DDI Border Surveillance Neg
Notes
Tight case press – look into it
- Gaurav and Nick
1NC On
1NC—Framing
1NC FL
Value to Life doesn’t outweigh---prioritize existence because value is subjective
Tännsjö 11, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011,
“Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HStexter/shaltthou.pdf
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to
utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that,
each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism
should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely
commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people
live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally
wrong to kill oneself. It
is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living , they believe they
do . And even if some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future
lives will be better . They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From the point of view of
evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of
one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive
dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My
strong belief
is that most of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth
living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic.¶ Let
us just for
the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if
this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should
do, each one of us . My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill myself,
many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of
feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish,
or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads
to rage,
loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish
act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning , if they do, does not
mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while
devastated because of.
Consequentialism key---pacifism is complicit with evil
Isaac 2—Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C.,
Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It
is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of
"aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The
status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist
violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires
us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a
Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls
for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and
civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty , because they are not accompanied
by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at
hand . The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic
choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of
power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics,
in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the
political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to
develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not
reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of
personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to
view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters ; (2) it fails to see
that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is
often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in
principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much
about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the
motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that
generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in
pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates
those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Their conception of violence is reductive and can’t be solved
Boulding 77 Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung Author(s): Kenneth E. BouldingReviewed
work(s):Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1977), pp. 75-86Published Kenneth Ewart
Boulding (January 18, 1910 – March 18, 1993) was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet,
religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher.[1][2] He was
cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in
economics and social science. He graduated from Oxford University, and was granted United States
citizenship in 1948. During the years 1949 to 1967, he was a faculty member of the University of
Michigan. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained
until his retirement.
Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of 'structural violence' 'and 'positive peace'. They are metaphors
rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more
persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can
be very dangerous, for it is both persuasive and wrong. The metaphor of structural violence I would argue
falls right into this category. The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condition in which more than half the
human race lives, is 'like' a thug beating up the victim and 'taking his money away from him in the street, or it is 'like' a conqueror stealing the land of the people
and reducing them to slavery. The
implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the conqueror and
there is some truth in the metaphor, in the modern world at
least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a
very different phenomenon from poverty. The processes which create and sustain poverty are not at all like the
processes which create and sustain violence, although like everything else in 'the world, everything is
somewhat related to everything else. There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence, but unfortunately Galitung's
metaphor of structural violence as he has used it has diverted attention from this problem. Violence in the
behavioral sense, that is, somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a 'threshold'
phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over, but at some 'threshold
the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While
boiling over will take place. The study of the structures which underlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social
science in general. Threshold phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent 'breaks' in the systenm rather than uniformities. Violence,
whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the 'strain' on a system is too great for its 'strength'. The metaphor here is that violence is like what
happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social systems, are so interwoven historically that it is very difficult to separate
them. The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is Ithe increase in the strength of the system, 'the other is the
diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these 'things which enable a system to stand lincreasing strain
without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system 'are largely dynamic in character, such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in
relative economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflicts of interest 'are only part 'of the strain on a system, and not always the most
important part. It is very hard for people ito know their interests, and misperceptions of 'interest take place mainly through the dynamic processes, not through the
structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect people's behavior, not the 'real' interests, whatever these may be, and the gap between percepti'on
and reality can be very large and resistant to change. However, what
Galitung calls structural violence (which has been defined 'by one
unkind commenltator as anything that Galitung doesn't like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low
expectation of life, on that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however
unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include all 'the problems of poverty,
destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems
which are only peripherally related to 'the structures whi'ch produce violence. This is not rto say that the cultures of
violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are cultures of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are
poverty cultures. But the
dynamics lof poverty and the success or failure to rise out of it are of a complexity far beyond
anything which the metaphor of structural violence can offer. While the metaphor of structural violence
performed a service in calling attention to a problem, it may have d'one a disservice in preventing us from finding the
answer.
1NC—Cartels Adv.
No internal link – no ev that increased border smuggling increases cartel power
Mexico is far from a failed state and trade high now
DeLong 2000, professor of Economics at Cal, 2K, J. Bradford DeLong, professor of Economics and chair
of the Political Economy major at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Deputy Assistant
Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence
Summers. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a visiting
scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, “NAFTA's (Qualified) Success”, http://www.jbradford-delong.net/TotW/nafta.html Mollie
It is time to conclude that NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement--is a success. It is nearly seven years since the ratification of
NAFTA, nearly seven years since then-Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen argued and President Clinton decided that NAFTA should be the second major initiative of
his administration. The major argument for NAFTA was that it was
the best thing the United States could do to raise the
chances for Mexico to become democratic and prosperous, and that the United States had both a strong
interest and a neighborly duty to try to help Mexican political and economic development. By that yardstick
NAFTA has been a clear success. NAFTA has helped Mexico economically. Over the past five years real GDP has grown at 5.5
percent per year. Even including the sharp shock of the 1995 peso crisis, Mexican real GDP has grown at 3.8 percent per
year since the ratification of NAFTA. The urban unemployment rate that was 6 percent in 1992 and rose to 8.5
percent in 1995 is now less than 4 percent. The Mexican boom has been led by the manufacturing,
construction, transportation, and communications sectors. Most of all, the Mexican boom has been led by
exports: next year Mexico's real exports will be more than three times as large as they were at the ratification of NAFTA,
and as a share of GDP exports have grown from a little more than 10 to 17 percent. It is here--in the growing volume of
exports and in the building-up of export industries--that NAFTA has made the difference. Four-fifths of Mexico's exports go to the United States. More than twothirds of Mexico's imports come from the United States. NAFTA guarantees Mexican producers tariff- and quota-free access to the American market. Without this
guarantee, a smaller number of Mexican exporters would dare try to develop the strong links with the market north of the Rio Grande that have enabled them to
sell their exports. Without this guarantee, few--either in Mexico or from overseas--would have dared to invest in the manufacturing capacity that has allowed
Mexico to satisfy United States demand. Without NAFTA's guarantee of tariff- and quota-free access to the American market, we would not have seen the rise in
trade within industries between Mexico and the U.S. over the past half decade. Rising intra-industry trade means that Mexico and the U.S. are moving toward a
greater degree of specialization and a finer division of labor in important industries like autos--where labor-intensive portions are more and more done in Mexico-and textiles--where the U.S. increasingly does high-tech spinning and weaving and Mexico increasingly does lower-tech cutting and sewing. As economists Mary
Burfisher, Sherman Robinson, and Karen Thierfelder put it, NAFTA
has nurtured the growth of productivity through "Smithian"
NAFTA, would
Mexican domestic savings have doubled as a share of GDP since the early 1990s? Surely not. Without NAFTA,
would the number of telephone lines in Mexico have doubled in the 1990s? Probably not. Moreover,
Mexican exports are by no means low-tech labor- and primary product-intensive goods. More than 20 percent
efficiency gains that result from "widen[ing] the exent of the market" and capturing "increasing returns to finer specialization." Without
of all Mexican exports are capital goods. More than 70 percent of Mexican manufacturing exports are metal products. Without NAFTA, would U.S. big three auto
producers have invested in the Mexican auto industry, and would Mexican exports of autos and auto parts to the U.S. have grown from $10 to $30 billion a year?
Surely not. More important, NAFTA
has helped Mexico politically. Strong economic growth makes political
reform much, much easier: reslicing a growing pie is possible under many circumstances where
reslicing a static pie is not. AIncreasing economic integration brings with it pressures for increasing
political integration as well: the liquidation of the statist-corporatist PRI order, and a shift toward democratic institutions that
are more like those of the industrial democracies that Mexico hopes to join (and to which mexico hopes that NAFTA
will serve as a passport of admission). The result has been the first peaceful transfer of power in Mexico in more
than a lifetime , with the election to the Mexican presidency of Vicente Fox Queseda. Economist Dani Rodrik describes political democracy as a powerful
meta-institution for building the political and economic institutions needed for success: thus Mexico's future looks much brighter now
than it did back in the late 1980s when the dominant PRI regularly stole elections and held a
hammerlock on Mexico's government.
Not internal link – no ev that cartel power along the border spills over across the state
Mexican state violence is decreasing - trends
Mexico News Daily, 3-21-2015, "Mexico Peace Index sees decline in homicides, violence," Mexico
News Daily, http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/index-sees-decline-homicides-violence/)//GV
Violence and crime have declined in Mexico since 2012, says a report by an international research organization, with current
conditions being similar to what they were in 2007. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) says falling homicide rates
and activity by organized crime have not only made the country more peaceful but have helped boost
the economy. It also concludes that there is great potential for peace in the long term based on
institutional strengths. The Mexico Peace Index shows the national level of peace has improved 16% since
2011, with improvements in 26 states, but also notes that under-reporting of crimes and the lack of prosecutions are a concern. The justice
efficiency indicator, which measures the ratio of homicides to homicide convictions, continues to worsen: the ratio doubled from 1.45 in 2006 to 3.43 in 2013. The
ratio of people sentenced to prison terms also worsened, falling from 210 per 100,000 people to 104, which combined with the deterioration in the justice efficiency
indicator represents “a troubling trend that highlights the urgent need to fully implement the current justice reforms.” The institute said another serious issue is
that most violent crimes go unreported: only 8% of rapes and 23% of assaults are reported to authorities. However, that under-reporting has been taken into
account by adjusting figures to create a more accurate index, say its authors. The reliability of crime statistics has been called into question by many over the years,
a concern to which the IEP has responded by comparing other data and victim surveys against official figures. The results, says the institute, “strongly suggest the
progress in peace is real.” That progress means Mexico is almost as peaceful now as it was in 2007, says the study, which is when the war on drug trafficking
escalated under former President Felipe Calderón. Homicides
have seen the greatest improvement, having decreased by
almost 30%, while the level of organized crime dropped by 25%, though weapons-related crimes were up 11%.
Turn - decreasing border enforcement increases cartel violence
Jena Baker McNeill, 3-9-2009, "15 Steps to Better Border Security: Reducing America's Southern
Exposure," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/03/15-steps-tobetter-border-security-reducing-americas-southern-exposure)//GV
One of many concerns raised by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington is the security of U.S. borders. The Homeland
Security Act of 2002 established border security as a major mission for the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The failed congressional
attempt at comprehensive immigration reform focused renewed attention on the U.S. border with
Mexico as well as on the challenges of illegal border crossings and surges in cross-border crime. In
response, the Bush Administration employed additional Border Patrol agents, deployed new technologies at the
border, and erected physical barriers. These efforts have contributed to a decrease in the illegal alien population in the U.S. and to an
expansion of cross-border security cooperation with Mexico. Sustaining these efforts is an essential component of regaining control of America's southern border
and battling cross-border crime cartels while improving the flow of legal goods and services across the border. This was a good start. Today, however, the
Obama Administration must continue these measures and work to integrate national efforts with state and
local governments as well as with private citizens. At the Border Understanding the southern border is the first step toward gauging
border security progress. This border is more than just a demarcation on a map-it has unique challenges that must be considered in any attempt to gain operational
control. Not only is the southern border extremely long, spanning 2,000 miles from Texas to California, its terrain is incredibly diverse, from rugged, mountainous
regions to expansive and barren desert.[1] While physical features, such as the Rio Grande River and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, serve as natural border
barriers that limit the ability of people to enter the U.S. illegally, in other areas all that separates the United States from Mexico is an old fence.[2] The
main
method by which to enter and exit the U.S. and Mexico is through the 39 ports of entry (POE).[3] These POEs
operate almost around the clock, processing vast numbers of people, goods, and vehicles. In 2005, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processed more than
319 million people and more than 133 million trucks and cars, a good majority of which came through the southern border.[4] While the POEs act as a security
mechanism, these entrances are also a constant source of vulnerability, largely stemming from out-of-date and dilapidated infrastructure.[5] POEs serve to regulate
the flow of people, goods, and services into and out of the U.S. and Mexico, making the border an economic engine that generates hundreds of billions of dollars a
year in commerce for both countries-and moving goods and services throughout North America. This shared border has also led to an extensive economic
relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. America is Mexico's primary source of foreign direct investment (FDI).[6] Immigrants living in the U.S. send millions of
dollars in remittances back home to Mexico every year.[7] The benefits of this relationship to the U.S. are also immense. Due to the free-trade relationship
established between the two countries under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico became America's second-largest trading partner. (In
2008, China became No. 2, with Canada in first place, and Mexico dropping to third.)[8] Challenges and Challenging Solutions As the economic relationship between
the U.S. and Mexico has expanded, challenges have also arisen that jeopardize the security of the border and require the immediate attention of both the U.S. and
Mexico. Cartels
Running Amok. Criminal cartels have seized de facto control of broad swathes of land in
Mexico just across the U.S. border.[9] Some of the most powerful cartels include the Gulf Cartel, The
Federation, the Tijuana Cartel, the Sinaloa, and the Juarez Cartel-who have also been known to make
alliances with one another. These cartels sell drugs and weapons, engage in human trafficking, and
launder money. From these "businesses" stem ever-increasing numbers of kidnappings, robberies, and
murders. No ordinary street gangs, these cartels are like violent mini-militaries, fully equipped with intelligence, weapons, and other equipment.[10] They
engage in these crimes largely without interference from Mexican law enforcement, which is simply too
overwhelmed, lacking both manpower and resources to tackle the problem.[11] Cartel violence has escalated in recent years in
retaliation to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's efforts to crack down on cartel criminal activity. In 2007, close to 3,000 people were
murdered by cartels.[12] By 2008, the number had risen to more than 5,300 (the number is expected to rise in 2009).[13]
The motivation behind this violence largely centers on the highly profitable illegal drug trade-largely fed by American demands for illegal narcotics. This battle has
induced outrageous acts of violence in areas like Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas, including gruesome beheadings.[14] In June
2008, a 12-year-old girl was killed when cartel gunmen used her as a human shield.[15] The
violence has begun to spill over into the
United States. In January 2008, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Luis Aguilar, was run over and killed by drug smugglers as he tried to arrest them in
California.[16] In 2005, four Americans were kidnapped for ransom by a cartel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, not too far from Laredo, Texas.[17] While they were later
released, their kidnapping as well as other acts of violence led the U.S. State Department to issue a travel warning for American tourists in the Laredo area.
Poverty, starvation, disease, and human rights issues are alt causes to a Mexico failed State
– their 1ac Manwaring ev
1NC—Relations Adv.
No internal link – no ev that decreasing border security would directly increase POE
investment – their advantage hinges on one bill proving the trade off, but no ev that
tradeoffs would occur in the future
Bureaucracy and cooperation inefficiency are alt causes to POE congestion
Regan 2011 Sean Regan Commander, U.S. Coast Guard NAVAL WAR COLLEGE U.S. – MEXICO POLICY COORDINATION AN ASSESSMENT
OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BORDER POLICY COORDINATION EFFORT A paper submitted to the Faculty of the Naval War College in partial
satisfaction of the requirements of the Department of Joint Military Operations. 2011 http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a555536.pdf
The Policy Coordination Challenge Bureaucracies
on both sides of the border struggle to coordinate policies
across and within various levels of government including federal, state, and local structures. However, the complexity
and interdependence of bi-national issues means there is rarely a clear, single lead department or
agency on any given issue on either side of the border. Complicating coordination efforts are the various and often duplicative authorities
held by many U.S. and GoM institutions. In addition, the various bi-national interactions at the federal, state, and
local levels are often not apparent to the other levels of government. The different government
stakeholders often address issues directly and indirectly through bi-lateral institutions, commissions,
and agreements.7 The failure to coordinate efforts results in disjointed border policies and activities
leading to increased levels of congestion, delay, higher border-crossing costs, and insufficient
infrastructure planning. One example of a disjointed effort can be found at coordination related to the
establishment and management of land ports of entry (POEs).8 The United States and Mexico have over
seven federal departments within each national-level structure with POE-related responsibilities.9
No internal link between security and relations – their ev is about two officials giving their
opinion over CIR
Spying kills relations
Reuters 7/10/13 Mexican president says possible U.S. spying 'totally unacceptable 'July 10, 2013|Reuters
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-07-10/news/sns-rt-us-usa-security-snowden-mexico-20130710_1_mexico-city-media-report-foreignministry
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Wednesday that if allegations were proven that the
United States had spied on its southern neighbor, it would be "totally unacceptable." During a visit to
northern Mexico, Pena Nieto was asked for his views on a media report that the U.S. National Agency had spied on countries including Mexico
"We have asked quite clearly, via the foreign ministry ... for an explanation from the government ... about possible spying," he told reporters in
the border state of Chihuahua. "And
we want to know if this is the case, and if it so, it would obviously be
totally unacceptable," he added, noting that relations with Washington remained cordial. Claims that the
NSA monitored internet traffic, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, were made in a Brazilian newspaper citing documents leaked by
Edward Snowden, a fugitive former NSA contractor. Earlier, Mexico's foreign ministry said it had asked Washington for an explanation about
the report in the paper O Globo. Separately, the Mexican government responded to a media report alleging that the prior administration had
signed a contract in 2007 allowing the United States to install a to monitor phone and internet communications in Mexico. "The
General
is reviewing the documentation regarding this apparent agreement. We are going to verify if it exists
and under what conditions," said Eduardo Sanchez, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Emilio
Gamboa, the Senate leader of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, said the contract
allegations needed to be thoroughly investigated. "Friendship is made by cooperation, not by spying
on us," Gamboa told reporters in Mexico City.
Turn – border surveillance is key to reducing illegal flows across the border – failure hurts
relations
Walser 2013 Ray Walser, Senior Policy Analyst specializing in Latin America at The Heritage Foundation
“Obama in Mexico: Change the Reality, Not the Conversation” 5/1/13
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/05/01/obama-in-mexico-change-the-reality-not-the-conversation/
Of course there is much value in an opportunities-oriented approach to U.S.–Mexico relations. The two countries have unique
ties based on patterns of trade, investment, integrated manufacturing, and the movement of peoples.
Both nations should continue to deepen this relationship by focusing on everything from trade, global competitiveness, and modernizing and
securing our shared 2,000-mile border in ways that advance economic freedom and improve educational quality and energy development. Yet
addressing hard, seemingly intractable issues related to the illicit traffic in drugs, people, guns, and money
moving with relative ease across the U.S.–Mexico border remains a major challenge for both leaders. The
Obama Administration has done little to reduce drug demand in the U.S. Consumption of marijuana is on the rise among
teens. There is legal confusion in Washington following passage of legalization measures in Colorado and Washington. Resource reductions for
drug interdiction and treatment are built into the fiscal crisis. Prior objectives for drug prevention and treatment established by the Obama
Administration have not been met, according to the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile,
cash and guns flow south
largely unchecked into Mexico. Cooperation with Mexico may be scaled back or waning as U.S.
officials are excluded from intelligence fusion centers the U.S. helped to set up. A new emphasis on citizen
security may take the law enforcement heat of trafficking kingpins, who will likely attempt to move drugs across Mexico with less violence and
greater efficiency as Mexican law enforcement focuses on the most violent criminal elements.
Latin American instability won’t escalate – diplomacy, treaties, and no incentives
Taylor Marvin, 8-7-2014, "Why Are There No Nuclear Weapons in South America?," Political Violence
@ a Glance, http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2014/08/07/why-are-there-no-nuclear-weapons-insouth-america/)//GV
As part of its occasional ‘Would Someone Please Explain This to Me” series, Political Violence @ a Glance recently asked readers to suggest questions about the
world of conflict and international relations. Reader Nawal Ali asks:
nuclear weapons program?
Why has Latin America been so free of nukes or at least a
Is it because technical requirements for nuclear weapons development are much higher then civilian nuclear ventures
or is it something else at play? The 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banned nuclear weapons in Latin America. But the treaty’s existence does not fully answer this question
— if Latin American states really desired nuclear weapons they would develop them anyway and accept the consequences, refuse to fully abide by the treaty, or
would not have signed it in the first place. Today’s Latin
America includes several countries that likely possess the
technological and financial resources to develop nuclear weapons, with effort — Argentina, Brazil, and
Mexico all spring to mind. One of these countries, Brazil, has long sought a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a body whose current
permanent members all possess nuclear arms. Latin America is also no stranger to arms races, with a little-known early
20th century dreadnought race between Argentina, Brazil, and Chile being the most famous example.
And as David R. Mares writes in his excellent book Violent Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America, interstate conflict, or at least militarized
interstate bargaining, is more common in the region than commonly known. Chile militarized its long border during the country’s period of dictatorship, Argentina
nearly went to war with Chile over Beagle Channel islands in the late 1970s, and violent rhetoric between Chile and its neighbors persists. So
if several
Latin American countries have the resources to develop nuclear weapons, and arguably at least some
incentive to do so, why does the region remain nuclear weapons-free? The simplest answer is that
nuclear weapons have gone out of style. As John Mueller has extensively argued, despite decades of proliferation
fears the number of nuclear-armed states has grown slowly. In an era where interstate war is comparatively
rare, the value of a nuclear security guarantee has shrunk when nuclear weapons’ diplomatic and
image costs have grown. As the threat of major war has receded both around the world and in the
region
—
which is partially due to US hegemony in Latin America , as Joe Young noted — the practical security
gains from nuclear weapons have declined.
Given the time, effort, and resources required to acquire nuclear weapons, if
states
cannot expect enough security or prestige gains to justify their costs they will be more hesitant to
invest in them. Tellingly, countries that have armed in the last few decades have tended to be isolated or
facing extraordinarily dangerous security situations: Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and South Africa are all a little of column A, and a
little of column B. None of the Latin American states with the resources to develop nuclear arms are, or more arguably have been, in this situation. Beyond
security, nuclear weapons are no longer seen as a path to international status. If a Latin American
country armed itself today with a nuclear weapon it would be more likely to receive global
condemnation than great power prestige. Indeed, in the modern era aircraft carriers are arguably a more
important military status symbol than nuclear weapons . For Latin American countries anxious to improve their international
standing, prestige stems from economic growth and membership in international organizations like the BRICS bloc (see Oliver Stuenkel’s writing on Brazil and the
BRICS), and conventional weapons, rather than nuclear status. (Though it is worth noting that in Latin America this argument is partially a circular one, as Brazil is
one of the world’s most politically and economically prominent non-nuclear states.) But it is important to remember that despite these explanations the lack of
nuclear weapons in Latin America is not an accident; Argentina
and Brazil both launched, and then abandoned, nuclear
weapons programs. Mitchell Reiss examines this aborted nuclear arms race in detail as a case study in his 1995 book Bridled Ambitions: Why Countries
Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities. In the 1970s Argentina developed a secret enrichment facility and by the early 1980s could “theoretically” enrich weaponsgrade uranium. At the same time each branch of the Brazilian military had a separate nuclear weapons program, the Air Force built an underground nuclear test
chamber hidden in the Amazon (though Brazil was not actually capable of carrying out a nuclear test), and the country maintained that it had the right to set off a
Both countries had incentives to develop nuclear weapons, and while their development
programs ran into severe technical problems and were never close to success, it’s plausible that they
could have eventually produced weapons with enough time and effort. So why did Argentina and
test nuclear explosion.
Brazil shelve their nuclear weapons programs? First, Reiss writes, both countries’ weapons programs moved
slowly enough — partially due to serious setbacks caused by nuclear states’ refusal to export their
sensitive technologies — that their governments had ample opportunity to shutter them. Secondly, both
realized that a nuclear arms race was a mutual losing game. Brazil’s great size advantage meant that
Argentina could never match a Brazilian nuclear arsenal in absolute terms over the long run, but also that
Brazil would lose relative prestige if Argentina developed nuclear weapons. Third, the existing Treaty of
Tlatelolco, which both countries had signed but not fully abided by, provided a convenient “out” and a
more acceptable alternative to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which both countries resented and had initially cooperated to
oppose. Fourth, bilateral relations improved in the late 1970s and soon afterwards Argentina and Brazil’s transitions to democracy reduced their governments’
desire for the bomb. Argentina’s humiliating loss in the Falklands War increased its incentive to gain a nuclear deterrent, but also helped usher in a civilian
government much less interested in nuclear weapons. Finally,
simple good diplomacy and the desire for international
approval allowed Argentina and Brazil to mutually agree to abandon nuclear ambitions, and anyway
while both were rivals for a leading position in South American neither saw war as any real possibility ,
which lowered the contest’s stakes. In a series of agreements in the early 1990s both agreed to shutter their nuclear weapons programs and fully abide by the
Treaty of Tlatelolco, though Brazil remains interested in developing a nuclear-powered attack submarine. While some allege that Brazil could develop nuclear
weapons on short notice or use work on nuclear submarine propulsion as cover for a weapons program,
for such a drastic step in the near future.
it is difficult to see any real rational
1NC—Structural Vio. Adv.
Turn - decreasing border enforcement increases cartel violence
Jena Baker McNeill, 3-9-2009, "15 Steps to Better Border Security: Reducing America's Southern
Exposure," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/03/15-steps-tobetter-border-security-reducing-americas-southern-exposure)//GV
One of many concerns raised by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington is the security of U.S. borders. The Homeland
Security Act of 2002 established border security as a major mission for the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The failed congressional
attempt at comprehensive immigration reform focused renewed attention on the U.S. border with
Mexico as well as on the challenges of illegal border crossings and surges in cross-border crime. In
response, the Bush Administration employed additional Border Patrol agents, deployed new technologies at the
border, and erected physical barriers. These efforts have contributed to a decrease in the illegal alien population in the U.S. and to an
expansion of cross-border security cooperation with Mexico. Sustaining these efforts is an essential component of regaining control of America's southern border
and battling cross-border crime cartels while improving the flow of legal goods and services across the border. This was a good start. Today, however, the
Obama Administration must continue these measures and work to integrate national efforts with state and
local governments as well as with private citizens. At the Border Understanding the southern border is the first step toward gauging
border security progress. This border is more than just a demarcation on a map-it has unique challenges that must be considered in any attempt to gain operational
control. Not only is the southern border extremely long, spanning 2,000 miles from Texas to California, its terrain is incredibly diverse, from rugged, mountainous
regions to expansive and barren desert.[1] While physical features, such as the Rio Grande River and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, serve as natural border
barriers that limit the ability of people to enter the U.S. illegally, in other areas all that separates the United States from Mexico is an old fence.[2] The
main
method by which to enter and exit the U.S. and Mexico is through the 39 ports of entry (POE).[3] These POEs
operate almost around the clock, processing vast numbers of people, goods, and vehicles. In 2005, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processed more than
319 million people and more than 133 million trucks and cars, a good majority of which came through the southern border.[4] While the POEs act as a security
mechanism, these entrances are also a constant source of vulnerability, largely stemming from out-of-date and dilapidated infrastructure.[5] POEs serve to regulate
the flow of people, goods, and services into and out of the U.S. and Mexico, making the border an economic engine that generates hundreds of billions of dollars a
year in commerce for both countries-and moving goods and services throughout North America. This shared border has also led to an extensive economic
relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. America is Mexico's primary source of foreign direct investment (FDI).[6] Immigrants living in the U.S. send millio ns of
dollars in remittances back home to Mexico every year.[7] The benefits of this relationship to the U.S. are also immense. Due to the free-trade relationship
established between the two countries under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico became America's second-largest trading partner. (In
2008, China became No. 2, with Canada in first place, and Mexico dropping to third.)[8] Challenges and Challenging Solutions As the economic relationship between
the U.S. and Mexico has expanded, challenges have also arisen that jeopardize the security of the border and require the immediate attention of both the U.S. and
Mexico. Cartels
Running Amok. Criminal cartels have seized de facto control of broad swathes of land in
Mexico just across the U.S. border.[9] Some of the most powerful cartels include the Gulf Cartel, The
Federation, the Tijuana Cartel, the Sinaloa, and the Juarez Cartel-who have also been known to make
alliances with one another. These cartels sell drugs and weapons, engage in human trafficking, and
launder money. From these "businesses" stem ever-increasing numbers of kidnappings, robberies, and
murders. No ordinary street gangs, these cartels are like violent mini-militaries, fully equipped with intelligence, weapons, and other equipment.[10] They
engage in these crimes largely without interference from Mexican law enforcement, which is simply too
overwhelmed, lacking both manpower and resources to tackle the problem.[11] Cartel violence has escalated in recent years in
retaliation to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's efforts to crack down on cartel criminal activity. In 2007, close to 3,000 people were
murdered by cartels.[12] By 2008, the number had risen to more than 5,300 (the number is expected to rise in 2009).[13]
The motivation behind this violence largely centers on the highly profitable illegal drug trade-largely fed by American demands for illegal narcotics. This battle has
induced outrageous acts of violence in areas like Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas, including gruesome beheadings.[14] In June
2008, a 12-year-old girl was killed when cartel gunmen used her as a human shield.[15] The
violence has begun to spill over into the
United States. In January 2008, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Luis Aguilar, was run over and killed by drug smugglers as he tried to arrest them in
California.[16] In 2005, four Americans were kidnapped for ransom by a cartel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, not too far from Laredo, Texas.[17] While they were later
released, their kidnapping as well as other acts of violence led the U.S. State Department to issue a travel warning for American tourists in the Laredo area.
