶ 5.17 By
framing their
conflict within a discourse which accentuates a struggle between good and evil, both religious terrorist
groups and their Western-led protagonists, view non-members of either camp to be ‘infidels’ or ‘apostates’
(Cronin, 2003) and ‘immoral’ or ‘fanatical’ respectively. The maintenance of such a discourse can be seen as
serving a dual purpose; namely, to dehumanise the respective victims on both sides of the conflict, and
sustain in-group and out-group identities.
The plan
The United States federal government should substantially curtail its
surveillance of the United States – Mexico border.
Solvency
Easier immigration solves a myriad of problems – deaths, racism, technological
competitiveness, and national security
Johnson ’07 (Kevin R., Kevin R. Johnson is Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and
Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Davis , “Opening the Floodgates: Why America
Needs to Rethink its Immigration Policies”, http://nyupress.org/books/9780814743096/) Franzy
The presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States is a plain reality that needs to
be addressed. Open borders would provide a pragmatic, long-term solution to this nation’s
undocumented-immigrant and related immigration problems. Freeing up migration through a
liberal admissions policy would recognize that the enforcement of closed borders cannot stifle
the strong, perhaps irresistible, economic, social, and political pressures that fuel today’s
international migration. Border controls, as currently configured in the United States, simply
waste billions of dollars and result in thousands of deaths. They have not ended, and cannot
end, unlawful immigration. Like the United States’s failed prohibition of the alcohol trade in the
early twentieth century, effective enforcement of the immigration laws to halt undocumented
immigration has proven virtually impossible. To make matters worse, border enforcement
shares many of Prohibition’s negative side effects: increased criminal activity, abusive law
enforcement practices, and a caseload crisis in the courts. An inability to enforce the laws,
whether they prohibit alcohol or dramatically restrict immigration, undermines and damages
the legitimacy and moral force of the law. Elimination of border controls would help eliminate
these costs by making the laws more realistic. As summarized in Chapter 2, history shows that the cyclical fear of a
flood of immigrants of different “races” destroying U.S. society often reaches fever pitch. These nativist outbursts have never been
justified.
The United States, however, has responded to the anti-immigrant impulse and has taken
extreme action in the name of self-preservation. Time and time again, it has targeted vulnerable
minorities, excluding, deporting, and otherwise punishing them for real and imagined offenses.
History records these episodes with regret, embarrassment, and disbelief. But the errors are repeated and entirely predictable.
Even though it may seem ridiculous today, U.S. society once considered the German and the
Irish unassimilable “races” that diluted and degraded Anglo-Saxon racial purity.4 Although Chinese
and Japanese immigrants were despised groups that generated a plethora of immigration restrictions in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries,5 today people of Chinese and Japanese descent in the United States have higher average incomes than
whites.6 Southern and Eastern Europeans, whose immigration led to the creation of the national-origins quota system in 1924, are
now generally viewed as part of the mainstream, rather than as people of different, inferior races.7 The United States unfortunately
has failed to learn from its mistakes. Since
September 11, 2001, security concerns have distorted
immigration law and policy in ways that, years from now, history almost assuredly will record
with regret.8 Some observers, including the restrictionist Samuel Huntington, have complained that current levels of
immigration have made the assimilation of immigrants difficult.9 However, the United States has a long history of successfully
integrating immigrants into U.S. society. The waves of immigration in the early twentieth century were, as a percentage of the U.S.
population, larger than the current levels of immigration.10 Over the course of the twentieth century, the nation slowly but surely
adjusted. “Unassimilable
aliens” are now part of mainstream America. This past success suggests that the
United States could fully integrate immigrants into civil society in a legal regime without borders. Moreover, given the
influence of U.S. culture throughout the world in this high-tech information age, we might well
expect immigrants today to be much more familiar with the United States, to be prepared for
faster integration into society, and to be more capable of making informed judgments about
immigration than were immigrants of previous generations. As time goes by, integration into U.S. society may
be easier than it currently is. In any event, Latina/os currently are assimilating into U.S. social life. Despite popular perceptions, most
Latina/o immigrants, the largest component of the current immigration cohort, assimilate into the United States to a large degree.