Drone surveillance at the border check drug operations
Vogel 2/11 (Nate, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Legislative Counsel at the New York Civil
Liberties Union, “DRONES AT HOME: THE DEBATE OVER UNMANNED AIRCRAFT IN STATE
LEGISLATURES”, February 11th 2015,
http://www.albanygovernmentlawreview.org/Articles/Vol08_1/8.1.204-N.%20Vogel.pdf)
Unmanned aircraft also appear in American skies where they engage in both training missions and
surveillance operations. 69 Military units that operate combat UAVs overseas train in the United
States .70 For example, the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard flies training missions using MQ-9 Reapers from a base in upstate
New York.71
The unit insists the aircraft do not carry weapons and do not participate in local law
enforcement, but they could be called upon by the State’s governor to assist disaster response. 72
Several federal law enforcement
agencies have considered operating unmanned aircraft in the United States
to conduct surveillance .73 In 2013 the Department of Justice released a report detailing an audit of the agency’s funding for law
enforcement UAVs.74 At that time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug
Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service had all used unmanned aircraft either for testing or real operations.75
The FBI and U.S. Customs may have the most active domestic operations.76 The FBI confirmed in a
letter to Senator Rand Paul in July 2013 that it had used unmanned aircraft in domestic operations
ten times since 2006. 77 The letter explained that its operations “related to kidnappings, search and
rescue operations, drug interdictions, and fugitive investigations.”78 U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
has employed unmanned aircraft for border surveillance for several years. 79 Additionally, documents obtained
through Freedom of Information Requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) revealed that U.S. Customs ran a loan program through
which the agency conducts domestic operations on behalf of other government agencies.80 Even local law enforcement agencies participated
in the program.81 The EFF documents show that between 2010 and 2012,
Customs flew unmanned aircraft for county
Sherriff offices thirteen times .82 Besides Department of Justice operations, the DOJ Audit also found that the Office of Community
Oriented Policing has distributed funding to “local law enforcement agencies and nonprofit organizations to purchase UAS for testing or use.”83
The report noted that the agency did not track funding carefully enough to know exactly how much federal support went to local law
enforcement UAV programs.84
Border Surveillance necessary to solve cartel violence
Weissman 14 (Deborah, the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law, THE POLITICS OF NARRATIVE:
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION OF MEXICAN CRIMINALITY, 2014,
http://fordhamilj.org/files/2015/02/FILJ_Weissman_thePoliticsofNarrative.pdf)
Immigration reform has been debated in the context of the global political economy, national security
interests, and electoral
concerns.
Proposals for comprehensive immigration reform (“CIR”) that might accomplish pathways to legal status
for undocumented immigrants in the United States came to the fore in 2004, when Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain and
Congressmen Luis Gutierrez and Jeff Flake unsuccessfully introduced a comprehensive package to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act
(“INA”).184 Additional efforts to reform immigration were subsequently proposed in 2006 but were largely rejected.185 In 2013, Congress
again undertook the task of amending the INA. The Senate passed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization
Act,”— Senate Bill 744 of 2013—and currently there are a number of House bills pending.186 Border enforcement looms large in the context of
CIR. It is the prevailing emphasis of the Senate bill, the majority of House bills, as well as President Obama’s framework for reform,
notwithstanding the complexity of comprehensive immigration reform and the multiple issues that must be addressed.187
Congressional proposals seek to marshal federal resources estimated to be in excess of US$40 billion
to double the size of the border patrol, to pay for troops at the border, and for the costs of military
surveillance equipment, 700 miles of fencing, and drones. 188 Both S. 744 and H.R. 1417 require “‘[s]ituational
awareness’ of the entire southwest border; meaning 100 percent surveillance” and “‘[o]perational control’ of the entire southwest border;
meaning that at least 90 percent of all unauthorized entries into the United States are deterred.”189
Many of these provisions,
particularly those found in S. 744, function as “triggers” or benchmarks which must be realized
before undocumented immigrants already in the United States might begin the process of
legalization, and before the operationalizing of other structural reforms that might allow immigrants
seeking entry to lawfully migrate . 190 House versions of CIR would require an increase in detention
of immigrants and a further expansion of crimes defined as “aggravated felonies.”191 Testimony
offered by opponents of CIR routinely invoke the danger of Mexican cartels, gun and drug-traffickers
from Mexico infiltrating the country, and insist that there is a war at the border. 1 CIR adversaries
warn of kidnaping and extortion at the hands of Mexican criminals inside the United States.193 CIR
hearings include sorrowful testimony by parents whose children were tragically killed by “illegal alien
gang members from Mexico with a history of violence”
or an “illegal immigrant in a pickup truck who had two drunken
driving convictions but was not in possession of a driver's license.”194 They “steal” jobs from Americans. Prior versions of the INA have been
deemed too soft with regard to undocumented Mexican workers whose unauthorized stays have grown longer over time, and justify calls for
greater enforcement mechanisms.195
In order to protect against Mexican criminals, elected officials argue for a
version of CIR that would triple the number of border patrol agents on the US-Mexico border .196
Senator John McCain supported such CIR proposals, stating, “[w]e'll be the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”197 Indeed,
the rhetoric serves the interests of those who would profit from a further increase in border enforcement, including private prison contractors
who build and house immigrant detainees, as well as corporations with contracts to produce the border military and surveillance
technology.198 The only bill to be approved in 2006 authorized the funding of the construction of a wall across 670 miles of the US-Mexico
border.19 Congressional debates about CIR reflect, as they construct, discriminatory attitudes against Mexican immigrants. One study found
that US citizens not only “conflate immigrants in general with illegal immigrants” but they also “treat illegal immigrants from Mexico differently
than those from other regions of the world.”200 As Gerald López has written, “[a]lmost everyone… sees undocumented Mexicans as convincing
proof that something is ‘broken’—in the United States and in Mexico.”201
Border surveillance key to check drug cartels
The Associated Press 5/22 (an American multinational nonprofit news agency headquartered in New
York City, ”Cartel Surveillance Cameras Found in Mexican Border City, May 22nd 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/05/22/world/americas/ap-lt-mexico-cartelsurveillance.html?_r=1)
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — A drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas used at least 39 surveillance
cameras to monitor the comings and goings of authorities in the city of Reynosa across the border
from Texas , Mexican officials said Friday. The cameras were powered by electric lines above the city streets and accessed the Internet
through phone cables along the same poles, according to a statement from state authorities.
The cameras included modems
and were capable of operating wirelessly or through commercial providers' lines.
The revelation came one
day after President Enrique Pena Nieto visited the city, but authorities said the cameras were seized Monday and Tuesday.
Several of the
cameras were trained on an army base, while others captured movement outside a marine post,
offices of the attorney general and state police as well as shopping centers, major thoroughfares and
some neighborhoods . An official with the state's security coordination group, who insisted on anonymity because he was not
authorized to release details on the case, said the cartel's cameras were revealed when the government's own surveillance cameras detected
suspicious people making installations on poles.
Once discovered, authorities simply thought about the places the
cartel would most like to monitor and looked for more cameras there, he said. Once cartel members
realized authorities had discovered their network, they took down 18 cameras before authorities
could seize them.
Authorities did not identify the cartel. But Reynosa, which is across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, has been the
scene of intense violence in recent months between suspected factions of the Gulf cartel.
Cartels have long used "halcones," or
hawks, stationed strategically around their turf to monitor the movements of authorities and rivals.
The camera surveillance network would simply be a technological progression on the same idea and
one that is increasingly employed by governments around the world to fight crime.
erected their own communications networks in the border area, complete with their own antennas.
Cartels for years have
Since the start of the year,
Mexican authorities have seized 55 radio communication antennas between the border cities of
Matamoros and Miguel Aleman.
Cartels feeds structural violence – only border enforcement solves
Michael Lohmuller, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 6-26-2015, "The Drug
War and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Mexico’s Hidden Epidemic," COHA, http://www.coha.org/thedrug-war-and-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-mexicos-hidden-epidemic/
In recent years, the Mexican drug war has consistently made headlines for its appalling levels of violence and
ever-increasing death count; with a figure approaching 70,000 people killed since 2006. Previously, violence in Mexico
had largely been associated with drug trafficking and was concentrated in a handful of regions along
key smuggling routes, especially near the U.S. border . However, under the Felipe Calderón administration (2006-2012), Mexico’s
drug cartels faced rising pressure from state security forces, resulting in their fragmentation and the dispersal of criminal violence around the country. Drug cartels
responded to enhanced counter-narcotics operations by expanding their criminal portfolios into locally focused crime in order to supplement their earnings. This
has led to a sharp increase in cases of extortion and kidnapping (979 and 3,634 cases, respectively, were reported through the first six months of 2014), wreaking
havoc on Mexican society.[1] A
side effect of this violence that has received relatively little attention is the
impact on the mental health of victims and the community at-large. More specifically, violence accompanying the
Mexican drug war has contributed to a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity , creating conditions
that have put millions of Mexican citizens at risk for developing post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD).
PTSD is most commonly associated with soldiers returning from war, and has attracted widespread attention in the United States for its effects on
veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet, while Mexico is not at war in the traditional sense,
many Mexican communities live in a
state of siege—either actual or perceived . While some areas are affected more than others, the majority of Mexican
communities have been exposed —directly or indirectly— to various degrees of traumatic violence.
the Mexican state has not devoted adequate attention to those victimized by violence.
Nevertheless,
This role has largely
been taken up by a number of civil society organizations, such as Ciudadanos en Apoyo a Los Derechos Humanos (CADHAC) in Nuevo León and the Movimiento por
la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity). In conjunction with the important role of these organizations, however, it
is
imperative that the Mexican government and health system acknowledge and research the problem
of PTSD in victimized populations. The short- and long-term effects of high levels of violence on the mental health and fabric of Mexican society
could potentially be grave. For the sake of Mexico’s future generations, it is therefore crucial that the Mexican state begin allocating sufficient resources towards
supporting those victimized by violence in order to mitigate the growth of PTSD’s nefarious consequences. Mexico’s Escalation of Crime & Violence Felipe
Calderónis widely regarded as one of the catalysts for Mexico’s current wave of violence. Upon taking theoffice of the presidency in 2006, Calderón declared a war
against Mexico’s drug cartels. This consisted of an aggressive strategy of confrontation and, with the deployment of the armed forces into Mexico’s streets and
communities, the increasing militarization of policing functions. Drug cartels, now finding themselves the target of antagonistic governmental policies, escalated the
brutality of their tactics. This was done in order both to defend themselves against incursions by state security forces and to exploit any openings created to win
territory from rivals. Violence quickly spiraled out of control, and has been extraordinary in its severity and indiscriminate targeting. Mass killings, torture,
dismemberment, disappeared persons, extortion, and kidnapping have become all too commonplace, leaving a wake of destruction rippling through Mexican
society as hundreds of thousands suffered. The scale of violence in Mexico is difficult to grasp. During the six years of Calderón’s term (2006-2012), more than
50,000 people were killed (a total of over 70,000 have reportedly died through 2014), 250,000 were displaced from their homes, 10,000 disappeared, and 8,000
wereorphaned.[2] By 2010, the homicide rate was double that of 2006.[3] Fortunately, homicide figures for 2012 and 2013 have shown a slight declining trend.
However, extortion and kidnapping levels have increased at an alarming rate. According to official statistics from Mexico’s Interior Ministry (SEGOB), there were
8,199 reported incidences of extortion in 2013, higher than any other year in the past decade.[4] There has also been a steady rise in documented cases of
kidnapping, climbing from 438 in 2007 to 1,698 in 2013.[5] Nonetheless, it is estimated that the vast majority of kidnappings and extortions have gone unreported.
Victims are often reluctant to seek help from officials for fear of retribution by criminal groups or that the police are corrupt and in cahoots with the criminals.
Overall, after nearly eight years of elevated levels of criminal violence, hundreds of thousands of people have been directly or indirectly victimized. Many Mexican
citizens rightfully perceive the government as inept and unable to provide adequate security and justice. This has contributed to the creation of a far-reaching
climate of insecurity, fear, and helplessness. High rates of exposure to traumatic experiences among Mexico’s populace, along with extensive and often graphic
media coverage, have produced degrees of trauma similar to those usually characterized with war zones. Consequently, many experts now say mental health
conditions typically associated with war veterans, such as PTSD, are on the rise in Mexico. What is PTSD? According to The National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), PTSD develops after a person experiences “a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm.”[6] Someone who develops PTSD
“may have been the one who was harmed,” but the harm may also “have happened to a loved one, or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that
happened to loved ones or strangers.”[7] According to the Mayo Clinic, the most common events driving PTSD’s development include combat exposure, childhood
neglect and physical abuse, sexual assault, physical attack, and being threatened with a weapon.[8] Other events that may also bring about PTSD are, among others,
natural disasters, robbery, torture, and kidnapping. The Mayo Clinic also reports that those who do suffer from PTSD have demonstrated difficulties in maintaining
their job, relationships, health, and quality of life. In addition, PTSD has been found to increase the risk of developing other mental health problems, such as
depression and anxiety, as well as substance abuse or suicidal thoughts and actions.[9] While PTSD can cause numerous symptoms, the NIMH classifies them into
three broad categories: re-experiencing symptoms, avoidance symptoms, and hyperarousal symptoms.[10] Bad dreams or flashbacks are examples of reexperiencing symptoms. Avoidance symptoms may include feelings of strong guilt or depression, loss of interest in activities one enjoyed in the past, and staying
away from places or objects that are reminders of the traumatic experience. Hyperarousal symptoms may consist of being easily startled, feeling tense or “on
edge,” having difficulty sleeping, and angry outbursts. To be diagnosed with PTSD, a person must exhibit at least one re-experiencing symptom, at least three
avoidance symptoms, and at least two hyperarousal symptoms for at least one month.[11] PTSD in Civilian Populations Several existing studies on the mental health
of civilian populations living in violent communities in U.S. cities offer a source for drawing comparisons with the case of Mexico. Despite
cross-cultural
differences, the studies demonstrate that PTSD can indeed have a wide presence in civilian
populations affected by disconcerting levels of violence; a concerning find for Mexican society given
the wide percentage of Mexico’s population that has been exposed to traumatic experiences. An
investigationby theGrady Trauma Projectstudied residents of violent inner-city communities in Atlanta.[12] Interviews with 8,000 inner city residents found that one
in three reported experiencing symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives. Dr. Kerry Ressler, the lead researcher of the project, said, “The rates of
PTSD we see are as high or higher than Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam veterans. We have a whole population who is traumatized.”[13] Another study took place in
Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, which treats around 2,000 patients per year for gunshots, stabbings, and other violent injuries.[14] Beginning in 2011, researchers
screened patients for PTSD, and observed that four in 10 patients displayed symptoms. There was an even higher rate among those wounded by guns—over 50
percent. “We knew these people were going to have PTSD symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be
as extensive.”[15] The two studies’ conclusions suggest that traumatic violence has influenced entire communities in these areas. This cumulative social stress can
undermine the fundamental institutions of family, work, and education, both at an individual and a collective level. At a broad level, these Atlanta and Chicago
communities have much in common with their Mexican counterparts: they are extremely poor, are plagued by inequality and violent crime, and have limited access
to hospitals or mental health services. Given comparable violence-levels and circumstances to these U.S. inner city communities, it is likely that many Mexican
communities exhibit similar patterns of PTSD rates among residents. PTSD Among Mexican Civilians Indeed,
many experts now say PTSD is
on the rise in Mexico due to the extreme violence seen over the past decade. The border city of
Ciudad Juárez, the epicenter of Mexico’s drug war from 2007-2012, has been particularly impacted.
In 2010, homicide levels in the city peaked at roughly 60 murders per week.[16] In fact, in 2010 more than half of all
executions, shootings, disappearances, and kidnappings that occurred in Mexico were concentrated in Ciudad Juárez. Consequently, according to figures cited in a
2013 study by researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Ciudad Juárez Municipality has estimated that 14-30 percent of the city’s more
than 1.3 million residents suffer from PTSD due to both direct and indirect exposure to violent acts.[17]
1NC—Solvency
Circumvention
Border surveillance inevitable – Border States fill – their 1ac author
Bosque ’15(Melissa del Bosque, March 2nd, 2015, Death on Sevenmile Road, Texas Observer,
http://www.texasobserver.org/human-cost-border-security-build-up/, AZ)
At the height of the Central American exodus in July, DPS launched another “surge” called Operation Strong Safety. Armored gunboats patrolled the Rio Grande
with DPS troopers, rangers and game wardens dressed in body armor and tactical gear.
Texas National Guard soldiers were also
deployed , despite the fact that the thousands of migrants, mostly women and children, were making a point of presenting themselves to authorities to ask
for asylum. Operation Strong Safety is slated to continue into August 2015 at a cost of more than $2
million a week. Recently, newly elected Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have
indicated they would like to make the surge permanent. By 2016, the state will have spent more than
$1 billion in state and federal money on border security over the last decade. And it’s poised to spend
much more in the decade to come.
The plan is circumvented by local governments
Ron Paul 14 (“Ferguson: The War Comes Home”, August 25, 2014 Monday, L/N- Farmington Daily
Times (New Mexico), Accessed 7/16/15, EHS MKS)
America's attention recently turned away from the violence in Iraq and Gaza toward the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting
of Michael Brown. While all the facts surrounding the shooing have yet to come to light, the shock of seeing police using tear gas (a substance
banned in warfare), and other military-style weapons against American citizens including journalists exercising their First Amendment rights,
has started a much-needed debate on police militarization. The
increasing use of military equipment by local police is a
symptom of growing authoritarianism, not the cause. The cause is policies that encourage police to see Americans as enemies to
subjugate, rather than as citizens to "protect and serve." This attitude is on display not only in Ferguson, but in the police lockdown following
the Boston Marathon bombing and in the Americans killed and injured in "no-knock" raids conducted by militarized SWAT teams. One
particularly tragic victim of police militarization and the war on drugs is "baby Bounkham." This infant was severely burned and put in a coma by
a flash-burn grenade thrown into his crib by a SWAT team member who burst into the infant's room looking for methamphetamine. As
shocking as the case of baby Bounkham is, no one should be surprised that empowering police to stop consensual (though perhaps harmful and
immoral) activities has led to a growth of authoritarian attitudes and behaviors among government officials and politicians. Those
wondering why the local police increasingly look and act like an occupying military force should consider
that the drug war was the justification for the Defense Department's "1033 program," which last year
gave local police departments almost $450 million worth of "surplus" military equipment. This included
armored vehicles and grenades like those that were used to maim baby Bounkham. Today, the war on
drugs has been eclipsed by the war on terror as an all-purpose excuse for expanding the police state. We
are all familiar with how the federal government increased police power after September 11 via the Patriot Act, TSA, and other Homeland
Security programs.
Not as widely known is how the war on terror has been used to justify the increased
militarization of local police departments to the detriment of our liberty. Since 2002, the Department of
Homeland Security has provided over $35 billion in grants to local governments for the purchase of
tactical gear, military-style armor, and mine-resistant vehicles. The threat of terrorism is used to justify these grants.
However, the small towns that receive tanks and other military weapons do not just put them into storage
until a real terrorist threat emerges. Instead, the military equipment is used for routine law
enforcement. Politicians love this program because it allows them to brag to their local media about how they are keeping their
constituents safe. Of course, the military-industrial complex's new kid brother, the law enforcement-industrial complex, wields tremendous
influence on Capitol Hill. Even many so-called progressives support police militarization to curry favor with police unions. Reversing
the
dangerous trend of the militarization of local police can start with ending all federal involvement in local
law enforcement. Fortunately, all that requires is for Congress to begin following the Constitution, which
forbids the federal government from controlling or funding local law enforcement. However, Congress
will not restore constitutional government on its own; the American people must demand that Congress stop facilitating
the growth of an authoritarian police state that threatens their liberty.
Plan is circumvented – new bases and military surveillance
Munsil 7/23 (Leigh, defense reporter for POLITICO Pro, and the author of Pro Report, “Skirmish over
drones on U.S.-Mexico border”, July 23rd 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/drone-makerlawmakers-skirmish-border-mexico-120489.html)
Both Rep. Beto O’Rourke and leading drone-maker General Atomics can envision swarms of
unmanned aircraft prowling the skies over the U.S.-Mexican border on the lookout for illegal
immigrants and smugglers.
But while the military contractor sees an opportunity to expand its government business, the Texas
Democrat who represents El Paso worries about the border becoming a war front. The defense industry is trying to ‘defense-ify’ the border —
and treat it as a problem or a security threat that has a military-like solution,” says O’Rourke, a member of the Armed Services Committee
whose district sits across from Juarez, Mexico.
Lobbying disclosures indicate the San Diego-based company, which
builds the Predator and other drones that have become a staple of the Pentagon’s arsenal, is
stepping up efforts to persuade policymakers in Washington to increase the use of drones on the
border
— in the wake of government findings that the first batch haven’t worked as advertised. The skirmish is part of a broader tussle over
the role of unmanned aircraft in domestic law enforcement now playing out on Capitol Hill and in the Washington lobbying ranks. It features
those like former El Paso City Councilman O’Rourke, who believes
the border is more secure than it was just a few years
ago, and fellow Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee, who has pushed legislation calling for more “forward operating bases” — military
terminology common in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — to be constructed near U.S. cities like El
Paso; Tucson, Ariz.; and Laredo, Texas. The company has stepped up spending on in-house lobbying
by 20 percent, to nearly $1 million, according to a disclosure filed Monday — citing homeland
security spending among its key priorities.
And the company is relying on a team of former government officials and
congressional aides to help make its case.
Plan is circumvented – Mexican citizens get surveilled after the border
Spagat 14 (Elliot, Associated Press correspondent in San Diego, California, “AP Exclusive: Drones patrol
half of Mexico border”, November 13th 2014,
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/8015402c7480430badfe47df502eaa19/ap-exclusive-drones-patrol-halfmexico-border)
SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. (AP) — The U.S. government now patrols nearly half the Mexican border by drones alone
in a largely unheralded shift to control desolate stretches where there are no agents, camera towers,
ground sensors or fences , and it plans to expand the strategy to the Canadian border. It represents a significant departure from a
decades-old approach that emphasizes boots on the ground and fences. Since
2000, the number of Border Patrol agents on
the 1,954-mile border more than doubled to surpass 18,000 and fencing multiplied nine times to 700
miles.
Under the new approach, Predator Bs sweep remote mountains, canyons and rivers with a high-resolution video camera and return
within three days for another video in the same spot, two officials with direct knowledge of the effort said on condition of anonymity because
details have not been made public. The two videos are then overlaid for analysts who use sophisticated software to identify tiny changes —
perhaps the tracks of a farmer or cows, perhaps those of immigrants who entered the country illegally or a drug-laden Hummer, they said.
About 92 percent of drone missions have shown no change in terrain, but the others raised enough
questions to dispatch agents to determine if someone got away, sometimes by helicopter because
the area is so remote. The agents look for any sign of human activity — footprints, broken twigs,
trash.
About 4 percent of missions have been false alarms, like tracks of livestock or farmers, and about 2 percent are inconclusive. The
remaining 2 percent offer evidence of illegal crossings from Mexico, which typically results in ground sensors being planted for closer
monitoring.
The government has operated about 10,000 drone flights under the strategy, known
internally as "change detection," since it began in March 2013. The flights currently cover about 900
miles, much of it in Texas , and are expected to expand to the Canadian border by the end of 2015. The purpose is to assign agents
where illegal activity is highest, said R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol's parent agency,
which operates nine unmanned aircraft across the country. "You have finite resources," he said in an interview. "If you can look at some very
rugged terrain (and) you can see there's not traffic, whether it's tire tracks or clothing being abandoned or anything else, you want to deploy
your resources to where you have a greater risk, a greater threat." If the video shows the terrain unchanged, Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher
calls it "proving the negative" — showing there isn't anything illegal happening there and therefore no need for agents and fences. The strategy
was launched without fanfare and expanded at a time when President Barack Obama prepares to issue an executive order by the end of this
year to reduce deportations and enhance border security. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security
Committee, applauded the approach while saying that surveillance gaps still remain. " We
can no longer focus only on static
defenses such as fences and fixed (camera) towers," he said. Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee
Republican who co-authored legislation last year to add 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 350 miles of
fencing to the southwest border , said, "If there are better ways of ensuring the border is secure, I am certainly open to
considering those options."
Border missions fly out of Sierra Vista, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center
at Fort Huachuca, or Corpus Christi, Texas. They patrol at altitudes between 19,000 at 28,000 feet
and between 25 and 60 miles of the border. The first step is for Border Patrol sector chiefs to identify
areas that are least likely to attract smugglers, typically far from towns and roads.
Analysts scour the drone
videos at operations centers in Grand Forks, North Dakota; Riverside, California; and Sierra Vista. After an initial survey, the drones return
within a week for another sweep. Privacy advocates have raised concerns about drones since Customs and Border Protection introduced them
in 2006, saying there is potential to monitor innocent people under no suspicion. Lothar Eckardt, the agency's executive director of national air
security operations, said law-abiding people shouldn't worry and that cameras are unable to capture details like license plate numbers and
faces on the ground. Eckardt looked on one September morning as a drone taxied down a runway in Sierra Vista, lifted off with a muffled buzz,
and disappeared over a rocky mountain range into a blue Arizona sky.
About a dozen computer screens line the wall of
their trailer, showing the weather, maps and real-time images of the ground below . Eckardt said there is "no
silver bullet" to border security but that using drones in highly remote areas is part of the overall effort. If there's nothing there, he said, "Let's
not waste the manpower here. Let's focus our efforts someplace else, where they're needed."
Cant solve – New technology surveilles everyone
Dart 4/26 (Tom, a Houston-based freelance journalist, reporter, editor and columnist for The Times in
London, “Inside the US 'border industrial complex: spy tech meets immigration crackdown”, April 26th
2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/26/surveillance-border-security-expo)
The US government’s appetite for grandiose and risky border technology projects was suppressed by
the failure of the Secure Border Initiative, a programme launched in 2005 that saw Boeing contracted to use cameras and sensors to build a
“virtual fence”. It was cancelled in 2011 after costing taxpayers about $1bn to cover a 53-mile stretch of the 2,100-mile long border with
Mexico.