As a group, they learn English, participate in the workforce to a larger extent than native-born citizens, and embrace widely accepted
American—often denominated “family”—values.11 By economic and political measures, for example, Cuban Americans on average
are better off than the average U.S. citizen.12 Not all Latina/os are Cuban, or course, and many have not achieved similar levels of
economic success. But the fact remains that immigrants assimilate to a far greater degree than is recognized by the restrictionists.
The assimilation of Latina/os can also be seen in their increasing political importance. Politicians across the political spectrum,
including President Bush, increasingly and aggressively court the Latina/o vote. Mainstream politicians often take care to avoid
taking positions on immigration and related issues that would tend to alienate this growing segment of the electorate.13 The
backlash against California governor Pete Wilson’s support for Proposition 187 in 1994 taught Republican politicians the potential
downside of taking strong anti-immigrant positions that anger Latina/os.14 Since then, most mainstream Republican politicians have
studiously avoided taking positions that could be characterized as anti-immigrant and anti-Latina/o. Not surprisingly, given the
growing Latina/o population, Latina/os in recent years have greatly increased their representation in elected offices,15 which
demonstrates their increasing integration into U.S. social life. A
move away from closed borders is called for at
this time in U.S. history. The law should be changed to create the legal presumption that a
noncitizen can enter the country unless it can be demonstrated that he or she would pose a
danger to the national security and public safety. This, of course, effectively would turn current
U.S. immigration law on its head. Open, not closed, borders would be the norm. Easy, not difficult, entry would be the
result. A less dramatic change in the law would be to allow labor migration within the nations that are a party to the North American
Free Trade Agreement. Over the past thirty years, a regional common market, which includes labor migration between and among
the member states, has evolved in the European Union. A similar labor migration agreement among the NAFTA nations would
recognize that migration from Mexico, perhaps Latin America generally, is inevitable,16 and must be managed responsibly,
efficiently, and safely. Globalization,
technological advances, and changing conceptions of the nationstate require serious study of new approaches to immigration and border controls.17 Besides
limiting the abuses and injuries that enforcement of the current immigration laws cause
immigrants and U.S. citizens, a system of easy entry promises many benefits—economic and
otherwise—to the United States. Importantly, allowing free labor migration would permit the
U.S. government to effectively and efficiently focus enforcement efforts on protecting national
security and public safety, a high priority after the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001.
2AC to Terror DA – Each type of surveillance technology has its limitations and
is proven to be widely inefficient
Ortega 13 (Bob, “Border technology remains flawed”,
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130524border-technology-flawed.html)
Faulty ground sensors
The ground sensors offer one example of the challenge of making sure technology works properly. About
13,400 have been deployed piecemeal along the border over several decades. They are typically placed along known or suspected
migrant or smuggler routes, and may detect vibrations (for foot traffic), metal (for vehicles) or have acoustic or infrared sensors.
Sensors from the Vietnam War era remain in use.
A possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty radio communications, may have contributed to the
death of Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire incident Oct. 2. As is often the case with
sensor alarms, agents didn’t detect anyone but each other when they arrived. Ivie, responding
separately, apparently mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire. One of the agents
shot and killed him.
But false alarms are nothing new.
In 2005, Homeland Security’s inspector general reported that only
4 percent of the alarm signals detected
migrants or smugglers (34 percent were confirmed false alarms, 62 percent couldn’t be
determined). The sensors, which run on batteries, frequently fail because of corrosion or bugs eating through
wires.
They were supposed to be replaced as part of the $1.1 billion Secure Border Initiative, a massive 2006 effort to boost security at the
border. But most of the money was spent on a problematic network of high-tech towers, known as SBInet.
The towers, to be equipped with video and infrared cameras and radar, were to cover the whole border. By the time Homeland
Security pulled the plug in 2010, after a host of problems, the contractor, Boeing, had completed only 15 towers covering a 72-mile
stretch of Arizona’s border. Most of the old ground sensors — with their false-alarm problems — remained.
In January 2011, Homeland Security launched another initiative, the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan.
That plan called for spending $1.5 billion over 10 years to integrate the SBInet towers, build new camera towers, buy trucks loaded
with surveillance gear — and replace 525 ground sensors in Arizona with more sophisticated military models. The military sensors
use a combination of technologies that can distinguish more accurately between, say, a four-legged coyote and the two-legged kind,
and can even detect the direction of travel.
But CBP confirmed this past week that — eight
years after the problems were identified — the sensors still
had not been replaced.