Officials are now trying to use more reliable technology on a smaller scale, having first thrown
people at the problem. The number of border agents has risen to about 21,000, up from 5,000 two
decades ago. The boots on the ground are getting iPhones in their hands, equipped with fingerprint
apps with the goal of identifying migrants as soon as they’re stopped , rather than at often-distant processing
centres. The crisis prompted by the influx of unaccompanied minors into the Rio Grande Valley last summer, when infrastructure was
overwhelmed, led the government to realise that technology that leads to quicker processing will help it cope more efficiently with any future
surge. The US government is also expanding its ability to scan train cargos crossing the southern border and is becoming more interested in
maritime surveillance, particularly in the Great Lakes – possible good news for amphibious drone manufacturers. Instinctively reluctant to trust
the federal government with anything,
Texas has its own plans, such as Operation Drawbridge: a 1,500-camera
array that it is seeking to expand to 5,500. They’re dubbed “game cameras” , as if the Texas
Department of Public Safety were hunting deer. “This is the border-industrial complex,” said James
Cooper, a professor at California Western School of Law, who was attending the conference to
research a book. “This is like Dwight D Eisenhower meets the medieval fortress. You’re seeing this
privatisation of what is an inherently governmental function.”Fingerprint; iris; the ultimate evolution
of that is facial recognition ,” said Cognitec’s Shaun Hilditch. “ Everyone’s face is so unique, as a fingerprint is,
but what makes facial recognition better is you don’t have to touch anything.” He said that the
success rate is close to 100% even for people wearing caps and hoodies. The software can work using
a tiny CCTV-esque camera costing as little as $100.
Customers include casinos and banks, Hilditch said, adding that the
healthcare industry is also looking into it as a way of giving patients access to private data that is more secure than using passwords.
1NC Off
1NC—T Domestic
A. Domestic surveillance is surveillance of US persons
Small 8 MATTHEW L. SMALL. United States Air Force Academy 2008 Center for the Study of the
Presidency and Congress, Presidential Fellows Program paper "His Eyes are Watching You: Domestic
Surveillance, Civil Liberties and Executive Power during Times of National Crisis"
http://cspc.nonprofitsoapbox.com/storage/documents/Fellows2008/Small.pdf
Before one can make any sort of assessment of domestic surveillance policies, it is first necessary to narrow the
scope of the term “domestic surveillance.” Domestic surveillance is a subset of intelligence gathering. Intelligence,
as it is to be understood in this context, is “information that meets the stated or understood needs of policy
makers and has been collected, processed and narrowed to meet those needs” (Lowenthal 2006, 2). In essence,
domestic surveillance is a means to an end; the end being intelligence. The intelligence community best
understands domestic surveillance as the acquisition of nonpublic information concerning United
States persons (Executive Order 12333 (3.4) (i)). With this definition domestic surveillance remains an overly
broad concept. This paper’s analysis, in terms of President Bush’s policies, focuses on electronic surveillance;
specifically, wiretapping phone lines and obtaining caller information from phone companies. Section f of the USA
Patriot Act of 2001 defines electronic surveillance as:
B. Undocumented persons are not US persons
Jackson et al 9 Brian A. Jackson, Darcy Noricks, and Benjamin W. Goldsmith, RAND Corporation The
Challenge of Domestic Intelligence in a Free Society RAND 2009 BRIAN A. JACKSON, EDITOR
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG804.pdf
3 Federal law and executive order define a U.S. person as “a citizen of the United States, an alien
lawfully admitted for permanent residence, an unincorporated association with a substantial
number of members who are citizens of the U.S. or are aliens lawfully admitted for permanent
residence, or a corporation that is incorporated in the U.S.” (NSA, undated). Although this definition would
therefore allow information to be gathered on U.S. persons located abroad, our objective was to examine the
creation of a domestic intelligence organization that would focus on—and whose activities would center around—
individuals and organizations located inside the United States . Though such an agency might receive information
about U.S. persons that was collected abroad by other intelligence agencies, it would not collect that information
itself.
C. the Aff interpretation is bad for debate – limits are necessary for negative
preparation and clash, and their interpretation makes the topic too big. Immigration
is a huge area, big enough to be a topic itself, and all the issues are completely
different.
D. T is a voter – the opportunity to prepare promotes better debating
1NC—Border K
Criticisms of US-Mexico border security compartmentalize harm against immigrants into
only border violence – this obstructs the everyday violence experienced by immigrants and
strengthens local anti-immigrant government agencies
Coleman 9
[Mathew Coleman Department of Geography, The Ohio State University (2009) What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and
Where? Devolution and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99:5, 904-913, DOI:
10.1080/00045600903245888] //duff
Displacing and Consorting with Critical Geopolitics Heightened U.S.–Soviet tensions during the Reagan era prompted a group of geographers to
examine the intersection of geographical knowledge and geopolitical power in international politics. The project, dubbed “critical geopolitics,”
centered on the sociospatial structures of intelligibility underpinning foreign policy practice. As Dodds and Sidaway (1994, 518) explained,
critical geopolitics seeks “to deconstruct the representational practices of conservative foreign policy elites, to reveal how they spatialize
international politics.” Specific attention was paid to “formal geopolitics” (i.e., foreign policy scholarship) and “practical geopolitics” (i.e.,
foreign policy conduct) as an ensemble of “socio-cultural resources and rules by which geographies of international politics get written” (Toal
and Agnew 1992, 193). The goal was to “challenge some aspect of taken-for-granted geopolitical knowledge by looking at its social production,
the parameters of its discursive economy” (Dalby and Toal 1996, 452). Critical geopolitics’ emphasis on knowledges constitutive of geopolitical
practice spurred an important rethinking of security. Of particular interest were the ways in which security
was hitched by
mainstream foreign policy elites and experts to spatialized tropes of identity and difference. Campbell
(1992), for example, unpacked security as a boundary-drawing knowledge of performative rather than
pragmatic temperament—as literally a self- and other-citing act in space. Similarly, Dalby (1990) discussed the
“geo-graphs”—or spatialized discourses about self and other—that inhere in foreign policy and that
reduce complex global realities to simplistic, state-territorial maps about security and danger. Dalby
emphasized that the self–other formulation of state security in terms of spatial exclusion and rival territories was in fact a primary constituent
of human insecurity insofar as it transformed lived spaces into dehumanized blocs ready for military conquest. This abbreviated account of
critical geopolitics’ beginnings will be familiar for many. Nonetheless, it is important to recall because it highlights critical geopolitics’ parasitical
relationship with mainstream geopolitics. Toal (1994, 542; 1996) hinted at this early on in the critical geopolitics experiment, noting that in
displacing orthodox geopolitics “we are consorting with a philosophical tradition, an historical code, a geographical map, an order of places.”
Indeed, in response to the charge that critical geopolitics sometimes fails to problematize its use of mainstream geopolitical concepts (Sharp
2000; Sparke 2000), Toal (2000, 387) conceded that “[i]n seeking to engage certain discourses in order to displace them, one invariably is
dependent to a certain degree upon the organizing terms of these discourses.” Toal’s explanation of the cramped relationship between critical
geopolitics and its mainstream interlocutors is in terms of deconstruction and its perils; however, Foucault’s notion of archaeology is also
relevant. In his early essays on discourse and its transformations, for example, Foucault (1989, 41) challenged the “opposition between the
liveliness of innovations and the dead weight of tradition.” Instead of seeing the boundary breaking-ness of the new against the wrongheadedness of the old, Foucault emphasized how “discoursing subjects” belong to a “discursive field”—not a monolithic plane in which authors
remain constants but one in which anonymous rules of expressibility, conservation, memory, reactivation, and appropriation are in play. Put in
the context of Toal’s comments, archaeology suggests that the new (i.e., critical geopolitics) does not break with the old (i.e., mainstream
geopolitics) but is engaged in a play of dependencies with it. I want to expand on this problem with the goal of interrogating what counts as the
politics and practice of security in critical geopolitics. If, as earlier, critical geopolitics seeks to upend the socio-spatial structures of intelligibility
underpinning the practice and rationalization of statecraft, the paradox is that the field as a whole tends to reactivate a mainstream account of
what constitutes security in practice. Even as
critical geopolitics approaches statecraft as a cultural performance of
identity, and thus in essence collapses any neat differentiation between domestic and foreign policy
spaces, it still has much to say about what might constitute the politics and practice of security beyond foreign policy. This is particularly the
case in critical geopolitics scholarship focused on theory building. Critical geopolitics’ conjoining of security to foreign policy has not gone
unnoticed.
One early critique was Dodds’s (1994; cf. 2001) plea that critical geopolitics move beyond
representational analyses of foreign policy and deal with “domestic” geopolitics. More recent
commentators point to critical geopolitics’ prioritization of interstate military conflict at the expense
of more “regional” research (Power 1999; Agnew 2001; Mamadouh and Dijkink 2006). Others, without noting the field’s foreign
policy centrism, focus on conflict in contexts frequently read as more political geographic than geopolitical per se (Herbert 1997). Likewise,
Mamadouh (1999) reminds critical geopolitics scholars—mostly in the United States and United Kingdom—of non-Anglo-American “critical
geopolitical” thought (i.e., Lacoste and Herodote ´ ) that attempted explicitly to delink geopolitics from international relations and draw
attention to the warring aspects of public policy geographies.
There is also research on the urbanization of war that
suggests that the politics and practice of security are not just about foreign policy in a narrow sense
(Falah and Flint 2004; Graham 2006). Reading this literature alongside the most cited critical geopolitics texts
suggests the latter’s reluctance to engage with statecraft’s more prosaic coordinates (Painter 2006; Katz
2007; Pain and Smith 2008). Feminist political geographers in particular have remarked on critical geopolitics’ dismissal of
the everyday . As Staeheli (2001) summarizes, critical geopolitics fetishizes the state and statecraft , both
theoretically and empirically, such
that localities and lived experiences feature infrequently in the research.
The result, as Sharp notes (2000, 363), is that critical geopolitics relies on a private–public mapping of “political effectual and non-politicalineffectual spheres” with geopolitics apparently only relevant in terms of the former. Indeed, feminist scholars note that what counts
as
security in critical geopolitics for the most part does not stray far from “big P” politics (i.e., warfare),
whereas the question of where security occurs is frequently about abstracted macro-spaces such as
the “battlefield” (Kofman 1996; Dowler and Sharp 2001; Secor 2001; Smith 2001). In this spirit, Hyndman (2004, 319) asks
geographers to shift “scales to include the security of the state but in relation to the security and
wellbeing of people who live in and across its borders.” Indeed, Hyndman (2001) argues a need to foreground a politics
of (in)security at a finer and more embodied scale and broaden what counts as the politics and practice of security to include everyday violent
relationships. In short, what the feminist geopolitics literature argues is that security should be approached as something that abides by no
particular practices and no particular spaces. In an attempt to contribute to rethinking geographies of security as suggested by feminist
geographers, without losing critical geopolitics’ problematization of security, I next explore post-9/11 immigration policing in the U.S. context. I
am interested in how, in the name of national security, the
localization of immigration enforcement targets
immigrants’ every day. Immigration Enforcement and Devolution after 9/11 One long-standing consequence of
critical geopolitics’ foreign policy centrism has been muted attention to how public policy spaces and
politics are geopolitical or to how public policy and foreign policy implicate increasingly indistinct
practices and spaces. More recently, despite attention across the social sciences to homeland defense and how post-9/11 immigration
policy in particular blurs the lines between public and foreign policy (Tirman 2004), critical geopolitics has
been surprisingly quiet about how everyday spaces of immigrant regulation and incorporation (Mountz
2004), or peopled mobility more generally (Hyndman 2000; Dahlman and Toal 2005), are relevant to the politics and practice
of security. This lack stands at odds with the ubiquitous motif of migrants (and their purported impact on welfare, crime, language, cultural
practices, etc.) as a national security problem in mainstream geopolitics. Recent research on the spatial convergence and rescaling of internal
and external security practices in the European Union, around precisely immigration enforcement, offers some important signposts (Bigo 2002;
Samers 2004; Walters 2006). This literature is striking insofar as state security practice is understood not as a foreign policy problematic but as a
multitude of quotidian techniques for governing immigrants across a variety of public and private sites and through means not typically thought
of as geopolitical (Huysmans 2006). Although there is not much like-minded research in the North American context,
the emphasis on
homeland security in the United States has brought about a comparable reorganization of internal
and external security. The post-9/11 devolutionary trend in immigration enforcement is a prime example.
Although states and localities played an early role in admitting and expelling noncitizens , a stand-alone (i.e., plenary)
federal power over immigration was the norm for much of the twentieth century, when immigration control was conceived as a specifically
national security power and as such preemptively the preserve of federal representatives and agencies (Lee 2005). Moreover, by virtue of its
focus on territorial entry itself as a security risk, the plenary doctrine meant that immigration control was administered primarily at U.S. borders
(Shachar 2007). This federally preemptive and outward-looking scheme has been fundamentally disrupted by the post-9/11 devolutionary
trend. In making immigration enforcement a localized as well as inward-looking national security practice, devolution constitutes a significant
challenge to who regulates immigration and to what practices security comprises. I limit my following discussion of devolution to the expansion
of interior enforcement via state and local authorities. I look first at 287(g) and second at inherent authority.
The alternative is to see like a border – positioning oneself in the borderlands allows for an
analysis of the structural conditions of those disposed by it. This is a prerequisite to any
positive political action.
Rumford 11
[“Seeing like a border”; Chris Rumford is a professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of
London; Political Geography 30 (2011) p. 61-69;
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~reecej/Johnson%20et%20al%202011%20Political%20Geography.pdf] //duff
In a world of security alerts, enhanced personal mobility (for many, but not all), and transnational flows of
goods, finances, and services we encounter not a borderless world but a plethora of borders which are not only
found “at the border”. They “now occupy ‘a multiplicity of sites’ and ‘seep into the city and the
neighborhood’ in addition to existing at the edges of a polity” (Amoore, Marmura, & Salter, 2008). Ordinary
spaces are saturated with “borders, walls, fences, thresholds, signposted areas, security systems and
checkpoints, virtual frontiers, specialized zones, protected areas, and areas under control” (Multiplicity,
2005). Borders are no longer seen only as lines on a map but as spaces in their own right (as in the idea of “borderlands”) and as
processes; in short, there has been a shift from borders to bordering (or rebordering, on some accounts). The argument advanced here is that
the changes to borders are in fact more far-reaching than can be captured by either the idea that “borders are everywhere” or a security-driven
rebordering thesis. I propose that to understand borders fully scholars need to “see like a border”. Three key
dimensions of borders/bordering are generating a distinct research agenda and associated literature. First, borders can be “engines of
connectivity”. Rather than curtailing mobility, borders can actively facilitate it; many key
borders are at airports, maritime
ports, and railway terminals. Borders can connect as well as divide, not just proximate entities, but
globally. This means that more conventional views of interactions across borders (e.g. Minghi, 1991) are in need of
revision. It also means that border scholars must take issue with the idea, expressed by Häkli and Kaplan (2002, p. 7), that “cross-border
interactions are more likely to occur when the ‘other side’ is easily accessible, in contrast to when people live farther away from the border”.
For van Schendel (2005) borderlanders are able to “jump” scales (local, national, regional, global) and therefore do not experience the national
border only as an immediate limit. People can construct the scale of the border for themselves; as a “local” phenomenon, a nation-state
“edge”, or as a transnational staging post: the border can be reconfigured as a portal. Second,
bordering is not always the
business of the state. Ordinary people (citizens and also non-citizens) are increasingly involved in the business
of bordering, an activity I have previously termed “borderwork” (Rumford, 2008). Citizens, entrepreneurs, and NGOs are active in
constructing, shifting, or even erasing borders. The borders in question are not necessarily those (at the edges) of the
nation-state; they can be found at a range of sites throughout society: in towns and cities, and in local
neighborhoods. Examples (in the UK) include: the local currency schemes in several English towns (Stroud, Lewes, Totnes) designed to
prevent the leeching of money from the local economy; securing Protected Designation of Origin status (from the EU) for
local produce such as Melton Mowbray pork pies and Stilton cheese (Cooper & Rumford, in press) which creates bounded regions
for branded products. What is distinctive about these activities is that they result from initiatives by entrepreneurs, citizens/ residents,
and grass roots activists. They are not top-down, state-led processes of bordering. This activity does not
necessarily result in borders that enhance national security but it provides borderworkers with new
political and/or economic opportunities: the uses of borders are many and various. Third, borders provide
opportunities for claims-making. This has long been recognized to be the case in respect of the nationstate, where national borders are not always imposed by the center. For example Sahlins’ (1989, p. 9) work on the
SpaineFrance border in the Pyrenees shows that “local society brought the nation into the village”. But borderwork also has a post-national
dimension and is consistent with what Is in and Nielsen (2008) term an “act of citizenship”: “they are part of the process by which citizens are
distinguished from others: strangers, outsiders, non-status people and the rest” (Nyers, 2008, p. 168). Moreover, acts of citizenship and
borderwork alike are not restricted to those who are already citizens; they are means by which “non-status persons can constitute themselves
as being political” (Nyers, 2008, p. 162). Borderwork can
also be associated with a range of claims-making activity,
not only claims to national belonging or citizenship, but also demands for transnational mobility,
assertions of human rights, and demonstrations of political actorhood, all of which can comprise acts
of citizenship. This leads to the possibility of viewing bordering not only in terms of securitization but
also in terms of opportunities for humanitarian assistance targeted at those (refugees, migrants) who may
coalesce at the borders. Some common themes are evident in these three dimensions of bordering, most importantly bordering as a
societal phenomenon and the importance of individual experience in making/negotiating borders, pointing to a vernacularization or
cosmopolitanization of borders (Rumford, 2007). The resultant diversity and multiplication of border studies provokes a key question: from
what perspective should this multiplicity of borders be viewed? The
danger is that even when acknowledged that
borders can be diffused throughout society border scholars still choose to look at borders from the
perspective of the state, by considering for example the extent to which the development of
borderlands is compatible with conventional notions of securitized borders. But what would happen if a
different, non-state perspective were adopted? Rather than “seeing like a state” (Scott, 1998) what would it mean to “see like a border”?
Seeing like a border shifts the emphasis in border studies in several important ways. First, as borders can be found “wherever selective controls
are to be found” (Balibar, 2002, pp. 84e85)
seeing like a border does not equate to “being on the outside and
looking in” (or looking out from the watchtower to the wilderness beyond). Bordering processes permeate everyday life,
well captured in Urry’s (2007) notion of “frisk society” in which passing through public spaces is akin to the
experience of airport security. In aspiring to see like a border, the constitutive nature of borders in social and political life must be
recognized. Second, borders are not necessarily always working in the service of the state. When seeing like a state
one is committed to seeing borders as lines of securitized defense. Borders do not always conform to this model. In a desire to shore up what
may be perceived as the ineffectual borders of the nation-state borderworkers may engage in local bordering activity designed to enhance
status or regulate mobility;
gated communities, respect zones, “resilient” communities of CCTV watching
citizens. Third, seeing like a border does not necessarily mean identifying with the subaltern, the
dispossessed, the downtrodden, the marginal. The border, and the borderwork which has led to its construction, may be the project of those
seeking to gain further advantage in society: entrepreneurs or affluent citizens, for example. Why remain passive in the face of other peoples’
borders when it is possible to obtain advantage by becoming a proactive borderer? If borders are networked throughout society and more and
more people can participate in borderwork, then the capacity to make or undo borders becomes a major source of political capital. Seeing
like a border means taking into account perspectives from those at, on, or shaping the border, and
this constituency is increasing large and diverse. Fourth, borders can be “invisible” (to some but not to all). This
assertion runs counter to one of the most established truths in border studies: that “a border that is not visible to all has failed its purpose”
(van Schendel, 2005, p. 41). But borders may be invisible, as
when they are designed not to look like borders, located
in one place but projected in another entirely. This is the case with the “juxtaposed” borders established by the UK along the
Eurostar routes, UK passport control being situated at the French terminus Gare du Nord in Paris, French controls at London’s St. Pancras. There
are many other examples of invisible borders: the UK’s “offshore borders” e established at points across the world where people apply for visa
to enter the UK e or the EU’s Frontex boat patrols along the coast of West Africa. Such bordering activity is designed to constitute a formidable
physical barrier to those beyond the EU’s border while not necessarily affecting those living on the inside. Borders
can be highly
selective and work so as to render them invisible to the majority of the population. ‘Seeing like a
border’ leads to the discovery that some borders are designed not to be seen.
1NC—Tunnels PIC
1NC Shell (Nuclear Terrorism)
Text: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its surveillance
of the US-Mexico border except underground tunnel surveillance.
ISIS is working on smuggling nuclear weapons across the borders via underground
tunnels—the impact is detonation on US soil--surveillance is key
Mac Slavo, 5-26-2015, "Report: Terrorist Nuke Attack May Be Carried Out Inside the United States in
Next 12 Months," http://www.infowars.com/report-terrorist-nuke-attack-may-be-carried-out-insidethe-united-states-in-next-12-months/)//GV
With nuclear material having been stolen on multiple occasions in Mexico, and close terrorist ties to
intelligence organizations in the middle east, it appears that if an organization was committed to acquiring
nuclear material they could do so. Finding the scientists to build such a weapon, whether dirty or
actual, wouldn’t be all that difficult. Moreover, smuggling such a device into the U.S. is possible, as
evidenced by a 2011 report which confirms that at least one nuclear weapon of mass destruction was
seized as it entered the United States. According to a report from Zero Hedge, such a plan may be in the works over
the next twelve months, as the Islamic State claims it may be actively pursuing a nuclear weapon
intended for detonation on American soil. Three weeks after the first supposed attack by Islamic State
supporters in the US, in which two ISIS “soldiers” wounded a security guard before they were killed in Garland, Texas,
the time has come to raise the fear stakes. In an article posted in the terrorist group’s English-language online magazine Dabiq (which as can be see below seems to
have gotten its design cues straight from Madison Avenue and is just missing glossy pages filled with ‘scratch and sniff’ perfume ads ) ISIS claimed that it has
enough money to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and “carry out an attack inside the United
States next year.” In the article, the ISIS columnist said the weapon could be smuggled into the United States
via its southern border with Mexico. Curiously, the author of the piece is John Cantlie, a British photojournalist who was abducted by ISIS in
2012 and has been held hostage by the organization ever since; he has appeared in several videos since his kidnapping and criticized Western powers. As the
Telegraph notes, “Mr Cantlie, whose fellow journalist hostages have all either been released or beheaded, has appeared in the group’s propaganda videos and
written previous pieces. In his latest work, presumed to be written under pressure but in his hall-mark style combining hyperbole, metaphor and sarcasm, he says
that President Obama’s
policies for containing Isil have demonstrably failed and increased the risk to
America.” Cantlie describes the following “hypothetical” scenario in Dabiq : Let me throw a hypothetical operation onto the table. The Islamic State
has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilayah in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through
weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region. The weapon is then transported overland
until it makes it to Libya, where the mujahadin move it south to Nigeria. Drug shipments from
Columbia bound for Europe pass through West Africa, so moving other types of contraband from East
to West is just as possible. The nuke and accompanying mujahadin arrive on the shorelines of South
America and are transported through the porous borders of Central America before arriving in Mexico and up
to the border with the United States. From there it’s just a quick hop through a smuggling tunnel and hey
presto, they’re mingling with another 12 million “illegal” aliens in America with a nuclear bomb in the trunk of their car. Cantlie continues: Perhaps such a
scenario is far-fetched but it’s the sum of all fears for Western intelligence agencies and it’s infinitely more possible today than it was
just one year ago. And if not a nuke, what about a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive?
That’s easy enough to make. The Islamic State make no secret of the fact they have every intention of attacking
America on its home soil and they’re not going to mince about with two mujahadin taking down a dozen casualties if it originates from the Caliphate.
They’ll be looking to do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a
squirrel shoot, and the more groups that pledge allegiance the more possible it becomes to pull off something truly epic. Remember, all of this has
happened in less than a year. How more dangerous will be the lines of communication and supply a year on from today? If the West completely
failed to spot the emergence of the Islamic State and then the allies who so quickly pledged allegiance to it from around the world, what
else of massive significance are they going to miss next? One can, of course, debate just how much the West “failed to spot the
emergence of ISIS” considering it was not only the CIA which initially trainedthe terrorist organization in Jordan in 2012, but according to recently declassified
Pentagon documents, the US was well aware the outcome its attempt to overthrow Syria’s Assad would have on the region, in the process “creating” ISIS, aka al
Qaeda 2.0. In other words, even the
“hypothetical operation” involving a nuclear attack on US soil would implicitly
have the blessing of the US government. Which, considering the way the stock market surges every time the US economy deteriorates
further on its way towards recession, probably means that a mushroom cloud appearing in some major US metropolitan area is just what the E-mini algos would
need to send the S&P500 limit up.
Terrorist retaliation causes nuclear war – draws in Russia and China
Robert Ayson 10, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New
Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging
Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not
necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should
ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that
would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant
numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of
what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major
nuclear
weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is
always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these
two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear
exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and
especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange
of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and
tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear
arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were
considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. t may require a
considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a
massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered
just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most
obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of
terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For
example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism
had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of
that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while
the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable,
identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials
used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if
the act of nuclear
a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible
(or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like
terrorism came as
the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list
consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia
and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism
occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China,
and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials
and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would
only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed
conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy
war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a
nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the
United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider
the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response
to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided)
confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate
aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces,
including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of
reality, it
is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S.
intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to
preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a
devastating response.
1NC—Agency PIC
1NC
Text: The United States Department of Homeland Security and the United States
Department of Justice should substantially curtail its surveillance of the US-Mexico border.
Solves border surveillance
CBP 15 [“U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION STRATEGIC PLAN”; http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CBP-VisionStrategy-2020.pdf; CBP Publication Number 0215-0315; MARCH 2015] //duff
To fully implement risk-informed, intelligence-driven operations that focus our capabilities against the
highest threats, CBP must maintain and constantly enhance situational awareness. Situational awareness is
derived from CBP’s comprehensive understanding of the threat environment and provides an in-depth
picture of the current operating conditions within a specific region of the border environment and the
near term projections for those conditions in that region. It forms the cornerstone for safeguarding the Nation’s air, land
and maritime borders because it ensures that CBP operational elements and their leadership are keenly aware of the threats, challenges,
opportunities, and capabilities within
a given border region. Building the Foundation of Situational Awareness
Situational awareness begins with the information collected by CBP’s intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance capabilities combined with a thorough analysis of other cross-border trends,
especially those concerning illicit trafficking and unlawful crossings along the U.S. borders, in the
approaches to the United States. Building upon that information and intelligence CBP will leverage a wide range of tactics, techniques,
technologies, and methodologies to improve data collection, formulate actionable intelligence, and enhance situational awareness. This will
enable CBP to prevent and disrupt threats in the border environment. The
border environment in which CBP operates is
challenged by continuously evolving tactics of terrorists, criminals and other adversaries. To promote and
advance situational awareness CBP must lead efforts to collaborate with our domestic law enforcement, intelligence, and local community
partners. Additionally,
ensuring coordination with our foreign law enforcement partners, especially our
North and Central American and Caribbean Basin neighbors, can significantly increase CBP’s
situational awareness. Furthermore, assisting our international partners in expanding their resources and capacities through
coordinated training and exercises will strengthen the network of capabilities for providing effective situational awareness. As CBP enhances its
ability to effectively develop situational awareness, it will become better able to predict actions, movements, and intent of TCOs, terrorists and
other potential threats.
1NC—VISA CP
Counter Plan Text: The United States Federal Government should issue three-hundred
thousand two-year visas annually to Mexicans and increase the number of permanent
resident visas available to Mexicans to one hundred thousand.
Solves both legal and illegal immigration
Massey et al. 7 [“Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in Mexico-U.S. Migration”; Patricia Fernández-Kelly Department of sociology
and Office of Population Research at Princeton University Douglas S. Massey Princeton University; American Academy of Political and Social
Science; http://ann.sagepub.com/content/610/1/98.full.pdf+html; doi: 10.1177/0002716206297449 The ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science March 2007 vol. 610 no. 1 98-118] //duff
The futility of recent immigration policies and their devastating effects upon the well-being of individuals and families need not continue.
Elsewhere, Massey (2005; Massey and Durand 2002) has proposed specific measures that would reconcile U.S. immigration policy with the
realities of growing economic integration brought about under NAFTA. Most important among those recommendations is to
bring
current flows of Mexican labor into the open through the creation of a temporary visa program that
would permit individuals to enter, live, work, and be accounted for in the United States. Those new visas
would be available to residents of Canada and Mexico, the two countries joined to the United States by territorial proximity but also by NAFTA.
If 300,000 two-year visas were issued annually, there would be 600,000 temporary workers in the
United States at any time, a small share of the U.S. labor force but a large fraction of the
undocumented population. A rational and consistent immigration policy would also require potential immigrants to pay substantial
fees—but not as large as those now paid to smugglers and counterfeit documents manufacturers—for visas and work permits issued by the
U.S. government. The funds amassed from such measures could be put to good use by supporting educational and employment opportunities
in U.S. communities. Those resources could also be directed to the enforcement of measures aimed at keeping dangerous individuals and
potential terrorists away from the United States. Finally,
it is imperative to increase the number of permanent
resident visas available to Mexicans to one hundred thousand. Mexico is a country of 105 million
people with a one-trillion-dollar economy that shares a two-thousand-mile border with the United
States, to which it is linked by a free trade agreement that has increasingly integrated the North
American economy to make Mexico and the United States one another’s largest trading partners. Yet
despite these intimate linkages, Mexico has the same immigration quota as Nepal or Botswana. Maintaining a quota of twenty
thousand visas per year for a nation to which the United States is so closely bound by history,
geography, and free trade is unrealistically low, bringing about waiting periods that surpass ten years,
creating frustration among qualified applicants, and making it all but certain that illegal migration will
continue.
1NC—Disease DA
1NC
Existing border disease surveillance checks chronic and infectious diseases
Weinberg et al. 03
[“The U.S.-Mexico Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project: Establishing Binational Border Surveillance”;
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/1/02-0047_article; Michelle Weinberg*Comments to Author , Stephen Waterman*, Carlos Alvarez Lucas,
Veronica Carrion Falcon, Pablo Kuri Morales, Luis Anaya Lopez, Chris Peter‡, Alejandro Escobar Gutiérrez§, Ernesto Ramirez Gonzalez§, Ana
Flisser¶, Ralph Bryan*, Enrique Navarro Valle#, Alfonso Rodriguez**, Gerardo Alvarez Hernandez††, Cecilia Rosales‡‡, Javier Arias Ortiz§§,
Michael Landen¶¶, Hugo Vilchis##, Julie Rawlings***, Francisco Lopez Leal†††, Luis Ortega‡‡‡, Elaine Flagg*, Roberto Tapia Conyer, Martin
Cetron*, and for the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project Working Group; they’re all CDC scientists; Volume 9, Number 1—January
2003 Research] //duff
The BIDS project demonstrates that the development of a binational regional surveillance system for one of the world’s busiest geographic
boundaries is feasible. Success is highly dependent on extensive U.S. and Mexican local and state involvement; maintaining a balance among
the competing priorities of this diverse group of participants continues to be one of the project's greatest challenges. A high level of
participation among the group is an essential ingredient in creating a binational, locally-relevant agenda and enhancing long-term project
sustainability. The
BIDS surveillance system has required flexibility to incorporate local and state reporting
requirements, while maintaining sufficient standardization of case definitions, data, and laboratory
testing procedures. Dedicated coordination at the federal level of both countries has been essential.
Maintaining federal political commitment and funding for the 3-year development and
implementation period has been and continues to be critical. BIDS promotes communication and cooperation through
border-wide meetings and the binational subcommittees. The border sister city meetings provide a forum for exchange of ideas and discussion
of issues of binational importance, thus strengthening cross-border relationships among counterpart epidemiologists and laboratory staff.
Many logistical problems require local solutions best handled by the sister cities working together. Effective problem solving requires
coordination and optimal communication among participants. However, this level of effectiveness will not be achieved in the border region
until the infrastructure barriers are overcome, including substantial improvements in access to telephones, fax machines, computers, the
Internet, and satellite teleconferencing. BIDS continues to face major obstacles in the movement of equipment, supplies, specimens, and
financial resources across borders. These activities are cumbersome and time consuming for all project participants. Accords between the
United States and Mexico should be developed to promote cooperation in public health and facilitate sharing of human and other resources
and the moving of laboratory specimens across the border; these agreements would substantially enhance border health activities and benefit
both countries. The states of Arizona and Sonora cooperated successfully in establishing a shared border health facility in Nogales, Sonora. This
state-based model could be replicated in other areas of the border and reinforced with federal policies. To further enhance federal support, we
suggest that a joint border field station be established by CDC, the Mexican General Directorate of Epidemiology, and the Instituto de
Diagnóstico y Referencias Epidemiológicas. The mandates from the United States–Mexico Border Health Association and the Council of State
and Territorial Epidemiologists served as an initiation point for project activities but did not anticipate the need for additional federal-level
agreements for data exchange. The BIDS group has drafted guidelines for conducting a binational outbreak investigation and will be
implementing these as opportunities arise. Ongoing data collection will enable better characterization of binational cases. However,
formal
agreements at high levels of government are needed to authorize and endorse the timely binational
exchange of epidemiologic and laboratory information about important infectious disease outbreaks
and cases that occur along the border at BIDS sites and sites that are not currently part of the BIDS network. Political changes at
the local, state, and federal levels in Mexico frequently lead to changes in public health personnel, resulting in an ongoing need to train and
incorporate new personnel into the project; this reality has highlighted the importance of institutionalizing any binational project through highlevel formal agreements between the two countries. Weathering political changes is a challenge to infrastructure-building projects, like BIDS,
which require several years of investment until tangible results, such as data are available. To
achieve the goal of building
border epidemiology and laboratory capacity, BIDS established a system that built on existing
strengths in syndromic and laboratory surveillance. The enhancement of border laboratory infrastructure at the Mexican
sites was a major benefit. Additional support is essential, including stable funding for laboratory supplies and training courses, ranging from
laboratory techniques to preventive maintenance of laboratory equipment; implementation of standardized quality control and quality
assurance guidelines, such as a voluntary blinded proficiency testing program for selected tests; and a telephone consultation service with a
toll-free telephone number to help staff address the problems. Syndromic
surveillance for hepatitis and febrile
exanthems will allow us to estimate the magnitude of public health problems along the border, for
example, acute hepatitis B and hepatitis C; determine the geographic distribution of diseases, such as
typhus, ehrlichiosis, and dengue; detect outbreaks; evaluate control measures, such as immunization
efforts to prevent measles, rubella, and hepatitis A and the reduction of breeding sites for mosquitoes
that transmit dengue; and monitor emerging infections, such as hepatitis E, and generate hypotheses
about these diseases that can be further studied. Systematic collection of surveillance data on
binational cases will also better define the contribution of mobile populations to disease transmission.
As a model for true binational cooperation along the border, BIDS is a starting point from which a comprehensive infrastructure can be
developed to accurately assess the health status of border residents and other migrants who come through the area. Ultimately, data provided
by BIDS will be useful in the development of more effective prevention and control strategies for infectious diseases in this unique region. Dr.
Weinberg is a medical epidemiologist in the Division of global Migration and Quarantine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her
research interests focus on the epidemiology and prevention of infectious diseases along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Disease surveillance on US Mexico border key to solve mosquito-borne viruses –
Chikungunya proves
Utepnews 2/19 (news reporting from The University of Texas at El Paso, “Mosquito Experts Prepare
for Chikungunya Threat Along U.S.-Mexico Border”, Febuaray 19th 2015,
http://news.utep.edu/?p=29135)
National mosquito experts will gather at The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss and strengthen
U.S. border plans related to the surveillance and control of mosquito-borne viruses. The meeting was
created to prepare for the likely onslaught of chikungunya, an emerging infectious disease
Eastern Hemisphere that first appeared in the Caribbean last year; it is
from the
expected to spread north to the southern United
States. “With the recent understanding that chikungunya virus is endemic in Mexico, we felt that a
meeting to assess virus surveillance activities along the U.S.-Mexico border would be appropriate at
this time ,” said Doug Watts, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert on mosquitoes and the viruses they transmit. “ The
opportunity to bring together those responsible for infectious disease surveillance will lead to
improved strategies for the detection and control of emerging infections, such as chikungunya and
dengue viruses that threaten the health of the border communities.”
The goal of the meeting is to strengthen
mosquito disease surveillance and control. The experts will focus on four objectives during the two-day conference :
1) improved
diagnostic and surveillance capacity for chikungunya 2) expanded training for health care providers in
recognizing and managing chikungunya cases 3) improved surveillance of mosquitoes that can carry
chikungunya 4) improved local mosquito control capacity Attendees will include scientists from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , such as Chief of the Arboviral Diseases Branch Roger Nasci, Ph.D., and Scott
Weaver, Ph.D, an expert in human infections and immunity at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The media and public are
invited to listen in as the scientists present their areas of specialty and work together in response to the possibility of a widespread epidemic.
The meeting is supported by UTEP’s Border Biomedical Research Center and a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health
Disparities.
Disease border surveillance key to challenged HIV/AIDS
Strathdee et al 12 (the Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences, Harold Simon Professor and Chief of
the Division of Global Public Health in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San
Diego School of Medicine, “The Emerging HIV Epidemic on the Mexico-US Border: An International Case
Study Characterizing the Role of Epidemiology in Surveillance and Response”, June 22nd 2012,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3361703/)
Surveillance data plays a critical role in monitoring epidemiologic trends and programmatic
responses to infectious disease threats, both nationally and globally.
There is a long history in public health
disease control and prevention in which epidemiologic and surveillance data have informed policy and interventions to reduce or alter risk even
in the absence of knowing the underlying mechanisms of disease transmission.1 In 1983,
epidemiologic studies prior to the
isolation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) had already identified many risks factors for which
control measure policies were subsequently developed. 1,2 However, national and regional HIV/AIDS surveillance data
can sometimes mask dynamic sub-epidemics that vary by country, region, sex or HIV transmission group, especially when HIV incidence is
increasing in vulnerable populations that under-utilize HIV testing and treatment services. In many countries,
HIV/AIDS surveillance
data are limited to programmatic data from clinics testing antenatal women, those being screened
for sexually transmitted infections (STI), or routine HIV testing among military personnel. The
reliance on these types of sources, rather than HIV testing data drawn from community-based
populations, can lead to erroneous conclusions about country-level HIV epidemic trends and the
presumed impact of prevention interventions and policies. 3 Among the country-level HIV prevalence estimates across
the Americas, Mexico’s nationwide prevalence of 0.3% is among the lowest.
By 2007, there were an estimated 200,000
HIV-positive persons living in Mexico, and at the end of 2008, a total of 124,505 reported AIDS cases,
among whom the vast majority were attributed to homosexual/bisexual activity. Since the first AIDS
case was reported in Mexico in 1983 until 2007, the male:female AIDS case ratio dropped from 10:1
to 3:5.4 Trends in national HIV prevalence data by gender and risk group were similar to AIDS
incidence data , but among Mexico’s 32 states, Baja California –abutting California, USA-- has consistently had the highest cumulative
AIDS incidence, second only to Mexico’s federal district, and the corresponding rate in the border state of Chihuahua has remained above the
national average.5
In this case study, we contrast Mexico’s national and state-level HIV epidemic profile
with data drawn from cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies conducted in two northern
Mexican cities bordering the United States
(Tijuana in Baja California and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua).
We then discuss
how HIV/AIDS surveillance data initially perpetuated spurious assumptions about the HIV epidemic
profiles in these states and in Mexico overall , which hampered timely responses for targeting appropriate prevention and
treatment.
We show how epidemiologic data used in conjunction with qualitative data led to the
recognition that the HIV epidemic in the Mexico-US border region
had already become well established in specific
subgroups that had been presumed to be insignificant and isolated, many of whom were highly mobile. These data played a significant role in
stimulating calls for action from researchers, NGOs and state policy makers. Several successful outcomes included formal endorsement and
expansion of needle exchange programs as a critical component to a combined HIV prevention response and the creation of a nation-wide
mobile HIV prevention program targeting marginalized populations. We discuss this experience in an international context and provide lessons
learned to suggest ways in which other countries may benefit from how epidemiology played a key role in formulating policy for HIV prevention
efforts. This case study also highlights the benefits of integrating research with training in a binational context, which is critical for capacity
building and sustained policy responses in resource-limited settings.
Chronic diseases disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities on the border –
disease surveillance is key to combat them
Bliss 10
[“The Challenge of Chronic Diseases on the U.S.-Mexico Border A Report of the CSIS Americas Program and the CSIS Global Health Policy
Center”; http://csis.org/files/publication/100614_Bliss_ChronicDiseases_Web.pdf; Katherine E. Bliss; June 2010; CENTER FOR STRATEGIC &
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES] //duff
Beatriz Díaz Apodaca is the director of research and graduate studies at the Instituto de Ciencias Biomédicas at the Universidad Autónoma de
Ciudad Juárez, where she also serves as a research professor. She prefaced her remarks by noting that chronic diseases are now responsible for
58 percent of all deaths worldwide. She observed that 80 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, explaining that
the increase in rates of chronic diseases has been very dramatic and is part of a broader process of economic growth, demographic transition,
urbanization, and globalization. The
factors that account for their emergence as a major cause of mortality, she
environmental change, the failure of individuals to take responsibility for their health, and
inadequate public policies. If left unaddressed, Díaz Apodaca warned, chronic diseases threaten to undermine
recent economic gains and widen gaps in health between developed and developing countries. Like Lara
said, include
Esqueda, Díaz Apodaca signaled the importance of reforming health systems to incorporate an emphasis on behavior change and disease
prevention into a broader recognition of noncommunicable, chronic diseases within public health settings.
In Mexico, the rate at
which the population is becoming overweight or obese is among the highest in the world. Among children
between the ages of 5 and 11, the rates of obesity rose 40 percent between 1996 and 2006, she said. The population’s weight gain
translates into higher rates of diabetes, with diabetes leading to ever greater rates of blindness, renal
failure, and amputations. One reason for the increase in chronic diseases related to weight gain, such as
diabetes, is that people are not preparing and eating nutritious foods, according to Díaz Apodaca. She pointed to a
recent study that showed that in Mexico people are drinking a half liter of sugared soft drinks per person per
day. Families in indigenous communities, which are among the poorest in Mexico, spend more money
on high-calorie soft drinks than they do on milk; the amount of money families spend on fast food
each day could easily cover the cost of all their fruit and vegetable needs. Díaz Apodaca highlighted the ways in
which changes in agricultural policy and practice are influencing food culture, as well. Beans, combined with rice or corn, provide a complete
protein, but bean cultivation and consumption are on the decline, with many families rejecting traditional foods, viewing them as associated
with poverty and indigenous lifestyles. The increasing occupation of women outside the home leaves them less time to cook traditional,
nutritious meals for the family, as well. For example, in Mexico instant and canned soups, which are high in fat and salt, are very popular, and
Mexico consumes 15 percent of the world’s instant soup at a rate of 4.5 million servings per day. The mass media fuel the demand for less
nutritious, “fast food” through advertising policies, according to Díaz Apodaca. With many children watching television for two hours a day, the
exposure of Mexico’s youngest citizens to images of “empty” calorie snacks and meals can be quite high—12,400 ads for fast food within a
year’s time. Díaz Apodaca emphasized that any
successful policies and programs to address chronic diseases must
take into account the fact that the border is a highly integrated region, with people regularly moving
from one side to another for work, to shop, or to spend time with family. Thus, communities on each side of the
border should have common programs focused on nutrition, health, and physical activity, with the health sector emphasizing the
reduction of inequalities in health and ensuring the improvement of population health, in general. Díaz
Apodaca presented several recommendations for policymakers to take into consideration in confronting the emerging challenge of chronic
diseases on the U.S.-Mexico border: create healthy environments for work, education, and recreation; involve organizations and leaders who
can prioritize improved health through a variety of initiatives; identify and support organizations and individuals who can take the lead in
investigate and analyze
community needs and goals; empower families and individuals to address chronic diseases through multiple sectors, including the
advocating for improved health through the reduction of risk factors that contribute to chronic disease;
education sector; and strengthen the research agenda, gathering information at the community level and ensuring that it can be shared across
regions. Díaz Apodaca emphasized that citizens must be empowered to take an active role in protecting their health, stressing that they must
be convinced that they are not necessarily fated to die from a chronic disease just because their parents or other relatives did. 6 | the challenge
of chronic diseases on the u.s.-mexico border David McQueen, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, Georgia Rather
than focus on chronic diseases themselves, Dr. David McQueen, who is a senior biomedical research scientist and associate director for global
health promotion at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, focused his remarks on eight political and social challenges that shape work on the border with respect to chronic diseases. He
noted that CDC has been working for at least 15 years with partners in the border area. McQueen agreed that it is important to think of the
region as its own entity, with its own characteristics, rather than as merely part of the United States or part of Mexico. The first challenge
McQueen identified was that the governments in each country have different priorities. The
border area is the poorest in the
United States but one of the more prosperous areas on the Mexican side. Despite these differences,
programs should emphasize commonalities and links that tie the residents of each country. The second
challenge is that most health systems are focused on infectious diseases and have not yet been reformed to address chronic diseases. Health
personnel must be trained to prevent and manage chronic diseases within health care settings.
It is important to focus on data
collection, risk assessment, and understanding what works and what doesn’t in terms of outreach and
prevention efforts at the community level.
1NC—Iran Deal DA
Obama can hold off a veto now – but his political capital is key
Walsh and Barrett 7/16 (Deirdre, Senior Congressional Producer for CNN, Ted, senior congressional
producer for CNN Politics, “WH dispatches Joe Biden to lock down Iran deal on Capitol Hill,” CNN,
7/16/2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/iran-deal-white-house-democratscongress/)//duncan
Two days after the Iran deal was unveiled, the Obama administration's sales job is in full swing.¶ Vice
President Joe Biden traveled to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to convince House Democrats to support the
deal, while a small group of senators were invited to the White House to get their questions answered directly from officials who sat across
from the Iranians at the negotiating table. Biden meets with Senate Democrats of the Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.¶ House
lawmakers said Biden was candid about the strengths and weaknesses of the compromise deal. One described his behind closed doors pitch.¶
"I'm going to put aside my notes and talk to you from my heart because I've been in this business for 45 years," Biden said in his opening
comments, according to Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey, who attended the session.¶ "I'm not going to BS you. I'm going to tell you exactly what
I think," the vice president reportedly said.¶ Obama
got a boost from the leader of his party in the chamber when
was backing the deal.¶ SInce Republicans in the
House and Senate are firmly against the Iran nuclear deal -- announced by President Barack Obama on Tuesday -- the
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi formally announced Thursday that she
administration is cranking up its campaign to sway concerned Democrats to back the agreement.¶
White House needs to secure enough votes from
members of his own party to sustain the President's promised veto on an resolution of disapproval -- 145 in the
House and 34 in the Senate.¶ After the session with Biden, several House Democrats stressed that while the process is
just beginning, right now the administration likely has the votes to sustain the President's veto on a
Under legislation that allows Congress to review the agreement, the
resolution to block the deal.¶
"I'm confident they will like it when they understand it all," the vice president told reporters on his
way into the session, beginning what will be a two month campaign culminating in a vote, expected in September.¶ Democrats,
both
for and against the deal, praised Biden's presentation.¶ "Joe Biden was as good as I've seen him," Rep. John Larson, DConnecticut, told CNN. "I thought he did an excellent job."¶ Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar said Biden is a "master of detail" and
helped clarify some concerns he had about the verification provisions in the deal, but he still planned to carefully study it and
said he was undecided.¶ Pascrell also cited the verification issue as a potential sticking point but said he is leaning 'yes' on the
agreement.¶ "On our side of the aisle there is concern and skepticism shared by a number of members but an
openness to be persuaded if the facts take them that way," Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said. "I think (Biden) made
some real progress on behalf of the administration today."¶ But Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York, a former member of Democratic
leadership, told reporters he wasn't sold yet.¶ "For me, I still have some very significant questions with respect to lifting of the embargo on
conventional arms. And missiles. The (International Atomic Energy Agency) verification process for me is not any time anywhere, I think there
are some very significant delays built into that," Israel said.¶ Larson noted that both Biden's
day earlier, who he said spoke favorably about the deal, helped
presentation, along with Hillary Clinton's a
lay the groundwork for most Democrats to back the
White House.¶ At the same time on Wednesday that the President held a news conference trying to persuade the public he had brokered
an strong and effective deal with Iran, Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and a handful of other senators, were in a separate
part of the White House meeting with some of the President's top negotiators, who had just returned from Vienna.¶ "I was very satisfied with
an awful lot of the answers we received," Manchin told CNN.¶
The intimate meeting for senators was another example
of the White House's effort to shore up support in the Senate where leaders believe as many as 15
Democrats could oppose the deal. If they did, it could provide Senate Republicans the votes needed to
override a veto of the disapproval resolution and scuttle the deal.¶ But Manchin, a centrist who has
close relations with senators on both sides of the aisle, said at this point he has not detected major
blowback from Senate Democrats to the deal.¶ "At caucus yesterday I didn't get a reading there is hard, hard opposition. I
did not," he said.¶ In fact, Manchin said he thought Republicans actually might struggle getting the 60 votes they will need to pass the
disapproval resolution, much less the dozen or so votes that might be needed to sustain a veto.¶ One
key senator whose position
will be closely monitored by the White House and his colleagues from both parties on the Hill, is Sen. Chuck Schumer of New
York, the third-ranking Democrats who is poised to become the Democratic leader in the next Congress. Schumer has many Jewish
voters in his state who are wary of the impact of the Iran agreement on the security of Israel. Schumer
said he is skeptical of the deal and won't decide whether to support it before doing his homework.¶ "I will sit down, I will read the
agreement thoroughly and then I'm gonna speak with officials -- administration officials, people all over on all different sides," he said when
asked about his decision-making process. "Look, this is a decision that shouldn't be made lightly and I am gonna just study this agreement and
talk to people before I do anything else."¶ Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, a leading critic of the agreement with Iran, said " the
pressure will be enormous from the administration," as it tries to keep Democrats from defecting . As
chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain said he intends to hold hearings to demonstrate what he calls the "fatal flaws" in the
deal.¶ House
conservatives
speaking at a forum sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, one after another
conceded that ultimately they may not be able to block it.¶ " The game is rigged
in favor of getting this done" Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said.
ripped the Iran deal. But they
Schumer is border security hawk – the plan pisses him off
On The Issues 14 (On The Issues, "Charles Schumer on Immigration",
www.ontheissues.org/International/Charles_Schumer_Immigration.htm, 12/14/2014, sr)
What changes to our current immigration policy do you support? A: I support further securing our borders; prohibiting hiring of
undocumented immigrants by requiring job applicants to present a secure Social Security card;
creating jobs by attracting the world's best and brightest to America, and keeping them here;
requiring undocumented immigrants to register with the government, pay taxes, and earn legal
[status or face deportation.] Establishes specified benchmarks which must be met before the guest worker and legalization programs may be
initiated: operational control of the border with Mexico; Border Patrol increases; border barriers,
including vehicle barriers, fencing, radar, and aerial vehicles; detention capacity for illegal aliens
apprehended crossing the US-Mexico border; workplace enforcement, including an electronic
employment verification system; and Z-visa alien processing. Within 18 months, achieves operational control over U.S. land
and maritime borders, including: systematic border surveillance through more effective use of personnel and
technology; and physical infrastructure enhancements to prevent unlawful border entry Defines
"operational control" as the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other
unlawful aliens, narcotics, and other contraband.
Schumer would create a dem majority to override the deal
Associated Press, 7/16/2015, “Schumer squeezed on Iran Nuclear deal,”
http://nypost.com/2015/07/16/schumer-squeezed-on-obamas-iran-nuclear-deal/)//
Indeed, with the leaders of Israel and their supporters in the US strongly opposed to the accord, observers on and off Capitol Hill say that the
only chance
congressional opponents have is if they get Schumer in their corner. Sometime in the fall, Congress will vote
on whether to approve or disapprove the Iran deal. If enough hawkish Democrats join Republicans and
the disapprove side prevails, Obama would veto the legislation. At that point, the focus would turn to
whether Congress could override Obama’s veto, which takes a two-thirds vote in both the House and
Senate. Chances of that are slim, but with Schumer on their side, opponents might stand a chance.
“There is no way a veto would be overridden without Sen. Schumer,” said Aaron Keyak, a consultant to several Jewish
groups and a former Democratic congressional aide. “Finding 67 votes to override a presidential veto is a very high
threshold and there is no way to get to that number without Sen. Schumer.” That helps explain the intense pressures
on Schumer and a handful of other key senators in a debate that pro-Israel groups have made clear will be their top focus, bar none, in the months to come. With
the deal just a few days old, Schumer
is already being targeted in advertising, news releases and social media from both sides. The
Emergency Committee for Israel announced an ad campaign on New York City cable television encouraging New Yorkers to “Call Sen. Schumer and tell him he
must stand firm” on his insistence that the deal allow nuclear inspections anytime and anywhere, which
opponents contend it does not. Another group, Secure America Now, has been urging supporters over Twitter to call Schumer and tell him to oppose the deal. On
the opposite side, the progressive group Credo issued a statement warning that “Democrats who sabotage the Iran deal will face consequences,” and listed
Schumer, who likely will win re-election next year, as a top target. Adding to the pressure, the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has
cautiously embraced the deal. At the middle of the storm, the famously media-friendly Schumer has gone uncharacteristically quiet. Questioned at an unrelated
news conference this week, he repeated his initial written statement nearly word for word. “I will sit down, I will read the agreement thoroughly, and then I’m going
to speak with officials, administration officials, people all over, on all different sides,” Schumer said. “This is a decision that shouldn’t be made lightly, and I am going
to just study this agreement and talk to people before I do anything else.” Congressional
allies say Schumer seems genuinely torn.
“He’s obviously got pressures and I assume he’s going to do the right thing,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who is undecided and facing similar
pressures. “There are very severe upsides and very severe downsides.” Obama argues the deal closes off Iran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb for the next decade, and
has challenged opponents to come up with an alternative. The liberal Jewish group J Street is backing the deal, and the group’s vice president of government affairs,
Dylan Williams, said Schumer risks angering progressive voters if he breaks with the White House. “This
an overwhelming majority of Sen. Schumer’s
deal is and will continue to be supported by
Democratic base and if there is a political consideration here, that
would be the overriding one,” Williams said. But the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee is vehemently opposed to
the deal, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is denouncing all over American media as undermining the security of Israel and the region. Steven J.
Rosen, a former longtime senior official with the group, said that backing the deal could hurt Schumer with the pro-Israel community — and with donors in New
York. “I think he wants to be seen as one of Israel’s most important friends in the United States. A bad vote here could have lasting damage on his standing in that
regard,” Rosen said. “The
White House has put him in a very, very tough position here.”
Failure will spur prolif and war with Iran – the plan tanks Obama’s ability to hold off
Congress
Beauchamp 14 (Zack – B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from Brown University and an M.Sc in
International Relations from the London School of Economics, former editor of TP Ideas and a reporter
for ThinkProgress.org. He previously contributed to Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish at Newsweek/Daily
Beast, and has also written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines, now writes for Vox , “How the new
GOP majority could destroy Obama's nuclear deal with Iran,”
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/6/7164283/iran-nuclear-deal-congress,)
There is one foreign policy issue on which the GOP's takeover of the Senate could have huge ramifications, and beyond just the US:
Republicans are likely to try to torpedo President Obama's ongoing efforts to reach a nuclear deal with
Iran. And they just might pull it off. November 24 is the latest deadline for a final agreement between the United States and Iran over
the latter's nuclear program. That'll likely be extended, but it's a reminder that the negotiations could soon come to a head. Throughout
his presidency, Obama has prioritized these negotiations ; he likely doesn't want to leave office without having made a
deal. But if Congress doesn't like the deal, or just wants to see Obama lose, it has the power to torpedo it
by imposing new sanctions on Iran. Previously, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used procedural powers to stop this from
happening and save the nuclear talks. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may not be so kind, and he may have the votes
to destroy an Iran deal. If he tries, we could see one of the most important legislative fight s of
Obama's presidency.