However, under the new technology plan, Arizona agents have received:
Twenty-three hand-held thermal-imaging devices (like night-vision binoculars).
Two “scope trucks” – modified Ford 150 4x4 trucks with day and night cameras mounted on retractable poles.
Twelve “agent portable surveillance systems,” which include radar, video and infrared video sensors and can be carried in a box and
set up on tripods.
Drone problems
Drones, too, have proven problematic. So far, CBP has acquired 10 drones, all versions of the Predator B made by
General Atomics, for about $18 million apiece. CBP’s unarmed drones carry radar, video and infrared sensors.
Theoretically, the drones can fly for up to 20 hours at a time. But last year, according to CBP, the drones flew an average of 94
minutes a day. The main problem: CBP
spent so much of its budget buying the drones that it hadn’t set
aside enough to operate them.
“They’re on the ground most of the time for lack of funding,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security-policy analyst for the
Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights organization that studies the effects of U.S. policies on Latin America. “They
cost $3,234 an hour to operate. They haven’t had the budget for maintenance or crews.”
Last year, Homeland
Security’s inspector general found that, because of poor planning, CBP not
only flew the drones less than one-third the number of planned hours in 2011, but also had to
use $25 million from other budgets pay for the hours the drones did fly.
CBP also didn’t have enough operational support equipment at the airfields where the drones
are based, and didn’t prioritize missions effectively, the inspector general found — all findings with which CBP concurred. Flight
hours last year rose 30 percent from the year before, to 5,700, but were still well below half the target hours. Budget cuts this year
because of the congressional sequester are likely to further limit flight hours, Isacson said.
The drones
are sensitive to high winds and thunderstorms. They face Federal Aviation Administration flight
restrictions because they are less able than manned aircraft to detect other aircraft and avoid collisions. And their use raises
privacy concerns.
At a Senate hearing in March, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., cited reports that “DHS
has customized its drone fleet to
carry out domestic surveillance missions such as identifying civilians carrying guns ...” that fly in the face of civil
liberties. “We must ask whether the trade-off in terms of border security is worth the privacy
sacrifice.”
But CBP officials have said they believe FAA concerns and other issues can be addressed, and that drones can help increase
surveillance wherever it’s most needed.
More coordination
In practice, every
piece of technology at the border has limitations:
Eight aerostats, or tethered radar blimps, that CBP is taking over from the military, can’t be flown in high winds,
and the line-of-sight radar makes them less effective in rugged, mountainous areas, which is much of
the Tucson Sector. In May 2011, an aerostat crashed in a Sierra Vista neighborhood after coming loose in 50-mile-an-hour wind
gusts.
CBP limits the use of its 16 Blackhawk
helicopters because the high rate at which they guzzle fuel makes them very expensive to
operate, according to pilots; and CBP budget documents confirm plans to temporarily ground nine of the 16 Blackhawks next year pending enough
money for renovations.
The 16 workhorse P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft are, on average, 42 years old. Refurbishing costs $28 million apiece.
But the bigger issue is a lack of coordination in fitting all of the pieces together and making effective use of the data they provide,
said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “It’s still
hard for CBP to figure out what we get out of all these billions that have been spent,” he said, which hampers planning for the
future.
A2 Terror/Security DA: framing politics through the risk of individuals and the
border produces a police state bent on racist purges. [keep in the 1AC just
maybe not in the same space]
This homogenized standard of normality culminates in the ultimate police state
that must continue to purge the undesirable in order to survive.
Salter 2004 (Mark B., School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ontario, “Passports,
Mobility, and Security: How smart can the border be?”)
At the border, all visitors, including Americans, have a greatly circumscribed set of rights. Border
officials have wide powers of search, seizure, detention, and of course, the ability to exclude
travelers from the country. Once admitted into the country, however, one's rights, including the right to due process,
come into effect. Under this system, the intense application of state power through the examination at the border substitutes for
wider police powers of surveillance once inside American territory. Simply, an examination at the border cannot deter or detect a
motivated criminal. Limits in intelligence-gathering and information-sharing will inevitably lead to the admission of more terrorists.