Why Congress can bully Obama on Iran sanctions At their most basic level, the international negotiations over
Iran's nuclear program (they include several other nations, but the US is the biggest player) are a tit-for-tat deal. If Iran agrees to place a series
of verifiable limits on its nuclear development, then the United States and the world will relax their painful economic and diplomatic sanctions
on Tehran. "The regime of economic sanctions against Iran is arguably the most complex the United States and the international community
have ever imposed on a rogue state," the Congressional Research Service's Dianne Rennack writes. To underscore the point, Rennack's fourpage report is accompanied by a list of every US sanction on Iran that goes on for 23 full pages. The US's sanctions are a joint Congressionalexecutive production. Congress puts strict limits on Iran's ability to export oil and do business with American companies, but it gives the
president the power to waive sanctions if he thinks it's in the American national interest. "In the collection of laws that are the statutory basis
for the U.S. economic sanctions regime on Iran," Rennack writes, "the President retains, in varying degrees, the authority to tighten and relax
restrictions." The
key point here is that Congress gave Obama that power — which means they can take it
back. "You could see a bill in place that makes it harder for the administration to suspend sanctions,"
Ken Sofer, the Associate Director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for
American Progress (where I worked for a little under two years, though not with Sofer directly), says. "You could also see a bill that says
the president can't agree to a deal unless it includes the following things or [a bill] forcing a congressional vote on any deal." Imposing
new sanctions on Iran wouldn't just stifle Obama's ability to remove existing sanctions, it would
undermine Obama's authority to negotiate with Iran at all, sending the message to Tehran that
Obama is not worth dealing with because he can't control his own foreign policy. So if Obama wants
to make a deal with Iran, he needs Congress to play ball . But it's not clear that Mitch McConnell's Senate wants to.
Congress could easily use its authority to kill an Iran deal To understand why the new Senate is such a big deal for congressional action on
sanctions, we have to jump back a year. In November 2013, the Obama administration struck an interim deal with Iran called the Joint Plan of
Action (JPOA). As part of the JPOA, the US agreed to limited, temporary sanctions relief in exchange for Iran limiting nuclear program
components like uranium production. Congressional Republicans, by and large, hate the JPOA deal. Arguing that the deal didn't place
sufficiently serious limits on Iran's nuclear growth, the House passed new sanctions on Iran in December. (There is also a line of argument,
though often less explicit, that the Iranian government cannot be trusted with any deal at all, and that US policy should focus on coercing Iran
into submission or unseating the Iranian government entirely.) Senate Republicans, joined by more hawkish Democrats, had the votes to pass a
similar bill. But in February, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid killed new Iran sanctions, using the Majority Leader's power to block
consideration of the sanctions legislation to prevent a vote. McConnell blasted Reid's move. "There is no excuse for muzzling the Congress on
an issue of this importance to our own national security," he said. So now that McConnell holds the majority leader's gavel, it will remove that
procedural roadblock that stood between Obama and new Iran sanctions. To be clear, it's far from guaranteed that Obama will be able to reach
a deal with Iran at all; negotiations could fall apart long before they reach the point of congressional involvement. But if he does reach a deal,
and Congress doesn't like the terms, then they'll be able to kill it by passing new sanctions legislation, or preventing Obama from temporarily
waiving the ones on the books. And make
no mistake — imposing new sanctions or limiting Obama's authority
to waive the current ones would kill any deal. If Iran can't expect Obama to follow through on his
promises to relax sanctions, it has zero incentive to limit its nuclear program . "If Congress adopts sanctions,"
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Time last December, "the entire deal is dead." Moreover, it could fracture the
international movement to sanction Iran. The U nited S tates is far from Iran's biggest trading partner,
so it depends on international cooperation in order to ensure the sanctions bite. If it looks like the US
won't abide by the terms of a deal, the broad-based international sanctions regime could collapse .
Europe, particularly, might decide that going along with the sanctions is no longer worthwhile. "Our ability to coerce Iran is largely based on
whether or not the international community thinks that we are the ones that are being constructive and [Iranians] are the ones that being
obstructive," Sofer says. "If they don't believe that, then the international sanctions regime falls apart." This could be one of the biggest fights
of Obama's last term It's
true that Obama could veto any Congressional efforts to blow up an Iran deal with
sanctions. But a two-thirds vote could override any veto — and, according to Sofer, an override is entirely
within the realm of possibility. "There are plenty of Democrats that will probably side with Republicans if they try to push a harder
line on Iran," Sofer says. For a variety of reasons, including deep skepticism of Iran's intentions and strong Democratic support for
Israel, whose government opposes the negotiations, Congressional Democrats are not as open to making a deal with
Iran as Obama is. Many will likely defect to the GOP side out of principle. The real fight, Sofer says, will be
among the Democrats — those who are willing to take the administration's side in theory, but don't
necessarily think a deal with Iran is legislative priority number one, and maybe don't want to open
themselves up to the political risk. These Democrats "can make it harder: you can filibuster, if you're
Obama you can veto — you can make it impossible for a full bill to be passed out of Congress on Iran," Sofer says. But it'd be a
really tough battle, one that would consume a lot of energy and lobbying effort that Democrats
might prefer to spend pushing on other issues.
"I'm not really sure they're going to be willing to take on a fight about an
Iran sanctions bill," Sofer concludes. "I'm not really sure that the Democrats who support [a deal] are really fully behind it enough that they'll be
willing to give up leverage on, you know, unemployment insurance or immigration status — these bigger issues for most Democrats." So if
the new Republican Senate prioritizes destroying an Iran deal, Obama will have to fight very hard to
keep it — without necessarily being able to count on his own party for support. And the stakes are
enormous: if Iran's nuclear program isn't stopped peacefully, then the most likely outcomes are
either Iran going nuclear, or war with Iran . The administration believes a deal with Iran is their only
way to avoid this horrible choice. That's why it's been one of the administration's top priorities
day one. It's also why this could become one of the biggest legislative fights of Obama's last two years.
since
Nuke war
Stevens 13 (Philip Stevens, associate editor and chief political commentator for the Financial Times,
Nov 14 2013, “The four big truths that are shaping the Iran talks,”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af170df6-4d1c-11e3-bf32-00144feabdc0.html)
The who-said-what game about last weekend’s talks in Geneva has become a distraction. The six-power negotiations with Tehran to curb Iran’s
nuclear programme may yet succeed or fail. But wrangling between the US and France on the terms of an acceptable deal should not allow the trees to
obscure the forest. The organising facts shaping the negotiations have not changed.¶ The first of these is that Tehran’s acquisition of a bomb would be
more than dangerous for the Middle East and for wider international security. It would most likely set off a nuclear arms race
that would see Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt signing up to the nuclear club . The nuclear n onp roliferation t reaty would be shattered. A future regional conflict could draw Israel into launching a
pre-emptive nuclear strike. This is not a region obviously susceptible to cold war disciplines of
deterrence .¶ The second ineluctable reality is that Iran has mastered the nuclear cycle. How far it is from building a bomb
remains a subject of debate. Different intelligence agencies give different answers. These depend in part on what the spooks actually know and in part on what their political masters want
others to hear. The progress of an Iranian warhead programme is one of the known unknowns that have often wreaked havoc in this part of the world.¶ Israel points to an imminent threat.
European agencies are more relaxed, suggesting Tehran is still two years or so away from a weapon. Western diplomats broadly agree that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not taken a definitive
decision to step over the line. What Iran has been seeking is what diplomats call a breakout capability – the capacity to dash to a bomb before the international community could effectively
mobilise against it.¶ The third fact – and this one is hard for many to swallow – is that neither a negotiated settlement nor the air strikes long favoured by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime
minister, can offer the rest of the world a watertight insurance policy.¶ It should be possible to construct a deal that acts as a plausible restraint – and extends the timeframe for any breakout
– but no amount of restrictions or intrusive monitoring can offer a certain guarantee against Tehran’s future intentions.¶ By the same token,
bombing Iran’s nuclear
sites could certainly delay the programme, perhaps for a couple of years. But, assuming that even the hawkish Mr Netanyahu is not proposing permanent war
against Iran, air strikes would not end it. ¶ You cannot bomb knowledge and technical expertise. To try
would be to empower those in Tehran who say the regime will be safe only when, like North Korea, it has a
weapon. So when Barack Obama says the US will never allow Iran to get the bomb he is indulging in, albeit understandable, wishful thinking.¶ The best the
international community can hope for is that, in return for a relaxation of sanctions, Iran will make a
judgment that it is better off sticking with a threshold capability. To put this another way, if Tehran does step back
from the nuclear brink it will be because of its own calculation of the balance of advantage .¶ The fourth
element in this dynamic is that Iran now has a leadership that, faced with the severe and growing pain inflicted by sanctions, is
prepared to talk . There is nothing to say that Hassan Rouhani, the president, is any less hard-headed than previous Iranian leaders, but he does seem ready to weigh the
options.
1NC—Elections DA
Clinton is likely to win 2016, but its close – recent poll proves – surveillance will be a
key factor
Glenza 6/23 [Jessica Glenza, Breaking News Reporter at Guardian News & Media, “Hillary Clinton on course to win presidential election,
poll says”, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/hillary-clinton-presidential-election-poll, June 23rd, 2015//Rahul]
Hillary Clinton is on course to win the Democratic primary and would go on to trounce her Republican
opponents, according to a new poll. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that the former secretary of
state was the first choice for nominee of 75% of her party, with Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders far behind
on 15%. Analysis Clinton v Bush: America is getting the dynastic matchup it said it didn't want Despite rivals’ protestations, Hillary Clinton
and Jeb Bush enjoy the support of their own party’s voters. But the other party’s dynasty candidate? Not a chance Martin O’Malley, the
former Maryland governor, was on 2%, while Lincoln Chafee, the former governor of Rhode Island, polled less
than 1%. Former Virginia senator Jim Webb, who has not yet formally declared he is running, was on
4%. According to the poll, 92% of likely Democratic voters said they could see themselves supporting Clinton.
The poll asked 1,000 likely voters about their opinions on potential presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat. It
showed Clinton polling at 48% to 40% against her closest Republican contender, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the
brother of former president George W Bush and son of former president George HW Bush. Against the Florida senator Marco Rubio,
Clinton polled 50% against 40%. And against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker she polled 51% to 37%.
Among Republican primary voters, the poll showed Bush ahead with 22% of the vote. Walker was next with 17% and Rubio third with 14%.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson had 11%, while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (9%), libertarian senator Rand Paul (7%), former
Texas governor Rick Perry (5%), New Jersey governor Chris Christie (4%) and Texas senator Ted Cruz (4%) were all in single figures. The
poll
is likely to encourage the Clinton camp, whose campaign got off to a rough start when questions arose
about Clinton’s use of personal email as secretary of state, this spring. But it is possible that early polls may not
reflect the true strength of Clinton’s challengers. On Tuesday, Clinton urged businesses to stop selling images with the Conferdate flag on them,
in the wake of the attack on a black church in Charleston Republican pollster Bill McInturff told the Wall Street Journal that Clinton had “the
strongest and most advantageous” standing among Democrats he had seen in 35 years of campaign polling. “She starts with advantages among
very important groups,” he said. McInturff conducted the poll with Democrat Fred Yang. Clinton’s high rankings could be buoyed by increasingly
positive support numbers for her 2008 rival Barack Obama, whose approval rating is up by 8 percentage points to 48% since September 2014,
when it hit an all-time low of 40% according to the same polls. Among
Republican candidates, Bush and Rubio remain
neck and neck, with 75% and 74% of respondents saying they could see themselves supporting the
candidates in a Republican primary. Bush pulls away slightly in favorability rankings, pulling 5% ahead of Walker with 22%, and 8%
ahead of Rubio. Most see Clinton as a moderate candidate (58%) who is trustworthy because of her “experience and background” (59%).
Respondents were fairly split over which party the next president should be from, with Republicans
scoring 36% and Democrats 39%. Ongoing concerns going into the election could set the mood for the
campaign. A “decline in traditional moral values” was rated as the most alarming trend in America of all respondents (25%),
seconded by possible terrorist attacks on the US (18%), while corporate and wealthy individuals’ influence over elections was
rated as the most disconcerting facet of the upcoming campaign (33%).
Dems are working on the evangelical vote now - loosening border control isolates
their base and forfeits the election to the GOP
Jack Jenkins, 6-16-2015, "The Explosive Growth Of Evangelical Belief In Latinos Has Big Political
Implications," ThinkProgress, http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/06/16/3668780/hispanicevangelicals-battle-political-soul-americas-curious-new-swing-vote/)//GV
Much has been written over the past year or so about the ecstatic faith and explosive growth of this new brand of Latino faithful, who unsettle
traditional understandings of American Hispanics as a predominantly Catholic demographic. But as the United States gears up for the 2016
presidential election,
Hispanic evangelicals appear to be making that classic American shift from curious
cultural newcomer to powerful political force.
If attendees at the conference in Houston were to be believed, Hispanic
evangelicals are eager to vote, and in substantial numbers. Yet unlike Hispanic Catholics, who
overwhelmingly reflect the Democratic party platform on several key issues, Latino evangelicals
share political sensibilities with both parties.
This has made their voting habits increasingly uncertain,
group could become that much-prized unicorn of American politics: the swing vote.
meaning the
The 2016 election may
be the “coming out” year for the Latino evangelicals, but as candidates and parties — and particularly the GOP — begin jockeying for this
unusual electorate, one question is lingering in the minds of political strategists on both sides of the aisle:
“evangélicos vote”?
Who will win the
Hispanic evangelicals share more than worship styles with their white theological brethren. Following in the
tradition of Billy Graham and Rick Warren, evangélicos are primarily represented outside their community by a small group of dynamic pastors,
most of whom enjoy robust followings and the political power that comes with it. Election buzzwords such as “left” and “right” are always poor
descriptors for theological camps, but a casual observer could potentially label the movement’s more progressive leaders as Rev. Gabriel
Salguero, a pastor and president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition (NaLEC), and Rev. Luis Cortés Jr., the head of Esperanza, a faithbased Hispanic evangelical network of more than 13,000 congregations. Both men enjoy theological and political clout among Democrats, and
the most tangible example of their influence — like many faith leaders — lies in where they pray: Salguero delivered an invocation at the
Democratic National Convention in 2012, and Cortés offered the opening prayer at President Obama’s inauguration luncheon in 2013. Rev.
Gabriel Salguero addresses the Democratic National Convention in 2012.Rev. Gabriel Salguero addresses the Democratic National Convention
in 2012.CREDIT: AP Meanwhile, the largest — and arguably most conservative — group of Latino evangelicals is the NHCLC, led by Rev. Samuel
Rodriguez. An energetic and media-savvy pastor born in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez is often associated with the Republican party: The NHCLC
conference, for instance, included speeches from two GOP presidential hopefuls — former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Gov. Jeb Bush of
Florida — which makes sense when one realizes that Rodriguez delivered the benediction at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where
he was introduced by none other than RNC chairman Reince Priebus. His organization has grown steadily over the past few years, now boasting
over 40,000 affiliated congregations in the U.S., an eye-catching number that has spurred Rodriguez to begin throwing his political weight
around among conservatives. In January, he published an op-ed boldly entitled “Hispanic
Evangelicals could determine GOP
nominee” aimed at attracting the attention of Republican presidential hopefuls. “Based on the performance on
display in Iowa last weekend by several of the Republican presidential hopefuls, none of them seem to be paying attention to what could
deliver the keys to the front door of the White House: Latino
voters,” Rodriguez wrote, pointing to immigration and
education as crucial issues for his member congregations. “The Hispanic faith community will be listening closely to
where candidates stand on reforms that align with the word of God and respect the dignity of all his people.” Despite Rodriguez’s eagerness to
influence the GOP primary, however, it would be a mistake to pigeonhole him as singularly dedicated to either party: He has served on White
House committees under President Barack Obama. His fellow faith leaders have similarly mixed political histories. Cortés has identified as a
Republican in the past, and his organization’s annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast regularly features speakers from both parties —
including President George W. Bush, who keynoted the event on six occasions. Salguero, meanwhile, can eagerly recount instances when
presidential contenders from both parties have courted his favor. “I have met with Chris Christie, Jeb Bush … former Secretary Clinton’s
people,” Salguero told ThinkProgress. “We are the quintessential swing voter in many ways.”
But even as Hispanic evangelicals
begin to flex their political muscles, assessing their true electoral power is tricky , in part because exact
estimates of their budding population are hard to come by. The U.S. census does not include questions about religion, so the best guess for
their population
size comes from a 2014 Pew study that listed them as roughly 16 percent of the
nation’s 35.4 million Latino adults. That amounts to an estimated 5 to 6 million voting-aged worshippers,
and the real number could be even higher: Rodriguez has claimed that there are 16 million Hispanic
evangelicals in the U.S., and the NHCLC says that evangélicos make up about 20 percent of Latinos overall. Rev. Samuel Rodriguez speaks
during a press conference at the NHCLC in AprilRev. Samuel Rodriguez speaks during a press conference at the NHCLC in AprilCREDIT: JACK
JENKINS/THINKPROGRESS That’s a sizable body politic by any measure. And it’s one that only continues to grow, as more and more Latinos
abandon Catholic cathedrals in droves for rock-music-filled worship halls — or, in some cases, immigrate to the United States from existing
evangelical communities in Central and South America. Assuming
things that are admittedly difficult to quantify at this early stage),
high voter turnout and a healthy registration rate (two
there could be roughly enough evangélicos to tip the
scales by as much as a percentage point in a national election, if they voted as a bloc. One percent may not
Obama, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter,
and Ronald Reagan all won (or lost) the popular vote in presidential elections by two points or less.
sound like much, but that portion of the electorate can have a big effect. Barack
And more importantly for election strategists, according to Salguero, is the fact that evangélicos are clustered in states critical to the 2016
Electoral College tally. “We
are big in key swing states: Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Cleveland,
Cincinnati…North Carolina — we have a radio station there,” Salguero said. “We’re also big in Texas,
Arizona — we’re big in the ‘purple’ states.” Unlike their Catholic compatriots, Hispanic evangelicals tend to skew to the right
on several issues that line up squarely with the Republican base, according to data provided to ThinkProgress from the Public Religion Research
Institute (PRRI). Evangélicos roughly mirror Hispanic Catholics in terms of age and education, but PRRI’s polling showed Latino evangelicals far
more likely than the general Latino population to “oppose” or “strongly oppose” legalizing same-sex marriage (66 percent vs. 36 percent) and
to say that abortion should be illegal in all instances (42 percent vs. 27 percent). The Pew Research survey found almost identical results. Most
significantly for Republicans, polls show that a solid slice of evangélicos are also uncharacteristically conservative on the most important
question in American politics: Party identification. The PRRI survey reported that 21 percent of Hispanic evangelicals say they’re Republicans, a
full 10 percent more than the total Hispanic population. (For context, most evangélicos — 41 percent — identify as independents, while 28
affiliate with the Democratic Party.) Pew
found an even bolder conservative streak: A full 30 percent of Hispanic
evangelical Protestant respondents said they “identify or lean Republican,” compared to 20 percent of
Latino Catholics. These numbers have not gone unnoticed by the Republican Party. At the NHCLC conference, where there was only one
Democratic congressman — Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois — and not a single Democratic candidate for president, it was clear the GOP has
stepped up its outreach to the Hispanic evangelicals who appear to be primed to support them. Most mentions of the Obama were negative,
with speakers repeatedly arraigning him for failing to do enough to protect “religious liberty.” But Republican political strategists are aware that
there’s one roadblock standing in the way. After then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney only won 27 percent of the Hispanic vote during
his failed attempt to win the 2012 election — whereas George W. Bush accrued a solid 44 percent of the same group in 2004 — the RNC
conducted an internal review of their party to determine a new strategy. When the group published the results in 2013,
researchers
concluded that, when it comes to Hispanics, the answer is clear: Republicans need to steer clear of
concepts such as “self-deportation” and rethink their stance on immigration reform.
“If Hispanic Americans
perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our
next sentence,” the report read. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them
here, they will close their ears to our policies. … among
the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and
beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our
Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” Indeed, Hispanics overall consistently rank
immigration as a top concern during elections, a tendency that is also generally true of Latino evangelicals: According to PRRI’s data, 64 percent
of evangélicos support an immigration reform policy that would provide undocumented people a pathway to citizenship provided they meet
certain requirements, compared to 66 percent of Latinos overall. Salguero and Cortés have both made passionate pleas to lawmakers about the
importance of immigration reform, and even as Rodriguez actively courted the favor of GOP candidates in Houston, he was unequivocal on the
issue of immigration. He announced midway through the gathering a plan to ask all presidential hopefuls — Democrats and Republicans — to
sign a pledge endorsing comprehensive immigration reform, invoking biblical language to drive his point home. Republicans must
cross the Jordan of immigration reform to step into the Promised Land of the Hispanic faith electorate.
“Republicans must cross the Jordan of immigration reform to step into the Promised Land of the Hispanic faith electorate,” Rodriguez said in
response to a question from ThinkProgress at a press conference. He tapped the table with his hand for emphasis as he spoke, adding, “There’s
a period there, not a comma. They must.” Beatriz Mesquias, the president of Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas, or the Hispanic Baptist
Convention, who attended the conference, echoed this view. “I
live on the border, in Harlingen, Texas, and I want to see more
protection, but I also wish there were more immigrants who could become residents of the United States,” Mesquias said in Spanish. “I
want a President who supports immigration reform, not because he or she is a Republican or Democrat, but because it’s
the right thing for the nation.” Clearly, the RNC’s advice hasn’t reversed every Republican’s resistance to immigration reform — but for Latino
evangelicals, just one candidate might be enough. At the gathering in Houston, Huckabee and Bush both offered rival addresses to the
assembly, competing for the (very bright) spotlight among an eager clientele. Huckabee, like many Republican candidates, mostly ignored
issues impacting undocumented people. But Bush, who is Catholic but whose wife is Hispanic, impressed by delivering a speech that appeared
to be directly inspired by Rodriguez’s op-ed. Speaking partly in Spanish, he pushed for a better education system and outlined something that
sounded suspiciously like a version of immigration reform. Jeb Bush addresses the crowd in Houston.Jeb Bush addresses the crowd in
Houston.CREDIT: JACK JENKINS/THINKPROGRESS “We have to fix a broken immigration system, and do it in short order,” he said, outlining a
pathway to “earned legal status.” “This country does not so well when people lurk in the shadows. This country does spectacularly well when
everybody can pursue their God-given abilities,” he added. Bush repeated and arguably expanded this idea while announcing his official
campaign for the presidency on June 15. When a group of demonstrators interrupted his speech with a protest encouraging full citizenship for
undocumented people instead of legal status, Bush departed from his prepared remarks, distancing himself from the president’s executive
actions on the issue while simultaneously endorsing a version of immigration reform. “The next president of the United States will pass
meaningful immigration reform so that [problem] will be solved, not by executive order,” he said. Rodriguez, for his part, returned the favor for
Bush. In the lead-up to the conference, he all but endorsed a Bush candidacy in an interview with Bloomberg. “I see hope in the candidacy of
Governor Jeb Bush,” Rodriguez said. “I think Governor Bush gets it. He’s not pro-amnesty, but he knows we have to find a solution to the
immigration issue in America. I have a great respect, an admiration toward Governor Bush for his exemplary leadership in Florida.” I see hope in
the candidacy of Governor Jeb Bush. However — despite all of Bush’s policy-talk, linguistic prowess, and degree in Latin-American studies — it
was Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and dyed-in-the-wool evangelical conservative, who stole the show in Houston. Huckabee’s warm
reception was initially confusing, given that the onetime governor has a long history of opposing immigration reform. True to form, when
ThinkProgress asked Huckabee in Houston whether he would sign NHCLC’s immigration pledge, he refused to answer, saying he hadn’t read it.
What happened next, however, offered a telling glimpse into the uncomfortable position occupied by right-leaning Hispanic evangelical leaders,
who appear caught between a need to advocate for their community’s issues and a desire to win favor with the conservative elite. Rodriguez,
sitting just inches from Huckabee when the question was asked, did not push for clarification regarding Huckabee’s immigration stance or
pressure him to sign the pledge. Instead, the otherwise spirited pastor — who spoke so passionately about immigration reform earlier that
morning — simply stared at the table as Huckabee spoke. When the governor finished, Rodriguez abruptly exited the press conference, only
returning several minutes later to help close the meeting. Rodriguez prays over former Gov. Mike Huckabee at the NHCLC
conference.Rodriguez prays over former Gov. Mike Huckabee at the NHCLC conference.CREDIT: JACK JENKINS/THINKPROGRESS Even if the
winner of the GOP primary doesn’t shift on immigration reform, the party could cleave off a few Hispanic evangelical votes through oldfashioned faith outreach. Immigration was clearly a charged topic at the NHCLC gathering, but attendees were equally energized by Bush’s
frank discussion of his own spiritual journey. When ThinkProgress asked Lisa, a young Hispanic evangelical who attended the conference, what
she was looking for in a presidential candidate, she responded with an answer that was virtually indistinguishable from a rank-and-file white
evangelical. “Number one, their faith,” said Lisa, her two friends nodding in agreement beside her. “That they stand for the family, the husband
and the wife … and that they continue to just hold the truth that the United States was founded on from the very beginning, and not to change
or sway because other people’s beliefs are different.” This is typical of Hispanic evangelicals. A May 2014 Pew survey showed a strong majority
of evangelical Latinos (62 percent) believed firmly that the church should speak out on social issues, compared to 47 percent of Hispanics
overall. This certainly seemed true for Daisy Gonzalez, another young Hispanic evangelical at the conference from Del Rio, Texas, who gave
Bush high marks for discussing education in his speech, but maintained that faith was paramount. “I don’t really look at the elephant or the
donkey [when picking a candidate],” Gonzalez said, referencing the mascots of America’s two dominant political parties. “At first, I look at their
foundation — their biblical foundation and their family foundation. The fact that [Bush] comes from a Christian family … is very important.” If
that quip about political symbols sounds smooth enough to be a catch-phrase, that’s because it is. It’s an oft-quoted line from Rodriguez, whose
2013 book The Lamb’s Agenda claims to posit a faith-led “third way” that bucks the rigid dichotomy of American politics. I don’t really look at
the elephant or the donkey [when picking a candidate]. In practice, however, Rodriguez’s understanding of the “lamb’s agenda” tracks closely
with America’s political right-wing. One of the book’s forwards is written by Jim Daly, head of the conservative think tank Focus on the Family,
and the chapter entitled “Not the Donkey, Not the Elephant, but the Lamb!” focuses largely on the moral shortcomings of the Democratic
party: Rodriguez bemoans the progressive embrace of marriage equality and abortion rights, and while he celebrates Obama’s willingness to
discuss his faith, he chastises the president for changing his position on same-sex marriage. “Unless the Donkey reconciles with the Lamb, the
Donkey may finish this century in the pony show of the politically obscure,” Rodriguez writes. By contrast, his vision for the future of the
Republican party was practically glowing: “The Elephant will make significant advances if it intentionally goes forward with the justice mission
of Lincoln and the moral optimism of Ronald Reagan.” The Hispanic evangelical embrace of the GOP may well become a reality, but not without
a lot of help. Salguero, the de-facto representative of the demographic’s left-wing, hinted that this ideological creep rightward has been
bolstered by robust outreach efforts from conservatives. “I know there is a lot of money going into recruiting Hispanic evangelicals into a
certain ideological camp. We should resist that,” he said. “One camp is ahead of the other in terms of outreach … I’m concerned that [we will
be coopted] instead of developing the voting bloc for the 21st century, a fiercely independent voice that holds candidates accountable.”
Still, there is hope for Democrats. Hispanic evangelicals interviewed by ThinkProgress pushed back
on the idea that either party has successfully “won” their vote. Salguero insisted Republicans still
have to cross the “rubicon” of immigration — as well as education and criminal justice — noting, “it would be a
political miscalculation to assume that Latino evangelicals don’t remember voting records — after you
leave the room, we visit your website.” He drew connections between Hispanic evangelicals and African Americans, pointing out that
evangélicos organizations were among the first to come out against death penalty, adding, “We marched with African American communities
on criminal justice reform, community policing.” And Salguero also noted that, although political leaders on the Left have a lot of ground to
make up if they expect to hold onto evangélicos votes in the event of a pro-immigration Republican candidate, they can start with a renewed
effort to engage with religion. He emphasized that progressives need to take seriously the conservative concerns of religious liberty, a
sentiment shared by Rodriguez and Cortés.
Hillary is key to comprehensive immigration reform
Nowicki 7/19 – Dan, The Arizona Republic's national political reporter. (“Clinton stands apart from GOP on immigration,” 7/19/15,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2015/06/19/clinton-stands-apart-from-gop-on-immigration/28968585/)
As the 2016 Republican presidential field toughens its tone on border security and enforcement,
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has drawn a sharp distinction on immigration by embracing
comprehensive reforms such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the
United States.¶ Speaking Thursday before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Clinton, a former secretary
of State, reiterated promises she made during a May 5 roundtable in North Las Vegas.¶ That she would fight for comprehensive
immigration reform that includes "a real path to citizenship" for the more than 11 million
undocumented immigrants who have settled in the United States.¶ That she would oppose any move to deport the
young immigrants known as "Dreamers" or to undo President Obama's executive actions that are shielding millions of immigrants from
enforcement action.¶ And
that if Congress continues to balk at acting on immigration reform, "as president I
will do everything possible under the law to go even further than what President Obama has
attempted to achieve," she said.¶ "There are so many people with deep ties and contributions to our communities, like many parents
of dreamers, who deserve a chance to stay, and I will fight for them, too," Clinton said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd inside the
Aria Resort & Casino. "But I don't have to wait to become president to take a stand, right here and right now, against divisive rhetoric that
demonizes immigrants and their families. It's wrong and no one should stand for it."¶ The
contrast between Clinton and the
Republican White House prospects grew sharper this week with the entry into the race of celebrity
real-estate developer Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy with a speech bashing Mexican
immigrants as "rapists" and vowing to build a border wall at Mexico's expense.¶ "They're bringing drugs.
They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people," Trump said of immigrants from Mexico.¶ While Trump is viewed
by many political handicappers as a novelty candidate, others said his anti-immigrant rant could tarnish the Republican brand with Latino
voters, a fast-growing demographic that is increasingly influential in key swing states such as Nevada, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and
Virginia.¶ Despite
warnings from national GOP leaders after the loss of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney to
Obama, in which Romney was shellacked among Latino voters, most of the Republican presidential
contenders continue to stake out hard-line positions on immigration and border security.
Comprehensive reform is key to prevent food insecurity
Gaskill ’10 (Ron Gaskill is director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Worker shortage urges immigration reform efforts April 9, 2010 Season Right for Meaningful
Immigration Reform By Ron Gaskill)
Even in these times of higher-than-usual unemployment, most farmers and ranchers still struggle to find
all the workers they need for a successful season. Serious concerns that not enough domestic workers
will choose to work in agriculture has become a harsh reality across the countryside. About 15 million people in the United States
choose non-farm jobs at wages that are actually lower than what they could earn by working alongside farmers and ranchers. The on-farm jobs and
opportunities are there, but many workers choose not to take advantage of them. The issue is rapidly
moving from one centered on a lack of resources, to one with food insecurity at its heart. Farmers and ranchers
are the ones being squeezed; caught between a domestic labor force that doesn’t want agricultural work, government policy that fails to
recognize the seriousness of the problem and an administration that consistently makes it harder to hire workers.
U.S. consumers will continue to eat fresh fruits and vegetables regardless of how the labor scenario
ultimately plays out. But, whether or not those fruits and vegetables are grown in the U.S. or imported
from other countries where labor is more plentiful greatly concerns Farm Bureau. It’s past time for our nation’s
policymakers to translate grassroots concern into meaningful action. As much as we believe in a farmer’s right to farm, Farm
Bureau fully respects the right of U.S. workers to choose other lines of work. But, on the flip side, as employers, we
must be able to legally employ those who do want to work, even if they’re from other countries.
Comprehensive immigration reform is needed, so that America’s farmers and ranchers can continue to
produce an abundant supply of safe, healthy food, as well as renewable fuels and fiber for our nation.
Food insecurity causes extinction
Brown 9 – is a US environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and
president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, (Lester R,
“Can Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” Scientific American, May http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/civilization-food-shortages/)//GV
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government
collapse. Those crises are brought on by ever worsening environmental degradation One of the toughest things for
people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But
sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today's economic crisis. For most of us, the
idea that civilization
itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from
what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire--and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list
of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos--and
Earth might collide with an asteroid, too! For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions.
The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of
governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our
global civilization. I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy-most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures--forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible. The Problem of
Failed States Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental field
are well into our third decade of charting trends of environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one. In six of the past nine years
world grain production has fallen short of consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the
amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of
As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting
food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of
last year climbed to the highest level ever.
chaos . Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the steep climb in grain prices in 2008, the number of
failing states was expanding [see sidebar at left]. Many of their problem's stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But if the food
situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a
new era in geopolitics. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpower conflict;
today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk. States fail when national governments can no longer
provide personal security, food security and basic social services such as education and health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory. When
governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no
Failing states
are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees,
threatening political stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has become a base for piracy. Iraq, number
longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy.
five, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world's leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda,
refugees from that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six).
Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation-states to control
the spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control international
terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling infectious diseases-such as polio, SARS or avian flu--breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once states fail, no one assumes
responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization
itself.
1NC—Terror DA
Status quo border surveillance deters and catches nuclear terrorists
Bunn and Tobey, 5-20-2015, Bunn is a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and co-principal
investigator for the Kennedy School’s Project on Managing the Atom. Tobey is a senior fellow at Harvard
Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and former deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Roth is research associate with the Belfer Center’s
Project on Managing the Atom."Don’t weaken our defenses against nuclear smuggling,"
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/242566-dont-weaken-our-defenses-againstnuclear-smuggling)//GV
Don’t weaken our defenses against nuclear smuggling When smugglers carrying deadly radioactive
cesium-137 emerged from the woods near the Armenian-Georgian border in August 2014, the police
were waiting. They were far from any fixed radiation detector. But the Georgian security services learned the smugglers chose not to use
the official border crossing because there was a radiation detector there — driving them right into the police’s arms on
the wild border. Had there been no radiation detector at the official border crossing, the smugglers would
have passed through without detection. The possibility of a terrorist detonating a “ dirty bomb” or
even a crude nuclear bomb is one of the gravest threats facing the United States today.
Yet the House Armed
Services Committee is pushing a bill that would prohibit funding for fixed radiation detectors to catch nuclear smugglers – both for installing new ones and even for
Radiation detection is a highly imperfect line of defense .
Once nuclear material has left the facility where it is supposed to be, it could be anywhere, and recovering it poses an enormous challenge. The immense
length of national borders, the huge scale of legitimate traffic, the myriad pathways across these
borders, and the small size and sometimes weak radiation signal of the nuclear and radiological
materials terrorists might be seeking combine to make nuclear smuggling extraordinarily difficult to
stop. But that hardly justifies giving up. From airports to bridges across major waterways to the loading stations at container ports, there are many locations
maintaining the ones U.S. taxpayers have already paid billions to install.
where fixed radiation detectors make sense. A balanced program to defeat nuclear smugglers must include strong security to keep material from being stolen in the
first place, effective law enforcement and intelligence work, and interdiction efforts and border controls backed by both fixed and mobile radiation detectors.
These elements work together, reinforcing each other’s effectiveness. In addition to detecting stolen
radioactive and nuclear material, fixed radiation detectors deter smugglers from using official
borders , limiting their options and making them easier to catch. As a military leader in Azerbaijian—which shares borders with Russia—recently argued, “to
leave an unequipped border crossing is like leaving the window open.”
For nearly twenty years, both Republicans and
Democrats in Congress and the White House have invested billions in putting in place a network of thousands of fixed radiation detectors in more than fifty
countries. Cutting off funding now would mean abandoning partners across the world, after years of painstaking diplomacy – and would undermine the investment
already made, reducing the chance that existing detectors would continue to be used effectively. As
much of the nuclear and radiological
material smuggled to date has come from Russia—a country with hundreds of tons of nuclear
weapons material spread across dozens of facilities—detecting smuggling from Russia is vital. It became
even more important last year, when Russia halted nearly all work with the United States on improving the
security of its nuclear stockpiles, increasing the risk of nuclear theft and smuggling. The good news is that before
the recent crisis in U.S.-Russian relations, Russia and the United States worked together to install a ring of detectors at all of Russia’s official border crossings. The
bad news is that the conflict
in Ukraine has effectively erased some of those borders, and Russia’s customs
union with Belarus and Kazakhstan means goods flow across those borders unchecked. Hence, there is
a clear need to install more fixed radiation detectors to patch the holes in the system already put in
place. Beyond Russia, there is radiological material located at thousands of inadequately protected
sites in more than a hundred countries. These vulnerabilities, combined with the rise of groups like
the Islamic State who are bent on mass violence and terror, make deliberately weakening defenses
against nuclear smugglers recklessly negligent. The proposed end of funding for fixed radiation
detectors would send precisely the wrong message as the United States prepares to host a global nuclear security summit in 2016.
The United States should be pressing countries to keep their foot on the gas in reducing the threat of
nuclear terrorism, not letting up on the effort itself. Cooler heads can still stop this proposal and maintain a balanced effort to stop
nuclear smuggling. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), for example, now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued in 2008 that the United
States needed to “redouble” its “efforts to reduce the risk that nuclear…weapons may fall into the
hands of terrorists.” Let us hope that he and others remember that priority and maintain our
investment in the full set of tools for detecting nuclear smugglers.
Terrorist organizations working with drug cartels
Barkoukis 14 (Leah, the online features editor and web editor at Townhall.com, “ISIS, Mexican Drug
Cartels Teaming Up?”, August 21st 2014, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3195711/posts)
The relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism has long existed, and can take many forms
depending on the goals and needs of each party.
hybrid criminal-terrorist organizations
Sometimes
form in which terrorist groups become involved in the drug trade to fund operations, purchase
equipment, and pay foot soldiers. In return, they provide safe passageways for the drugs and give
traffickers tips for circumventing customs and security forces.
Other times a localized criminal organization or
terrorist group lacks expertise, so increased contacts and business with major drug cartels helps advance the sophistication of their operation.
Ultimately, though,
both have logistical needs and working with or even talking to each other allows the
groups to share lessons learned, important contacts to corrupt officials, and operational methods.
Thus, it’s not surprising to hear that the
Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is already talking to Mexican drug cartels.
Rep. Ted
Poe (R-TX), a member of the House Judiciary Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, said as much on Newmax TV’s “America’s
Forum” on Wednesday when asked if there’s any interaction between the two. “My opinion is yes,” he replied. “There seems to be at least a
talking to each other. How much? I don’t know. But ...
drug cartels use the same operational plan as terrorist groups
do. They kill their opponents, they behead their opponents, they brag about it and they have
operational control of many portions of the southern border of the United States.
United States doesn’t. Otherwise they wouldn’t be crossing daily with their drugs.
Mexico doesn’t. The
They’re as vicious as some of these other
terrorist organizations. We need to recognize them that this is an organized international crime
group. And we have to deal with them as such.” Even amid all the domestic and international crises
going on at the moment, it’s important that the American people and lawmakers not give up on
putting pressure on this administration to beef up border security.
than just the illegal immigration of tens of thousands of Central Americans—it’ s
The crisis at the Southwest border is about more
about national security. Criminals, violent
gang members, drug cartel members, and yes, terrorists, are also coming in and will continue to do
so as long as this administration puts politics
and political correctness
ahead of security.
Un-surveilled cartels and ISIS will cooperate to smuggle weapons
Siouxland News 6/26 (News report for Northwest Iowa, “Isis Expansion Along U.S. Borders”, June 26th
2015, http://www.siouxlandnews.com/story/29413634/isis-expansion-along-us-borders)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Our southern border is long and U.S. border patrol agents work to fight illegal activity
like illegal immigration, drugs and now according to an FBI consultant, the border could be an
attractive region for ISIS thanks in part to powerful drug lords. "Drug dealers have found a way to
move money without it being followed,” said Tyrone Powers, Former FBI Agent. “They found a way to move people in and out
and they found a way to move product."
That product powers refers to is tons and tons of meth, heroin and pot
transferred through a labyrinth of tunnels from Mexico. Drugs that are headed for the streets of the U.S. But these
tunnels could easily be an underground highway for ISIS to spawn its brutality here. "The stronger
they get over there, the more power they have so I can definitely see, in the future, collaboration
between terrorist groups and drug dealers to our south," said Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina, 2016 Presidential
Candidate "It's individuals they bring into this country, maybe at some point, suicide bombers which is really scary and then weapons of mass
destruction," said Powers.
Terrorist experts say the epidemic of unstable leadership in Mexico, combined
with ruthless drug cartels creates a vacuum. "What's been going on in Mexico creates an opportunity
for any organization to try to take advantage of it, whether it's ISIS or Al Shabbab," said Brandon Behlendorf,
Terrorist Targeting Strategist. Two major drug cartels that could attract ISIS cover a lot of land in Mexico. Both
skirt the U.S. border. The Sinalos Federation takes up western Mexico and borders Texas to California. Los Zetas occupies eastern Mexico and
hugs the southern Texas border.
Experts say Al Qaeda already tried linking up with drug lords in Mexico
roughly 15 years ago. But to no avail. But Isis is far more determined than Al Qaeda. "It makes logical sense for ISIS
to do this,” said powers. “But I do not think they'll be catching the intelligence agencies off guard, because this has been a persistent problem
whether it was Al Qaeda or any other group."
ISIS will sneak weapons of mass destruction across the border w/o surveillance
Cantilero 7/1 (Monica, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City with expertise in
Communication and Media, “ISIS could smuggle fighters, weapons into US via Mexican tunnels, says exFBI agent”, July 1st 2015,
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/isis.could.smuggle.fighters.weapons.into.us.via.mexican.tunnels.
says.ex.fbi.agent/57653.htm)
A former FBI agent has warned that tunnels used by drug dealers to smuggle drugs and cash into the
US from Mexico could be used by the Islamic State to move its jihadist fighters, including suicide
bombers and even a nuclear warhead, into the United States . "Drug dealers have found a way to move money
without it being followed," said former FBI agent Tyrone Powers during a recent remark on national television. " They
found a way to
move people in and out and they found a way to move product." ISIS agents may find a way to enter
the US and "may be, at some point, suicide bombers, which is really scary, and then weapons of mass
destruction ," said Powers. Two major drug cartels that could be involved are the Sinaloa Federation , which
controls western Mexico's borders from Texas to California,
and the Los Zetas , which occupies eastern Mexico. Experts say al-
Qaeda once tried to establish links with Mexican drug lords,
Newsmax reported. "It makes logical sense for ISIS to do
this," said Powers. "But I do not think they'll be catching the intelligence agencies off guard, because this has been a persistent problem
whether it was al-Qaeda or any other group." Mexico's unstable leadership mixed with drug cartels can create a dangerous concoction that
could be used by ISIS, according to experts. "What's been going on in
Mexico creates an opportunity for any organization
to try to take advantage of it, whether it's ISIS or Al Shabbab ," said Brandon Behlendorf, a terrorist targeting
strategist.
The jihadist group claimed earlier this month that it plans to acquire a nuclear weapon from
Pakistan and to sneak it into US territory using drug and human smuggling routes.
Judicial Watch reported in
April that ISIS is managing a camp in northern Mexico just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, and that "coyotes" of the Juarez Cartel are helping to
"move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico ."
ISIS fighters are
also being smuggled "through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas." The
locations are being eyed by ISIS "because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces , and
the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing." In a related development,
the CIA is now reassessing the view that the ISIS is mostly a "regional threat" following the "Bloody
Friday" attacks that covered three countries on different continents.
The group is transforming into a global threat
because of its ability to "evangelise followers," said retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who helped create the US military campaign against alQaeda. "This will only continue unless something is done to destroy ISIL and reduce its appeal to the extremist fringe in the Islamic community,"
he added.
2NC On
2NC—Framing
2NC War T/ Svio
War turns structural violence and outweighs on magnitude – all lives are infinitely valuable
Bulloch 8 Millennium - Journal of International Studies May 2008 vol. 36 no. 3 575-595 Douglas
Bulloch, IR Department, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently completing his
PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics, during which time he spent a year
editing Millennium: Journal of International Studies
But the idea that poverty and peace are directly related presupposes that wealth inequalities are – in and
of themselves – unjust, and that the solution to the problem of war is to alleviate the injustice that inspires conflict, namely
poverty. However, it also suggests that poverty is a legitimate inspiration for violence, otherwise there would be no reason to alleviate it in the interests of
peace. It has become such a commonplace to suggest that poverty and conflict are linked that it rarely suffers any examination . To suggest that
war causes poverty is to utter an obvious truth, but to suggest the opposite is – on reflection – quite hard to believe.
War is an expensive business in the twenty-first century, even asymmetrically. And just to examine Bangladesh for a moment is
enough at least to raise the question concerning the actual connection between peace and poverty. The government of Bangladesh is a threat only to itself, and
despite 30 years of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh remains in a state of incipient civil strife. So although Muhammad Yunus should be applauded for his work in
demonstrating the efficacy of micro-credit strategies in a context of development, it is not at all clear that this has anything to do with resolving the social and
political crisis in Bangladesh, nor is it clear that this has anything to do with resolving the
problem of peace and war in our times. It does speak to
Peace Prize itself has
simply become an award that reflects a degree of Western liberal wish-fulfilment. It is perhaps comforting to believe
that poverty causes violence, as it serves to endorse a particular kind of concern for the developing world that in turn regards all
problems as fundamentally economic rather than deeply – and potentially radically – political.
the Western liberal mindset – as Geir Lundestad acknowledges – but then perhaps this exposes the extent to which the
2NC—Cartels
2NC POE alt causes
Vehicle regulations are alt causes to trade across POE
Will Sowards, 5-1, 2015, 5-1-2015, "Border renovations improve crossing, critics say officials must do
more," No Publication, http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2015/05/nogales-border-renovations-improvecrossing-but-critics-say-officials-must-do-more/)//G
NOGALES – Engines roar and the smell of diesel wafts through the air as trucks steadily pass through the final checkpoints as they enter Arizona from Mexico. About
300,000 commercial vehicles pass through the Mariposa Port of Entry every year on their way into the United States, and it’s one of the busiest ports on the border.
The federal government spent nearly $200 million to add booths and inspection dock spaces to help increase traffic between the U.S. and Mexico and cut wait
times. Trucks began using the new lanes in October 2014. So far, it appears to be working. “Definitely the
widening of the border has been good for us,” said Octavio Vasquez, a facility manager for the Nogales branch of ProTrans, an Indiana-based logistics company. “We
have seen an extra amount of flow of trailers, and they are coming in faster.” Since the four-year renovation ended, port traffic has increased nearly 7 percent and
wait times have decreased as well, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics. “I have noticed a change,” said Juan Egera, a warehouse worker at
the Mariposa Port of Entry. “There’s more traffic and more space for the trucks that are being looked over. Since the renovations, everything has been faster.” But,
there is some debate about how effective the renovation has been. A combination of
stricter regulation
and lack of infrastructure
has lead
some to believe that Arizona is lagging behind other border states. Though the Mariposa Port of Entry processes
hundreds of thousand of trucks each year, it pales in comparison to some ports located in California and Texas – states that have benefited,
some say, from more lax regulation and better highways. Border barriers The port serves as the busiest land port in Arizona for privately owned vehicles, according
to the U.S. General Services Administration. In addition, more than 3 million pedestrians cross the border at the Nogales port every year. All that activity is
important, officials said. Every day, Mexican visitors to Arizona spend more than $7 million in hotels, malls, restaurants and other businesses, according to a 2008
study from the University of Arizona. But, the commercial traffic is critical to the region and beyond. According to the Arizona-Mexico Commission, Arizona
brings in $16 billion from trade with its southern neighbor, about 38 percent of U.S.-Mexico trade. The
port is the main entry point for fresh produce entering from Mexico for the West Coast, according to the U.S.
General Services Administration. And although the federal government may have improved the port, some
elected officials have turned their attention to the regulations for commercial trucks.
“The state of Arizona has
a different relationship with the federal Department of Transportation than other states,” said Lance Jungmeyer with the Fresh Produce Association of the
Americas, an organization that focuses on U.S.-Mexico agricultural trade. “Some time ago, Arizona made an agreement to allow for stricter inspections by the
federal government, but Texas and California did not.” He said these stricter
inspections increase wait times and create a trade
barrier for truckers trying to enter Arizona. On April 16, 10 of Arizona’s 11-person federal delegation signed a letter to the director of the
Federal Motor Carrier and Safety Administration asking for a reversal of these restrictions. “It is our understanding that both Mexican and U.S. carriers have deemed
Arizona ports of entry to be more difficult to cross than those of other border states because of the frequency of inspections and out-of-service orders issued by
(the administration),” the letter said. It went on to request a change to bring the Arizona in line with other border states. Jungmeyer said it’s a major issue that’s
holding Arizona back from being one of the top states for imports from Mexico. Truckers fear citations for small infractions. In some cases, a quick run across the
border only nets a trucker about $50, but
fines can cost more than $3,000 for some minor mistakes , like incomplete paperwork.
2NC Violence Declining
Drug violence decreasing – effective government policies
Deutsche Welle 7/9/14 ("Violence on the decline in Mexico's war on drugs," DW,
http://www.dw.com/en/violence-on-the-decline-in-mexicos-war-on-drugs/a-17906401)//GV
A new policy in the war on drugs appears to be having the desired effect in Mexico. The murder rate is
dropping, but despite a return to pre-2010 levels it's still too early to declare victory over the drug cartels. Archivbild Mexiko
Sicherheitskräfte Drogenhandel "Narcomensajes": the messages that Mexican drug cartels leave for their adversaries. These drug messages
don't come through the mail, but are transmitted by contract killers who leave behind bullet-riddled bodies in public places, severed heads on
dance floors and victims hanging from pedestrian bridges. Atrocities like these, and their dissemination in the media and online, are not just the
preserve of Islamist terrorist groups. In the Latin American drug war, these cruel messages have long been an important tool for the drug
cartels, which use them to intimidate and deter actual and potential adversaries. Open war For several years now, the central scene of the drug
war in the Americas has been Mexico. The country has experienced a rapid increase in violence since 2007, when the murder rate tripled within
four years. Between 2007 and 2012, Mexico's national statistics office counted 121,613 murders. This period coincided almost exactly with
President Felipe Calderon's term of office. Calderon declared open war on the cartels and employed massive military force against the gangs.
Mexiko Kampf gegen Kriminalität Military strikes against drug cartels are the exception today The government claims
to have
killed or captured more than 20 leading figures in the drug mafia. But the price for that success has been high,
according to an article for the Cato Institute, an Washington-based think tank. In the piece, Mexico's foreign minister from 2000 to 2003
estimates that 55,000 murders can be directly linked to the war on drugs. "President Calderon made the war on drugs the central theme of his
political policies. Strikes against the drug cartels or allegedly corrupt politicians were played up for the media," explained Günther Maihold, who
currently teaches at the Humboldt Institute in Mexico City. The drug cartels saw this struggle for media attention and decided to use it for their
own purposes. The result of this media battle: during Calderon's tenure, 3,793 bodies were found carrying drug messages, according to
Mexico's office of national security - an average of 12 executions per week. Steady decline in murder rate Mexiko Vereidigung neue
Polizeitruppe President Pena Nieto relies on police rather than the Military, unlike his predecessor Under Enrique Peña Nieto, Calderon's
successor who has been in office since December 2012, Mexico's
government has adopted a new strategy. " The new
president has put on emphasis on policing, rather than military and propaganda ," said Maihold. Since then, a
number of leading capos have been arrested, among them Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who headed the powerful Sinaloa cartel. Just last week,
on August 31, police arrested one of the key men behind the exceptionally cruel Los Zetas cartel. One day later, the military stormed one of the
gang's training camps. Perhaps
the most important success of the new strategy - at least for Mexican citizens
- has been the significant decline in violence. Over the last few years the murder rate has steadily
declined, dropping below 2010 levels last year. The frequency of the cruel narcomensajes has drastically decreased as well,
falling from an average of 52 murders a month to just eight.
Mexico is stabilizing because of policing and security – especially true across the border
Jacqui Barrineau,, 4-30-2015, "After years of drug wars, murders decline in Mexico," USA TODAY,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/30/mexico-drug-war-homicidesdecline/26574309/)//GV
Murders in Mexico fell for a third straight year in 2014 — the most pronounced declines occurring
along the U.S. border — a sign the country is slowly stabilizing after gruesome drug wars. There were 15,649
people murdered in Mexico in 2014, a 13.8% reduction from the previous year and down from a peak of
22,480 in 2011, according to a report set to be released Thursday by the University of San Diego's Justice in Mexico Project. The
reductions were steeper along the U.S.-Mexican border . Five of the six Mexican states that border
the USA reported a combined drop of 17.7% in the number of homicides. "These data really help to
underscore that we're talking about a sea change in violence," said David Shirk, co-author of the report and director of
the Justice in Mexico Project, a U.S.-based initiative to protect human rights south of the border. "You still have
elevated levels of crime, so we still have a long way to go. But there is improvement, and we have to acknowledge that improvement and
understand why it's happening so we can try to further it." JUSTICE IN MEXICO 2015 "Drug Violence in Mexico" Justice in Mexico Report The
reduction in homicides does not mean Mexico has completely solved its security problems. Maureen Meyer, senior associate for Mexico at the
Washington Office on Latin America, said Mexicans still face extremely high levels of kidnappings, extortion and other violent crimes. American
travelers have also been attacked. The U.S. State Department issued a warning April 13 that said U.S. citizens continue to be victims of
carjackings, robberies and other violent crimes. Meyer
said the overall reduction in murders is an encouraging trend
that allows Mexican officials time to cement improvements in the judicial system, anti-corruption
programs and police practices. She said the government must "make sure that the space opened by having less violence leads to
structural changes to Mexico's institutions to guarantee a strong rule of law in the future." Mexico became home to a bloody, nationwide drug
war after then-President Felipe Calderón announced in December 2006 that the government would crack down on drug cartels and go after its
leaders. The United States agreed to help, and
Congress has sent $2.3 billion to Mexico since 2008 to train police
and buy new aircraft, scanners, X-Ray machines and nearly 400 canines that can detect drugs,
weapons and explosives . The strategy seemed to work. Calderón's administration boasted several high-profile successes, capturing
or killing the heads of different cartels. But the unexpected consequence was an explosion of violence throughout the country as lower-level
cartel members fought to fill the power vacuum. At least 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since the end of 2006, according to
the report. USA TODAY Notorious Mexican drug cartel leader arrested When President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December 2012, he
continued going after cartel leaders, most notably capturing Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the biggest drug supplier to the USA, last year. Shirk
said the violence that usually follows such high-profile arrests has not materialized in recent years. Meyer said some cartels appear to have
negotiated deals to split up the lucrative smuggling routes into the USA. Shirk said the gradual degradation of cartels could play a role. The
Sinaloa Cartel reigns over northwestern Mexico, and Shirk said it may have become so entrenched in its position that rivals are no longer trying
to overtake it. "It could be that this conflict between organized crime groups has burned itself out," Shirk said. "There's really not too many
people left to fight." Other findings in the report: • The
number of Mexican mayors and ex-mayors killed was down
to six in 2014, compared with 12 the previous year and as high as 17 in 2010. • Violence increased
against journalists. There were 17 murders in 2014, up from seven in 2013. The worst year for
journalists came in 2011, when 19 were murdered. • For the second straight year, no individual city
reached 1,000 murders. Cities such as Juárez and Acapulco regularly topped 1,000 murders a year during the peak of the drug wars.
Acapulco had the highest tally of any city in 2014, with 590 murders. The report is based on a collection of data from the Mexican government,
private companies and media organizations that track homicides in Mexico.