The openness on which America prides itself proves to be a weakness in terms of terrorist activities. Thus, controls
have been
tightened at the border and the surveillance of “high-risk” nationals will be extended
domestically. Because the examination of the 9/11 terrorists failed, the Homeland Security Department and other federal law
enforcement agencies aim to continue the surveillance of “high-risk” individuals within American territory. The transition from
“undesirable” visitors to “high-risk” marks a significant shift in discourse. The
exclusion of undesirable visitors
indicates knowledge of the individual, if only as undesirable. However, defining individuals as
“high-risk” indicates a lack of precise knowledge, suggesting only suspicions based on statistics,
sociology, and narratives. As the government defines individuals as “high-risk,” it encourages a
cycle of insecurity that leads to the increase of police powers and bureaucratic structures of
control. Bigo (2002) has made this argument in the European context, but we believe that it can be extended to the post-9/11
American context also. For example, after the capture of Abdullah Al Muhajir (born Jose Padilla), Attorney General John
Ashcroft said, “Al Qaeda officials knew that as a citizen of the United States holding a valid U.S. passport, Al Muhajir would be able to
travel freely in the U.S. without drawing attention to himself” (2002b). Al Muhajir was “high-risk” precisely because of his mobility,
not because of something that had been proven in court. Ashcroft petitioned to have Al Muhajir declared an enemy combatant,
leading to a severe circumscription of his rights, which would normally be unconceivable.
Whereas previous border security regimes focused on the actual examination between the
agent of the government and the traveler, the surveillance regime aims to make the agents of
the government present but invisible so that travelers police themselves. By surveillance we
invoke the work of Foucault who describes an architecture of power and authority by which
individuals come to police themselves in addition to being policed from outside (1977:189).8 This
surveillance strategy operates most efficiently when “surveillance is permanent in its effects,
even if it is discontinuous in its action [consequently] the perfection of power should tend to
render its actual exercise unnecessary” (Foucault, 1977:201). The topography of these surveillance strategies have
been studied productively by Lyon (2001, 2003)and Bigo. This surveillance system applies to the border security
regime, and in the case of the US-VISIT, to the entire mobile population of border-crossers.
In addition to an extended examination at the border, the US-VISIT special registration program continues the work of domestic
monitoring of high-risk visitors. Aliens are initially fingerprinted and photographed at the border. They must report any change in
their employment, schooling, or residence details to the government within ten days, and must also report in person to an BCIS
official after one month and one year, where they are interviewed and are compared to the records of their fingerprints and
photograph, after which their are also recorded. The function of the program is to define, regulate, and identify foreign visitors in
the country. While
the extended examination strengthens the discernment functions of the
contemporary border regime, the collection and verification of biometric information and
residence details indicate a shift in the mode of policing from examination to surveillance.
This surveillance regime imitates the 1994 Californian Proposition 187 that required all state employees to act as de facto
immigration inspectors and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that offered a mechanism by
which anyone could report illegal immigrants or their employers. The proposed Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS)
creates a national neighborhood watch program. Through a toll-free telephone number American transportation workers, truckers,
letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and other members of the USA Citizen Corps may identify
suspected terrorists, who will then be questioned by authorities.
Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, has also launched a public awareness campaign.
The Citizens' Preparedness Guideencourages every citizen to be “vigilant” toward suspicious individuals, packages, and situations.
The guide enlists all 280 million Americans into the war on terror. For example, Shiels reported programs that trained airline
passengers to restrain hijackers (2002); andUSA Today ran a feature “Here's what to do if you're hijacked,” in which an expert on
terrorist attacks suggested: “You want to take a good look at who's getting on board. Do
your own screening and
profiling. You want to look into their eyes. You can tell a lot about people by looking in their
eyes. Are they shifty? Are they nervous?” (Sloan, 2002). This is epitomized in the campaign slogan: “Don't be afraid,
be ready.”9 We would argue that the campaign in fact urges citizens to be afraid in an “economy of
danger.” Simply put, buying duct tape and extra water does not attack the roots of global terrorism—rather it places American
citizens in the position of continuous threat against which they can only be ready to victims. The primary functions of this public
campaign are to distract the populace from the external war on terror (which seems unable to reach its goals—witness the absence
Reinforcing the
notion that all citizens are watching each other leads each individual to attempt to appear as
“normal” as possible. Examination has been supplanted by a surveillance regime, in which every
citizen is both watched and a watcher
of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden) and to enlist the populace's help in policing the national population.