The rapidly expanding legal marijuana market decimates cartel power
Ioan Grillo, 4-8-2015, "U.S. Legalization of Marijuana Has Hit Mexican Cartels' Cross-Border Trade,"
TIME, http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/)//GV
Agents on the 2,000 mile-U.S. border have wrestled with these smuggling techniques for decades, seemingly unable to stop the northward flow
of drugs and southward flow of dollars and guns. But the amount of one drug — marijuana — seems
to have finally fallen. U.S.
Border Patrol has been seizing steadily smaller quantities of the drug, from 2.5 million pounds in 2011
to 1.9 million pounds in 2014. Mexico’s army has noted an even steeper decline, confiscating 664 tons
of cannabis in 2014, a drop of 32% compared to year before. Sign up for THE BRIEF and more view example This fall
appears to have little to do with law enforcement, however, and all to do with the wave of U.S. marijuana
legalization. The votes by Colorado and Washington State to legalize marijuana in 2012, followed by
Alaska, Oregon and D.C. last year have created a budding industry. U.S. growers produce gourmet products
with exotic names such as White Widow, Golden Goat and Oaktown Crippler as opposed to the bog-standard Mexican “mota.”
American dispensaries even label their drugs, showing how strong they are, measured in THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive
ingredient), and grade their mix of sativa, which gets people stoned in a psychedelic way and indica, which has a more knock-out effect. Drug
reformists tout this market shift from Mexican gangsters to American licensed growers as a reason
consumers choose to buy their product from a legal
tax-paying business as opposed to a black market product that is not tested or regulated,” says Tom Angell, chairman of
policy
to spread legalization. “It is no surprise to me that marijuana
Marijuana Majority. “When you go to a legal store, you know what you are getting, and that is not going to be contaminated.” A group called
Marijuana Doctors elaborate the point in this comical online ad. Analysts are still trying to work out the long-term effect this shift will have on
Mexican cartel finances and violence. The
legal marijuana industry could be the fastest growing sector of the U.S.
economy. It grew 74% in 2014 to $2.7 billion, according to the ArcView group, a cannabis investment and research firm.
This includes revenue from both recreational drug stores and from medical marijuana, which has
been legalized in 23 states . The group predicts the industry will top $4 billion by 2016. This means less cash
for Mexican cartels to buy guns, bribe police and pay assassins. Coinciding with legalization, violence has decreased in Mexico. Homicides hit a
high in 2011, with Mexican police departments
reporting almost 23,000 murders. Last year, they reported
15,649. Other factors may have caused this fall in killings, says Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former officer of Mexico’s federal
intelligence agency. “Finances from marijuana could be having an impact on violence but you also have to look at other causes. Many of
the most violent cartel commanders have been killed or arrested,” Hope says. These downed warlords
include the head of the Zetas cartel Heriberto Lazcano, a former soldier who was known as the Executioner for the mass graves he
dug. Mexican marines say they shot Lazcano dead in 2012, although his cohorts bust into the funeral home and stole his corpse.
Key victories and trends prove Mexican state violence is decreasing
Eduardo Guerrero, 2014, a partner at Lantia Consultores in Mexico City and an expert in security
policy. "Yes: Violence and Murder Are Decreasing in Mexico,"
http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/yes-violence-and-murder-are-decreasing-mexico)//GV
When Mexican President Felipe Calderón left office in 2012, the nation’s war on the drug cartels had already claimed 60,000 lives. Now, two years into the
presidency of his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, security
conditions are still far from praiseworthy, but have improved in several
key areas. Homicides, the most reliable indicator for measuring public security in Mexico, have
steadily decreased over the past two years. According to Mexico’s Insituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (National Institute of
Statistics and Geography—INEGI) the number of murders decreased 13 percent between 2012 and 2013, and the
homicide rate per 100,000 people declined from 22 to 19. Organized crime-related deaths have
decreased even faster . According to the database of Lantia Consultores, a Mexico City-based public policy consulting firm, there were 1,956
organized crime-related deaths in the second quarter of 2014, down from a peak of 4,587 in the second quarter of 2011. The pace of the decline in
organized crime-related deaths has been especially encouraging in two key metropolitan areas. In Ciudad
Juárez, once known as the world’s most violent city, organized crime-related deaths have dropped from a peak of 787 during the third quarter of 2010 to 54 in the
second quarter of 2014—a 93 percent drop. Likewise, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, Mexico’s industrial capital, murders in this category dropped from 472 in
the first quarter of 2012 to 38 in the second quarter of 2014. The improvement in Monterrey seems to be the result of a thorough revamping of state and local
police departments, which is largely the result of aggressive lobbying by the city’s powerful business community. This demonstrates the potential of local
institution-building efforts in Mexico. Even the U.S. Department of State acknowledged as much in its August 2014 Mexico Travel Warning, which stated,
“Security
services in and around Monterrey are robust and have proven responsive and effective in
combating violent crimes.”1 Moreover, over the past two years, peace has returned to cities throughout
northern Mexico to an extent that seemed impossible between 2008 and 2012. High-profile attacks, shootings
and roadblocks are less frequent . (One exception is Tamaulipas, which experienced a violent crisis as recently as last April.) Unfortunately, data
for crimes other than homicide remain unreliable in Mexico. Thus, it is very hard to assess whether the downward trend in murders extends to other violent crimes,
especially kidnapping and extortion, which are foremost concerns for Mexicans. The Peña Nieto administration has also recorded a number of important
operational successes.
The Zetas, a particularly violent cartel founded by defectors from elite military groups,
have been nearly disbanded. (The decision to have federal forces target Zetas was taken at the end of the previous administration.) Joaquín “El
Chapo” Guzmán—Mexico’s most notorious drug lord—was captured last February by Peña Nieto’s forces . His
capture was skillfully executed and managed to avoid a violent conflict among factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. Some would argue that capturing such kingpins
represents only a temporary setback to the cartels. However, such captures convey an important message: the Mexican state is only willing to tolerate so much
violence or public notoriety, and it has the strength to prevail over drug lords. Arguably, Peña Nieto’s
biggest victory thus far has been
the successful operations in the state of Michoacán in early 2014, which dealt a significant blow to
the Knights Templar—a drug cartel that had exercised virtually uncontested influence over political
and economic activities in the state for the previous two years. Former Governor Fausto Vallejo and
several mayors have acknowledged that the gang extorted protection money from almost all 113
municipal governments.
A stream of recently released videos featuring mayors, state-level officials and even Vallejo’s son talking and drinking with
the Knights Templar leader, Servando “La Tuta” Gómez, seem to confirm the cartel’s tight grip over local and state authorities. What made the Michoacán case
particularly challenging was the emergence of armed self-defense groups in the Tierra Caliente region that organized to combat ever-increasing extortion by the
Knights Templar. As the initial uprising rapidly expanded, a widespread civil conflict became a serious threat. The intervention of federal troops should have begun
earlier, and was triggered only when self-defense groups were about to march on Apatzingán, the stronghold of the Knights Templar in the Tierra Caliente region,
risking massive bloodshed. However, since the arrival of hundreds of federal forces in Michoacán last January, stability and security have improved. Organized
crime-related deaths decreased 40 percent between the first and second quarters of 2014, and another large reduction is expected for the third quarter. Several
Knights Templar leaders and some of their political associates have been arrested, avoiding an extensive witch hunt. In an effort to restore the rule of law, the
federal government created the Comisión para la Seguridad y el Desarrollo Integral en el Estado de Michoacán (Commission for Security and Development in the
State of Michoacán), which has displaced the state government as the key decision maker in the region. The Commission has brokered a ceasefire with most selfdefense groups, many of which opted to join the ranks of a legal rural police. But while Peña Nieto has enjoyed some key victories when it comes to the cartels, his
security strategy is still far from perfect. For example, the steep reduction in violence has not had an impact on public perception. The percentage of people who
claim to feel insecure has hovered around 70 percent for the previous four quarters. Moreover, the federal government has failed to develop a comprehensive
strategy to strengthen the rule of law throughout the country, especially in rural and impoverished areas where some criminal organizations are seeking shelter and
turning into local mafias. While the president has launched a program to fund violence and crime prevention, it is not clear that it will adequately target at-risk
communities and individuals. And the new 5,000-strong Gendarmería Nacional (National Gendarmerie) unit of the Federal Police—inaugurated in August and tasked
with fighting criminal activities especially harmful to the economy—is a shadow of the 40,000-member force originally proposed by Peña Nieto and is unlikely to
have a major impact on the current security situation. Despite these shortcomings,
it is clear that the security picture is
gradually improving in Mexico, especially along the U.S. border and in large metropolitan areas
throughout the country . With four years left in his term, Peña Nieto will need to extend his gains in lowering
homicides and pacifying conflict areas, and hope that public opinion begins to shift in his favor as a
result.
2NC No Failed State
Mexico is far from a failed state despite violence
John M. Ackerman, 1-6-2015, "It's Time To Reset U.S.-Mexico Relations," POLITICO Magazine,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/us-mexico-relations-reset-113998.html)//GV
Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto makes his first state visit to the White House this week. This meeting offers a golden opportunity to start cleaning up the
blood which today stains US-Mexico relations. Since taking office, President Barack Obama has treaded water in the bilateral relationship and become increasingly
implicated with terrible human rights violations in the process. It is time to end this vicious cycle and mark out a new path for peace and prosperity in North
America. The present situation is unsustainable. Violence, crime, corruption and conflicts of interest are out of control. The September 26 assassination of four and
mass abduction of 42 student activists from the Ayotzinapa teachers college by police in Iguala, Guerrero is only the tip of the iceberg. Over 100,000 people have
been violently executed and 20,000 people disappeared since 2007. Over the same period, dozens
of journalists and human rights
activists have been murdered. Freedom of speech and association are also under constant attack, with arbitrary detentions of activists
skyrocketing since Peña Nieto took power on December 1st, 2012. It is time to face the facts and recognize that the Merida Initiative has failed. This binational
project was announced on October 22nd, 2007 by former presidents George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón. Its objective was to “fight organized crime and associated
violence while furthering respect for human rights and the rule of law” in Mexico. Today, seven years, two presidents and almost $3 billion later, Mexico is more
unsafe, chaotic and authoritarian than before. In
order to blaze a new path we first need to clear up some common
misperceptions. First, Mexico is not a failed state . To the contrary, it stands out as one of the Latin American
countries with the most powerful and best-funded public institutions. The country has significantly
strengthened its congress, judiciary, state governments and a series of specialized independent
agencies in recent years. Mexico is also the 14th largest economy in the world and a member of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Second, Mexico is not Colombia.
Organized crime is not linked to politicized guerrillas who want to take over state power from the
outside. To the contrary, Mexico’s organized criminals are “rational” market actors in search of profits who operate by infiltrating and undermining government
institutions from the inside. In addition, Mexico’s grassroots political opposition is a great ally in the struggle for
peace since it is ideologically grounded in the democratic principals of the world-historical 1910 Mexican Revolution, which predates both the Russian
Revolution and the Cold War.
2NC—Relations
2NC Relations Alt Causes
El Chapo’s escape is an alt cause to relations
Jessica Mendoza, 7-12-2015, Christian science Monitor, "‘El Chapo’ escapes again. What could it
mean for US-Mexico relations? (+video)," http://www.csmonitor.com/World/GlobalNews/2015/0712/El-Chapo-escapes-again.-What-could-it-mean-for-US-Mexico-relations-video
Joaquin “ El Chapo” Guzman has done it again. The head of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel has for the
second time broken out of a maximum security prison in Mexico, authorities said Sunday. The escape, occurring just
over a year since Mr. Guzman’s much-publicized recapture, is a blow to President Enrique Peña Nieto, who won
office in 2012 on the promise of cracking down on the country’s top drug lords and cycle of drug violence. His escape could also strain
relationships with the United States, as the Sinaloa cartel continues to smuggle billions of dollars worth of cocaine,
methamphetamines, and marijuana into the US, and is largely responsible for supplying the heroin epidemic in the Northeast, CNN reported.
Recommended: How much do you know about Mexico? Take our quiz. Guzman was last seen around 9 p.m. Saturday in the shower area of the
Altiplano prison, Mexico’s National Security Commission said in a statement. Surveillance cameras lost sight of him shortly after that, and when
guards checked his cell, they found it empty. TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE How much do you know about Mexico? Take our quiz. IN PICTURES Latin
America's fight against drugs and violence PHOTOS OF THE DAY Photos of the day 07/21 At a news conference Sunday, Security Commissioner
Monte Alejandro Rubido said Guzman escaped through a mile-long tunnel that opened into the shower area of his cell. The incident calls to
mind Guzman’s first prison break in 2001, when he escaped from a maximum security facility in Jalisco state in a laundry cart. He stayed beyond
the reach of the law until 2014, when Mexican Navy forces arrested him in an oceanfront condo in Mazatlán, less than 150 miles from where
the Sinaloa cartel was based. At the time, “Guzman had a $5 million bounty on his head in the US and had been sought by Mexican and
American authorities for over a decade,” The Christian Science Monitor’s Howard LaFranchi wrote. His capture, Mr. LaFranchi continued,
represented “US-Mexico cooperation in the long-sensitive areas of law enforcement and intelligence sharing.” In early 2015, the US filed an
extradition request for Guzman, Forbes reported, but Mexico Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam argued that keeping the drug kingpin in
Mexico was a matter of national sovereignty. “El Chapo must stay here to complete his sentence and then I will extradite him,” Murillo Karam
told the Associated Press. “So about 300 or 400 years later – it will be a while.” He
dismissed concerns that Guzman might
escape a second time, telling the AP that such a risk “does not exist.” Guzman , who faces multiple
federal drug trafficking indictments in both the US and Mexico , transformed the Sinaloa cartel from a
garden-variety operation into Mexico’s most notorious group, building links to suppliers and retailers in far-flung
countries like Malaysia and Australia, and starting feuds that rattled virtually the entire nation, Patrick Corcoran wrote for InSight Crime. He
was also the first Mexican drug trafficker to ferry drugs under the US-Mexico border via elaborate
tunnels, which he also used as escape routes from his many hideouts, CBS News reported. Officials have since launched a massive manhunt
and closed Toluca International Airport, about 20 miles from the prison. Eighteen employees of the Altiplano prison have been taken in for
questioning, according to the AP.
2NC—Svio.
Cartels Turn
Drone surveillance at the border check drug operations
Vogel 2/11 (Nate, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Legislative Counsel at the New York Civil
Liberties Union, “DRONES AT HOME: THE DEBATE OVER UNMANNED AIRCRAFT IN STATE
LEGISLATURES”, February 11th 2015,
http://www.albanygovernmentlawreview.org/Articles/Vol08_1/8.1.204-N.%20Vogel.pdf)
Unmanned aircraft also appear in American skies where they engage in both training missions and
surveillance operations. 69 Military units that operate combat UAVs overseas train in the United
States .70 For example, the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard flies training missions using MQ-9 Reapers from a base in upstate
New York.71
The unit insists the aircraft do not carry weapons and do not participate in local law
enforcement, but they could be called upon by the State’s governor to assist disaster response. 72
Several federal law enforcement
agencies have considered operating unmanned aircraft in the United States
to conduct surveillance .73 In 2013 the Department of Justice released a report detailing an audit of the agency’s funding for law
enforcement UAVs.74 At that time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug
Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service had all used unmanned aircraft either for testing or real operations.75
The FBI and U.S. Customs may have the most active domestic operations.76 The FBI confirmed in a
letter to Senator Rand Paul in July 2013 that it had used unmanned aircraft in domestic operations
ten times since 2006. 77 The letter explained that its operations “related to kidnappings, search and
rescue operations, drug interdictions, and fugitive investigations.”78 U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
has employed unmanned aircraft for border surveillance for several years. 79 Additionally, documents obtained
through Freedom of Information Requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) revealed that U.S. Customs ran a loan program through
which the agency conducts domestic operations on behalf of other government agencies.80 Even local law enforcement agencies participated
in the program.81 The EFF documents show that between 2010 and 2012,
Customs flew unmanned aircraft for county
Sherriff offices thirteen times .82 Besides Department of Justice operations, the DOJ Audit also found that the Office of Community
Oriented Policing has distributed funding to “local law enforcement agencies and nonprofit organizations to purchase UAS for testing or use.”83
The report noted that the agency did not track funding carefully enough to know exactly how much federal support went to local law
enforcement UAV programs.84
Border Surveillance necessary to solve cartel violence
Weissman 14 (Deborah, the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law, THE POLITICS OF NARRATIVE:
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION OF MEXICAN CRIMINALITY, 2014,
http://fordhamilj.org/files/2015/02/FILJ_Weissman_thePoliticsofNarrative.pdf)
Immigration reform has been debated in the context of the global political economy, national security
interests, and electoral
concerns.
Proposals for comprehensive immigration reform (“CIR”) that might accomplish pathways to legal status
for undocumented immigrants in the United States came to the fore in 2004, when Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain and
Congressmen Luis Gutierrez and Jeff Flake unsuccessfully introduced a comprehensive package to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act
(“INA”).184 Additional efforts to reform immigration were subsequently proposed in 2006 but were largely rejected.185 In 2013, Congress
again undertook the task of amending the INA. The Senate passed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization
Act,”— Senate Bill 744 of 2013—and currently there are a number of House bills pending.186 Border enforcement looms large in the context of
CIR. It is the prevailing emphasis of the Senate bill, the majority of House bills, as well as President Obama’s framework for reform,
notwithstanding the complexity of comprehensive immigration reform and the multiple issues that must be addressed.187
Congressional proposals seek to marshal federal resources estimated to be in excess of US$40 billion
to double the size of the border patrol, to pay for troops at the border, and for the costs of military
surveillance equipment, 700 miles of fencing, and drones. 188 Both S. 744 and H.R. 1417 require “‘[s]ituational
awareness’ of the entire southwest border; meaning 100 percent surveillance” and “‘[o]perational control’ of the entire southwest border;
meaning that at least 90 percent of all unauthorized entries into the United States are deterred.”189
Many of these provisions,
particularly those found in S. 744, function as “triggers” or benchmarks which must be realized
before undocumented immigrants already in the United States might begin the process of
legalization, and before the operationalizing of other structural reforms that might allow immigrants
seeking entry to lawfully migrate . 190 House versions of CIR would require an increase in detention
of immigrants and a further expansion of crimes defined as “aggravated felonies.”191 Testimony
offered by opponents of CIR routinely invoke the danger of Mexican cartels, gun and drug-traffickers
from Mexico infiltrating the country, and insist that there is a war at the border. 1 CIR adversaries
warn of kidnaping and extortion at the hands of Mexican criminals inside the United States.193 CIR
hearings include sorrowful testimony by parents whose children were tragically killed by “illegal alien
gang members from Mexico with a history of violence”
or an “illegal immigrant in a pickup truck who had two drunken
driving convictions but was not in possession of a driver's license.”194 They “steal” jobs from Americans. Prior versions of the INA have been
deemed too soft with regard to undocumented Mexican workers whose unauthorized stays have grown longer over time, and justify calls for
greater enforcement mechanisms.195
In order to protect against Mexican criminals, elected officials argue for a
version of CIR that would triple the number of border patrol agents on the US-Mexico border .196
Senator John McCain supported such CIR proposals, stating, “[w]e'll be the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”197 Indeed,
the rhetoric serves the interests of those who would profit from a further increase in border enforcement, including private prison contractors
who build and house immigrant detainees, as well as corporations with contracts to produce the border military and surveillance
technology.198 The only bill to be approved in 2006 authorized the funding of the construction of a wall across 670 miles of the US-Mexico
border.19 Congressional debates about CIR reflect, as they construct, discriminatory attitudes against Mexican immigrants. One study found
that US citizens not only “conflate immigrants in general with illegal immigrants” but they also “treat illegal immigrants from Mexico differently
than those from other regions of the world.”200 As Gerald López has written, “[a]lmost everyone… sees undocumented Mexicans as convincing
proof that something is ‘broken’—in the United States and in Mexico.”201
Border surveillance key to check drug cartels
AP 5/22 (an American multinational nonprofit news agency headquartered in New York City, ”Cartel
Surveillance Cameras Found in Mexican Border City, May 22nd 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/05/22/world/americas/ap-lt-mexico-cartelsurveillance.html?_r=1)
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — A drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas used at least 39 surveillance
cameras to monitor the comings and goings of authorities in the city of Reynosa across the border
from Texas , Mexican officials said Friday. The cameras were powered by electric lines above the city streets and accessed the Internet
through phone cables along the same poles, according to a statement from state authorities.
The cameras included modems
and were capable of operating wirelessly or through commercial providers' lines.
The revelation came one
day after President Enrique Pena Nieto visited the city, but authorities said the cameras were seized Monday and Tuesday.
Several of the
cameras were trained on an army base, while others captured movement outside a marine post,
offices of the attorney general and state police as well as shopping centers, major thoroughfares and
some neighborhoods . An official with the state's security coordination group, who insisted on anonymity because he was not
authorized to release details on the case, said the cartel's cameras were revealed when the government's own surveillance cameras detected
suspicious people making installations on poles.
Once discovered, authorities simply thought about the places the
cartel would most like to monitor and looked for more cameras there, he said. Once cartel members
realized authorities had discovered their network, they took down 18 cameras before authorities
could seize them.
Authorities did not identify the cartel. But Reynosa, which is across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, has been the
scene of intense violence in recent months between suspected factions of the Gulf cartel.
Cartels have long used "halcones," or
hawks, stationed strategically around their turf to monitor the movements of authorities and rivals.
The camera surveillance network would simply be a technological progression on the same idea and
one that is increasingly employed by governments around the world to fight crime.
erected their own communications networks in the border area, complete with their own antennas.
Cartels for years have
Since the start of the year,
Mexican authorities have seized 55 radio communication antennas between the border cities of
Matamoros and Miguel Aleman.
2NC—Solvency
2NC Circumvention
National Guard circumvents – congressional support and Rick Perry prove
O’Keffe and Costa 14
[Ed O'Keefe and Robert Costa August 1, 2014; they are national political reporters at the Washington Post; “House passes two Republican
measures in response to surge of child migrants”; http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-gop-moves-closer-on-immigration-billahead-of-recess/2014/08/01/11084a2e-1983-11e4-9e3b-7f2f110c6265_story.html] //duff
Ultimately, members voted 223 to 189 to
approve $694 million in additional funding for federal agencies
dealing with the influx of immigrants — a sum far lower than Obama’s original $3.7 billion request. The bill would tweak a 2008 antitrafficking law and make it easier for the government to deport Central American minors who have entered
the United States illegally. It also would provide $35 million to border-state governors, who would be
given broader legal authority to deploy the National Guard. Concerns about a governor’s ability to
deploy National Guard troops came to a head in recent weeks as Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R)
took steps to
activate about 1,000 troops to deploy to the Rio Grande Valley, after he said Obama had rebuffed requests for a federal
deployment order. Four Republicans, some of the most conservative in the chamber, voted against the bill. All but one Democrat voted against the bill, reflecting
the opposition of the White House and several organizations working with illegal immigrants, including prominent religious leaders. In a sharply worded statement,
Bishop Eusebio Elizondo of Seattle, who leads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ work on immigration issues, called passage of the legislation “a low point for
our country. It eviscerates American values of justice and due process and stains our record as a defender of human rights globally.”
2NC—VISA CP
2NC O/V
The counter-plan solves case – issuing more worker visas facilitates the safe transfer
of immigrants across the border, that’s Massey. Solves border violence – their
evidence is descriptive of the conditions of migrants attempting to cross the border –
we facilitate a safer method for their crossing avoiding violence.
2NC—Border K
O/V
The aff’s focus on the US-Mexico border as the locus of violence towards immigrants
perpetuates exclusion and violence domestically, that’s Coleman. The thesis of the
kritic is that resistance to anti-immigrant policies and groups should follow the lives of
migrants throughout their journey.
The Alt is to see the struggle of migrants like a border. This follows the lives of
immigrants as they travel across the border and then face new borders when they try
to make a life for themselves, that’s Rumford. This is both grassroots and collective.
This movement can solve – generic “pragmatism” concerns do not apply – the
business of “bordering” domestically is one taken up by private individuals and local
governments through things like gated communities and CCTV monitoring. This lowers
the threshold for the pressure necessary to generate social and political change. The
alt solves both the structural and proximate causes of violence against immigrants –
the xenophobic foundation of anti-immigrant beliefs requires a social upheaval to
dispel AND the local hatred of immigrants requires a grassroots political challenge to
block.
Link/Impact
1) Devolution – curtailing federal surveillance of the border sustains the narrative of
states rights’ that has dominated anti-immigrant policy for the past twenty years. As
the government looks inward to exclude migrants through the building of borders
internally – state to state, city to city – the 1AC continues to look to the national
border. This causes further violence against migrants through academic gentrification
– abstracting critical geopolitics to the foreign “battlefield” rather than the site of
oppression against immigrants. Empirics prove – the section 287 curtailment of
federal deportation initiated the takeover of deportation by state governments,
ramping up the deportation of Hispanics.
2) Statecraft – the 1AC fetishizes interstate politics at the expense of intrastate
politics. Their analysis of the U.S. “war on terror” analogizes excluded identities to
those left outside of the border. This obscures the way discrimination against
immigrants along lines of identity occurs domestically every day through things like
security systems and checkpoints. This perpetuates the urbanization of war – one in
which urban authorities profile and commit violence against immigrants in the
backdrop of a liberalizing national government.
Turns Case
K turns case – their focus on the border means the plan just devolves immigration
enforcement to state authorities, furthering violence
Coleman 7
[Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border; Mathew Coleman; Department of Geography, The Ohio State University;
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2007.00506.x/epdf; 2007] //duff
Interior Enforcement and the Devolution of the Immigration Power after 9/11The above typification of US immigration law as a collection of
sovereign decrees is meant to indicate how immigration enforcement practices are paradoxically sequestered to an exceptional space carved
out by lawmakers who decide what should—and more importantly, what should not—be included under the umbrella of legal review as
concerns the power to police immigration. But at the same time, this exceptional space of immigration lawmaking is in no easy sense
“sovereign”, if the latter term means exercised between blocks of undifferentiated state space and with particular vigor at the territorial
margins of the state. Indeed,
despite its explicit affiliation with the power to conduct foreign affairs and
commerce, which are typically thought relevant only outside the black box of the state and in terms of
inter-state relations, the sovereign exceptionality of immigration law corresponds to a re-scaling of
immigration enforcement in still emerging localized spaces of immigration geopolitics. This is so in two
senses. First, there has been a marked increase in immigration policing operations away from borders in
the interior. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, there has been a devolution of the federal immigration
power to non-federal officers, who have a greater presence in these interior immigration enforcement
spaces. In concert, the growth of interior enforcement operations and the devolution of the federal
power to police immigration are about pushing border enforcement inwards toward the municipal
scale and away from the margins of the state. This is not to suggest that the Mexico–US border—among other borders—has
been rendered insignificant. Rather, it is to suggest that US immigration policing—in addition to its conventional location at the border—has
been down-scaled in important ways as a result of the 1990s period of lawmaking, and especially as part of the war on terrorism. In other
words, these new spaces of immigration geopolitics suggest that the border—and border enforcement—is increasingly everywhere. I will tackle
interior enforcement and the devolution of the immigration power in turn below. The expansion of the aggravated felony charge and the
limitation of judicial review over deportation have combined on the ground to produce a remarkable spike in interior immigration enforcement
operations, at least as measured by annual deportation statistics. This should not be surprising, as the laws passed over the 1990s and after
9/11 have snowballed, first, to
vastly expand the population of aliens subject to deportation; and second, to
hasten the removal of aliens under accelerated, extra-judicial channels, particularly if found to be
unlawfully in the US or if charged as aggravated felons in some other capacity. Between 1992 and 2003, for
example, during exactly the period when the aggravated felony charge was being expanded and court oversight of immigration policing was
being curtailed, deportable
aliens located in the interior of the US as a percentage of immigration
apprehensions at the southwest border more than doubled. Whereas in 1992 immigration apprehensions by
“investigations districts” (ie in the interior) made up approximately5% of total immigration apprehensions made by the Border Patrol at the
southwest border with Mexico, by 2003 immigration apprehensions in the interior had jumped nearly threefold to approximately 13% of southwest border apprehensions, with the single largest increases coming in1997—directly after a major bout of immigration lawmaking in
1996dealing with the aggravated felony offense—and then again in 2002directly after 9/11 (Immigration and Naturalization Service
2002:242,2003:244; DHS 2004:155). The overwhelming bulk of these cases involve nationals from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El
Salvador, who presumably entered at some point across the Mexico–US border. Thus, even if Mexico–US border region apprehensions continue
to make up the vast majority of total apprehensions, interior immigration enforcement numbers are proportionally on the rise, and deserve
attention as an increasingly important component of this total. Moreover, we should anticipate a further escalation of interior enforcement
operations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the DHS, for ex-ample, is readying to vastly expand immigration policing
in the interior as part of the war on terrorism (General Accounting Office 2004) while the Bush administration (as well as prominent members
of Congress)intonate regularly that any future immigration legislation concerning Mexico will necessitate stepped-up immigration-related
criminal enforcement operations in the US interior, away from the Mexico–US border (US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary
2005).While a wide range of legally resident aliens and refugee claimants were affected by this recent expansion of interior immigration
enforcement (Lagenfeld 1999; Martin 1999; Kanstroom 2000b), undocumented aliens were doubtlessly the primary focus of the law reform
movement. For example, the undocumented migrant was consistently referenced by lawmakers as the central subject of the 1990s laws, often
due to the supposed threat “it” posed to unemployed American workers, state-funded welfare programs, urban safety, etc. (Coleman 2005).
Indeed, it is safe to say that without the perceived threat posed by the undocumented migrant, and the way undocumented migrants were
inflated and held accountable for a number of different social ills (Nevins 2002), the above changes to the INA around the aggravated felony
charge would never have been contemplated by lawmakers. But in a more tangible sense, too, undocumented migrants were in the sights of
the laws as lawmakers sought explicitly to render insecure the conditions of possibility of undocumented laboring in the US. For example, the
expansion of the aggravated felony category over the 1990s to include the “crime” of unauthorized
entry, and particularly unauthorized re-entry following an aggravated felony deportation (for which
undocumented entry counts), meant that significant numbers of undocumented laborers could be deported
from the US with extremely limited ability to petition their removal via either judicial or
administrative channels. DHS data show that a major impact of this period of lawmaking was not simply an increase in the number of
formal deportations but more specifically a large jump in the number of aliens detained and deported for being “present without
documentation” in the interior. In 1991 this number totaled some 13,000 individuals; this number has now increased almost sixfold to more
than 70,000 cases annually (DHS 2004:157).This heightened scrutiny of undocumented aliens in the interior proceeds, of course, without
overtly policing the physical workplace—a move unpopular with agribusiness and other major beneficiaries ofundocumented labor (Calavita
1989). In fact, there appears to be an inverse relationship between workplace enforcement and interior immi-gration enforcement. Whereas
interior immigration policing—measured in terms of the above deportation versus border enforcement ratio—increased throughout the 1990s
and after 9/11, workplace enforcementdeclined precipitously after 1997. In that year there were some 17,000workplace enforcement cases; in
2000 there were 1000; by 2003 thisnumber had dropped to 445 (DHS 2004:147, 157). Indeed, year-endDepartment of Homeland Security data
show that the bulk of interior enforcement operations are extra-workplace investigations. On the whole, deportees are located by immigration
officers surveying the US inmate population and court dockets for aggravated felons; as a result of street-level criminal investigations to which
federal immigration officers are party; and, via entitlements and services fraud investigations launchedby state and local authorities and
reported to the DHS. We can conclude, then, that one major upshot of the most recent 16-year bout of immigration law reform has been the
legal transformation of undocumented migrants in the interior into “permanent criminals” subject to expanded and expedited deportation
practices outside the workplace (Kanstroom2004).This said, I do not mean to imply some uniform interior federal territoriality throughout
which immigration enforcement occurs. Rather, what
we now see emerging is an uneven urban geography of
immigration law enforcement which is more strict in some areas than others, and which at times
pitches the federal government against local governments. This has come about due to municipal laws
which contest the application of federal immigration law, and federal counter-attempts to undo or
otherwise circumvent these practices after 9/11 by devolving immigration enforcement to willing
local authorities.
Alt solvency
Empirics prove the alt can become a stasis point to generate movements surrounding
immigration injustice
Cowen 09
[“After Geopolitics? From theGeopolitical Social to Geoeconomics”; Deborah Cowen Department of Geography, University of Toronto; Antipode
Vol. 41 No. 1 2009 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 22–48doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14678330.2008.00654.x/epdf] //duff
Towards a Geo-economic Social? As
market calculation supplants the geopolitical logic of state territoriality, the
historical assemblage of state and social security in and through national space—the “geopolitical
social”—increasingly dissolves. Geo-economics is ineluctably central to political geography at multiple scales today. While we have
highlighted questions of maritime border security on the one hand, wherein the national border is expanded from a line to a
“seam”, and on the other, the disentangling of social entitlement and military service, it should be
apparent that this reworked nexus of geo-economic reasoning and social forms operates at multiple
scales. Port security, for instance, works through the biometric surveillance of workers’ bodies, the enclosure of local port spaces, the
reworking of national labour law and citizenship rights, and the extension of the US border across global space. Likewise,
revamped military citizenship, draws on global as much as local labour markets, transforms the gendered and racialized contours of warring
bodies, while at the same time individualizing social and economic risk. Wed well on the geo-economic challenge to national territoriality
precisely because of the historical vitality of this scalar assemblage as a metric for calibrating economic exchange, social subjects, and national
societies with the warring state. The rise of geo-economics does not necessarily mean that boundaries and territories become less important,
but their strict national articulation may. As
the militarized US–Mexico border suggests, or the new seam of southern Europe
boundaries blurred for the sake of state security may
simultaneously be sharpened. Nevertheless, whatever their social precision as regards migration,
these borders no longer map so thoroughly the boundaries of economy or society. That the violence
of border recasting finds its most vivid expression amidst wars that happen in specific places(Iraq,
Palestine/Israel, Afghanistan) yet is also amorphously global (the war on terrorism) is precisely the point of the
emerging calibration of geoeconomics and the social. Political geographies of security are certainly not forged in a social
stretching from North Africa across the Mediterranean,
vacuum excluding all but state and corporate power. From the American and Haitian revolutions to the Paris Commune, social and political out
comes were shaped by many movements and social groups who did not come to rule the resulting geopolitical social. The same applies to
Russia in 1917. Similarly today, we might ask what kinds of geo-economic social worlds are in the works, and to whose claims and what
demands do they respond? Rather than the outright “death of the social” (Rose 1996) we see the transformation and proliferation of newsocial
forms (cf Brodie 2008), but with an eclipse of the particular social that we have conceptualized as geopolitical. If the territorial wars that
assembled the modern state were at the centre of the geopolitical social, then we see private and public accumulation through imperial
violence at the core of geoconomic social forms. In place of state welfarism, market power and prerogative increasingly governs the social,
while an environmentalized discourse of “sustainability” and the endemic threat of disaster organize new fields of capital accumulation (Klein
2007;Smith 2007). Yet emergent threads of the geoeconomic social are alsoforged by other sources of social power. Immigrant
rights
movements are a superb example. Specifically, sanctuary movements that make claims for the rights
of undocumented people—les sans papier—reject the national bounding of society, demanding instead
new socio-spatial forms of belonging and citizenship that connect local places globally(Ridgley 2008). The
new geography of military recruitment in the US is challenged by counter-recruitment campaigns emerging powerfully
out of communities of colour which organize with Canadian activists demanding the right of
settlement by soldiers who have refused to fightin an illegal war. In the EU, Australia and the NAFTA countries, labour
unions, whose decline in many places is integral to the decline of thegeopolitical social, now expend unprecedented effort on international
lcampaigns including undocumented peoples’ rights. Then there is the anti-globalization movement. Emerging in the 1990s,this loosely
defined movement recognized more than most political movements the power of emerging
geoeconomic calculation. Targeting global and international economic bodies, this movement refused
to take the national state as its preferred target, the repression of Seattle,Quebec and Genoa notwithstanding, a stance
which actually paralyzedit in the months following September 11, 2001. By February 2003,however, as the connections between global
economic ambition andwar became difficult to deny, this
evolving movement was a central force in turning out an
estimated 23 million people around the world against the imminent US war. Today it has morphed and
regrouped invarious interconnected directions—a global anti-capitalist movement, the global social
justice movement, a global environmental movement, and the world social forum (Gautney 2006). To what
extent these various social movements sculpt emergent geoeconomic social forms dependson how well they organize, on the creativity of their
claims, the intereststhey organize around, and on how well supported they are. In that sense,the shape of the geoeconomic social is probably
still a radically openquestion, especially with the onslaught of global economic crisis.
2NC—Tunnels PIC
O/V
ISIS has the capability to attain nuclear weapons from Pakistan and smuggle them
across the southern border via underground tunnels – surveillance is key to preventing
detonation – that’s Slavo
Nuclear detonation on US soil would spark conventional war against states such as
Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea – Russia and China would get drawn in sparking
nuclear miscalc, the impact is nuclear war – that’s Ayson
ISIS is rallying in Mexico now to smuggle WMD’s across border tunnels – border
surveillance is key
Sandy Fitzgerald, 7-20-2015, terrorism expert, "Former FBI Agent: ISIS Could Sneak In Through
Mexican Tunnels," http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/isis-us-borderdrug/2015/06/27/id/652505/)//GV
Tunnels used by drug dealers to sneak narcotics and cash from Mexico into the United States could
also become an underground route for Islamic State terrorists to enter the country, a former FBI agent is warning.
"Drug dealers have found a way to move money without it being followed," the former agent, Tyrone Powers, said,
according a story posted by Siouxland News, the website for CBS affiliate KMEG and Fox44 in Sioux City, South Dakota. " They found a way to move
people in and out and they found a way to move product." South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, also a 2016 presidential
candidate, agreed that "the stronger they get over there, the more power they have so I can definitely see, in the future, collaboration between terrorist groups and
drug dealers to our south." Powers said that the individuals that
could come "may be, at some point, suicide bombers, which
is really scary, and then weapons of mass destruction." Terrorism experts believe Mexico's unstable
leadership, along with ruthless drug cartels are creating a vacuum that ISIS could exploit. "What's been
going on in Mexico creates an opportunity for any organization to try to take advantage of it, whether
it's ISIS or Al Shabbab," Brandon Behlendorf, a terrorist targeting strategist,commented. There are two major drug cartels that could come into play,
with the Sinaloa Federation controlling western Mexico's borders from Texas to California, and Los Zetas, which occupies eastern Mexico, including the southern
Texas border. Experts claim Al Qaeda tried to hook up with Mexican drug lords about 15 years ago, the Siouxland News report indicates. " It
makes logical
sense for ISIS to do this," said Powers. "But I do not think they'll be catching the intelligence agencies off guard, because this has been a persistent
problem whether it was Al Qaeda or any other group." Earlier this month, ISIS claimed it has plans to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and smuggle it into the
U.S., using drug and human smuggling routes already in use by Mexican and South American drug cartels. In ISIS's online magazine Dabiq, in an article entitled, "The
Perfect Storm," apparently written and narrated by British captive photojournalist John Cantlie, ISIS says that using "billions of dollars" it has banked, the group
could purchase a nuclear device from corrupt Pakistani officials and send it on its way to explode in the U.S., the Daily Mail reports. Further, in April, Judicial Watch
reported that ISIS is operating a camp in northern Mexico just a few miles from El Paso, Texas citing sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a
Mexican Federal Police inspector. Judicial Watch sources said that "coyotes" working for the notorious Juarez Cartel are involved in helping to "move ISIS terrorists
through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico." Moreover, east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed
coyotes are smuggling members of the jihadi terrorist group "through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas," Judicial Watch reported. The
group says that these locations were targeted for exploitation by ISIS "because of their understaffed
municipal and county police forces, and the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked
large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing."
Uniqueness
A2: No ISIS Capability
ISIS has the ability to acquire a nuclear weapon and explosives—al Qaeda proves
Fox News, 7-16-2015, "ISIS Magazine: Terror Army Could Buy Nuclear Weapon From Pakistan," Fox
News Insider, http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/05/26/isis-magazine-terror-army-could-buy-nuclearweapon-pakistancxc
An article in the official magazine of ISIS claims that the terror army has the financial wherewithal to
purchase a nuclear weapon, possibly from corrupt officials in Pakistan. The article in Dabiq was written
last week under the name of British photojournalist John Cantlie, who's been held by ISIS for the last
two years. If a nuclear weapon cannot be obtained, the article suggests ISIS look into procuring a few
thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosives. Meantime, new photos show the terror army's
rapidly growing arsenal of guns, ammo and explosives, seized when Iraqi forces fled Ramadi. Brian
Kilmeade discussed these troubling developments with Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, senior fellow at the London
Center for Policy Research. Shaffer said the nuclear threat from ISIS is "very real," adding that al Qaeda
went down this path years ago. Shaffer said al Qaeda was only one-tenth as smart as ISIS and about
one one-hundredth as well financed. He argued that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it's going to
cause proliferation throughout the Middle East, increasing the chance that ISIS can get a nuclear
device. "They're available. Last time I checked on the black market, these things run about 400 million
dollars per warhead. So, ya know, it's there," said Shaffer.
ISIS is on track to gaining nuclear capabilities—US recruits and financial resources
increase probability of a nuclear attack or a dirty bomb
Joseph Cirincione, 9-30-2014, "ISIS will get nukes if allowed to consolidate: expert," NY Daily News,
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-nukes-allowed-consolidate-expert-article-1.1958855
The risk of a terrorist attack using nuclear or chemical weapons has just gone up. ISIS is willing to kill
large numbers of innocents, and it has added three capabilities that catapult the threat beyond
anything seen before: control of large, urban territories, huge amounts of cash, and a global network
of recruits. British Home Secretary Theresa May warned that if ISIS consolidates its control over the land
it occupies, “We will see the world’s first truly terrorist state” with “the space to plot attacks against
us.” Its seizure of banks and oil fields gave it more than $2 billion in assets. If ISIS could make the right
connection to corrupt officials in Russia or Pakistan, the group might be able to buy enough highly
enriched uranium (about 50 pounds) and the technical help to build a crude nuclear device. Militants
recruited from Europe or America could help smuggle it into their home nations. Or ISIS could try to
build a “dirty bomb,” conventional explosives like dynamite laced with highly radioactive materials.
The blast would not kill many directly, but it would force the evacuation of tens of square blocks
contaminated with radioactive particles. The terror and economic consequences of a bomb detonated
in the financial districts of London or New York would be enormous. ISIS could also try to get chemical
weapons, such as deadly nerve gases or mustard gas. Fortunately, the most likely source of these terror
weapons was just eliminated.
Terrorist organizations have nuclear capabilities—ISIS has access to nuclear materials
and are planning an attack
Lora Moftah, 6-30-2014, "Does ISIS Have A Nuclear Weapon? Islamic State Supporter Claims
Militants Have Dirty Bomb," International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/does-isis-havenuclear-weapon-islamic-state-supporter-claims-militants-have-dirty-1731890
Islamic State group has reportedly developed a nuclear weapon made from radioactive material stolen
from an Iraqi university, according to a militant who claims insider knowledge. Hamayun Tariq, a
British ISIS member now based in Syria, claimed on social media that the group obtained the uranium
from Mosul University and now possesses a “dirty bomb” that it is now considering detonating in a
public area. If true, this would confirm fears voiced by Iraq’s United Nations ambassador back in July
following the seizure of 40 kilograms of uranium compounds from Mosul University. In a letter to U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon dated July 8, ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim warned that these
materials “can be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction,” according to Reuters. "These
nuclear materials, despite the limited amounts mentioned, can enable terrorist groups, with the
availability of the required expertise, to use it separate or in combination with other materials in its
terrorist acts," said Alhakim.
Link
Seismic Tech Link
US seismic sensors are key to detecting nuclear weapons borders smuggling
US Border Patrol No Date, "Border Tunnels,"
http://www.usborderpatrol.com/Border_Patrol725.htm)//GV
Border Tunnels, Part 1 Border tunnels are of three general types: Large and Deep, Small and Shallow , and lastly,
those Connecting to Existing Infrastructure. Border tunnels are constructed because it is often far
more efficient to spend weeks or months building a tunnel to transport some amount of contraband than to risk sending that same amount contraband on
the surface where it might easily be detected. It is often a simple price-performance tradeoff. If the smuggler has a million pounds of drugs to move -- or a
million pounds of illegal aliens from Afghanistan -- then a tunnel can be a low cost solution. If the
contraband to be smuggled is of tremendous value -- for example a key terrorist or a nuclear weapon -- then a
tunnel is probably the best choice. There are all sorts of ways of finding tunnels. Some methods work and some do
not. The methods of tunnel detection in use along the U.S. / Mexico border seem to come and go in
waves, like fads or the lengths of miniskirts. A major problem for the United States Border Patrol is that effective tunnel detection methods are deemed too
imprecise and expensive. Before one decides to build a tunnel it is imperative that the threat of possible detection be evaluated. There are four
general methods of detecting tunnels: Seismic activity (low frequency digging noises and tunnel transit noises) Magnetic
Anomaly (electrical power lines in the tunnel, metal digging tools or metal shoring) Acoustic Activity (higher frequency noises) Density
Anomalies (the tunnel is a hole and so the amount of earth below the surface changes when you dig a tunnel) Present urges within the Department of
Homeland Security are for immediate gratification. They have this Giant Urge to just walk out along the border and -- while using some magical tool -- find a tunnel
in ten minutes. This does not happen. Although this does not happen, it is this thing that does not happen that DHS expects to happen and so
to use various sensor systems over and over again expecting a different result.
they continue
Border Patrol Link
Border patrol surveillance is key to ratting out underground tunnels
Catholic Online, 4-9-2015, "Underground tunnel between U.S. and Mexico found hidden in
wardrobe," http://www.catholic.org/news/international/americas/story.php?id=59593)//GV
An average wooden wardrobe near San Diego served a far more sinister purpose. Concealed within its doors was a small trapdoor
that led to a secret underground passageway stretching some 500 feet towards the U.S. border. The
Mexican military uncovered the suspected drugs tunnel and arrested nine people before they were able to flee into the U.S. When soldiers raided the
property, they also reportedly seized 44 pounds of marijuana and a truck being used by the racket to
move the excavated earth. When soldiers raided the property, they also reportedly seized 44 pounds of marijuana and a truck being used by the
racket to move the excavated earth. LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Wired with lights and ventilation, the sophisticated passageway appears to have been a
cart system drug runners. The 66-foot deep route, still under construction upon discovery was next to the Tijuana checkpoint. Soldiers who entered the
passageway, just west of A.L. Rodriguez International Airport, had to descend a 10-foot ladder to access the muddy path. Officials said the route had not yet crossed
the border, stretching only some 500 feet. Keep these beautiful rosaries nearby -- Officials think the tunnel would have surfaced somewhere inside U.S. territory if
left undetected. Estimated seven miles by car from the official border crossing at San Ysidro, the tunnel was less than a mile as the crow flies from the actual border.
The border is just over 22 miles from the city of San Diego, California. When soldiers raided the property, they also reportedly seized 44 pounds of marijuana and a
truck being used by the racket to move the excavated earth. Government
officials have said that similar tunnels have also
been used to smuggle migrants into the United States. Over the past decade, dozens of illegal tunnels
have been found across the roughly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
Impact
Terrorism Turns Case
Terrorism is used as a justification for increased surveillance – empirics prove and turns
case
Haggerty and Gazso 2005 (Kevin, Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of
Alberta; Amber, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, The Canadian
Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 30, No. 2 ( Spring, 2005), pp. 169-187 “Seeing
beyond the Ruins: Surveillance as a Response to Terrorist Threats” JSTOR; accessed 7/17/15 JH @ DDI)
A climate of fear and anxiety helped ease the passage of such laws (Davis, 2001). However, a great deal of organizational
opportunism was also at work. Many of the surveillance proposals adopted in the days after the attack were
recycled from earlier legislative efforts. In previous incarnations these proposals had often been legitimated as essential for the
international "war on drugs" or to address other crimes, such as money laundering. The September 11 th attacks gave the
authorities a new and apparently unassailable legitimation for long-standing legislative ambitions.
Before the dust had settled on Manhattan, the security establishment had mobilized to expand and
intensify their surveillance capabilities, justifying existing proposals as necessary tools to fight the new
war against terrorism. Ultimately, the police, military and security establishment reaped an unanticipated windfall of increased funding,
new technology and loosened legislative constraints by strategically invoking fears of future attacks. There are several examples of such
opportunism. Since at least 1999, when Congress initially turned down their request, the U.S. Justice Department has lobbied for the
development of new "secret search" provisions. Likewise, prior to the attacks, the FBI and the National Telecommunications and Information
Systems Security Committee had a lengthy shopping list of desired surveillance-related measures including legal enhancements to their
wiretapping capabilities, legal constraints on the public use of cryptography, and provisions for governmental agents to compel Internet service
providers to provide information on their customers (Burnham, 1997). All
of these proposals were recycled and
implemented after the September 11th attacks now justified as integral tools in the "war on terrorism."
New provisions requiring banks to exercise "due diligence" in relation to their large depositors were originally justified by the authorities as a
means to counter the "war on drugs." The opportunism of many of these efforts was inadvertently revealed by an RCMP Sergeant when, during
a discussion about new official antiterrorism powers to monitor financial transactions, he noted that: "We've been asking for something like
this for four years. It's really our best weapon against biker gangs" [emphasis added] (Corcan, 2001). In Canada, the Federal Privacy
Commissioner was particularly alarmed by the development of what he referred to as a "Big Brother database." This amounts to a detailed
computerized record of information about Canadian travelers. Although justified as a means to counter terrorism, the data will be made
available to other government departments for any purpose they deem appropriate. Such
provisions raise the specter of
informational "fishing expeditions." Indeed, the Canadian government has already indicated that this ostensible anti-terrorist
database will be used to help monitor tax evaders and catch domestic criminals. It will also be used to scrutinize an individual's travel history
and destinations, in an effort to try and determine whether they might be a pedophile or money launderer (Radwanski, 2002). While these are
laudable goals, they also reveal how a
host of other surveillance agendas have been furthered by capitalizing on
the new anti-terrorism discourse.
Lone wolf terror attacks are used to justify disproportionate increases in surveillance
and military operations abroad
Lennard, Senior News Analyst for Vice News, 10/27/14 (Natasha Lennard, Brooklyn-based Senior
News Analyst for Vice News, VICE News, October 27, 2014, “'Lone Wolf' Terrorist Acts Will Be Used to
Justify the Surveillance State” https://news.vice.com/article/lone-wolf-terrorist-acts-will-be-used-tojustify-the-surveillance-state, accessed 7/17/15 JH @ DDI)
The phenomenon of individuals committing violent and murderous acts in the name of an ideology is
nothing new in the US. The FBI's Operation Lone Wolf investigated white supremacists encouraging autonomous violent acts in the 1990s.
Why, then, are we seeing pundits and politicians newly focus on the "lone wolf" category? There's no simple answer, but we can at the very
least see that the old binary, distinguishing terror as the act of networked groups versus lone madman mass killings — a distinction that has
tacitly undergirded post-9/11 conceptions of terrorism — doesn't serve the latest iteration of the war on terror. California Senator Dianne
Feinstein, speaking on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, suggested that "the
Internet, as well as certain specific Muslim
extremists, are really firing up this lone-wolf phenomenon." Whether intentionally or not, the Senate
Intelligence Committee chair performed a lot of political work with that one comment. Crystallizing
"lone wolves" as a key threat domestically helps legitimize the US's current military operation against
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. With or without established connections, the Islamic State's far-reaching tentacles of online
influence encouraging individuals worldwide cement the group as a threat to the homeland — which is always useful for politicians struggling
to legally justify another protracted war. In this way, attributing attacks to homegrown "lone wolves" is more useful for current US political
interests than attributing them to madness alone. The
assumption that terror acts were always borne of connected
networks problematically buoyed domestic counter-terror efforts that saw entire communities profiled
as potential threats. Which is not to say that "lone wolf terrorist" is a flawed designation for attacks by ideologically motivated
individuals. In many ways it seems apt, and any challenge is welcome to the all too basic distinction that imbues group terror with motive while
dismissing individual acts as madness. The "lone wolf" straddles the ill-conceived gap between madman and terrorist node. It's an intersection
all too complicated for the inexpert punditry of Fox News: "They are terrorist acts, to be sure," Megyn Kelly said about Canadian gunman
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, adding "but this guy was also a nutcase." Furthermore, the assumption that terror acts were always borne of connected
networks problematically buoyed domestic counter-terror efforts that saw entire communities profiled as potential threats. Under the premise
that terror networks ran like arteries through US Muslim communities enabled an era of profile-driven preemptive policing that has been
nothing short of racist. Entire mosques in New York were designated terrorist organizations to enable police surveillance. The NSA's meta-data
collections claim justifiability on the premise that terror was locatable by tracing networks of communication. The "lone wolf" phenomenon
should at least prompt the questioning of the sort of profile-based counter-terror efforts that assumed terror lurked in any network of Muslims,
and that the mass hoarding of communications data was vital to national security. However, the
rhetoric surrounding this type of
domestic threat already bodes ill for civil liberties. If the hunt for terrorist networks has been plagued by
ethnic profiling and overreaching spycraft, an established threat of "lone wolf" attacks gives a defensive
imprimatur for unbounded NSA-style surveillance — anyone can wield a hatchet with ideological ire. As Chairman of the
House Homeland Security Committee Michael McCaul said on This Week, finding such lone actors in advance of attacks is
like "finding a needle in a haystack." And as Feinstein said the same day, "You have to be able to watch it, and you have to be able
to disrupt them." As such, the era of the "lone wolf" terrorist does not only spell the end of the bunk distinction between motivated
group and deranged individual. It ushers in the dawn of a new era of justification for our totalized state of
surveillance and national security paranoia.
Surveillance would increase after a terrorist attack
Feaver 1/13/15
(Peter D., 1/13/15, Foreign Policy, “10 Lessons to Remember After a Terrorist Attack,” Peter is a
professor of political science and public policy and Bass Fellow @ Duke University, and director of the
Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/13/ten-lessons-to-remember-after-a-terrorist-attack/, 7/16/15, SM)
In particular, it is striking how some of the things that were “obvious” in the days and weeks after 9/11, but then were
gradually forgotten, have become obvious again:∂ Terrorists succeed when they are abetted by intelligence failures. Or, put
another way, terrorists only need to get lucky once to “succeed,” whereas counterterrorism has to be lucky all the time to “succeed.”∂ Even
robust intelligence and law enforcement may not guarantee 100 percent safety and security. By global standards — certainly by the standards
of Western democracies — France has a particularly formidable counterterrorist structure. But it failed in this instance.∂ When
terrorists
succeed in an attack, citizens demand that the government do more to protect them — even if they
have already been doing a lot. And steps that would have seemed heavy handed before the attack, say
aggressive surveillance of suspected terrorists or visible demonstrations of presence by the security forces, are deemed
not just tolerable but necessary. Moreover, savvy political leaders will understand that one of the benefits of a stronger official
response is that it is a hedge both against dangerously stronger vigilantism and also against additional pressure from some segments of the
public to do more than is wise.
Terrorism leads to crackdowns
History.com, Reaction to 9/11, http://www.history.com/topics/reaction-to-9-11, 2010
“Today,” the French newspaper Le Monde announced on September 12, 2001, “we are all Americans.”
People around the world agreed: The terrorist attacks of the previous day had felt like attacks on everyone,
everywhere. They provoked an unprecedented expression of shock, horror, solidarity and sympathy for
the victims and their families. Citizens of 78 countries died in New York, Washington, D.C., and
Pennsylvania on September 11, and people around the world mourned lost friends and neighbors. They
held candlelight vigils. They donated money and goods to the Red Cross and other rescue and relief
organizations. Flowers piled up in front of American embassies. Cities and countries commemorated the attacks in a
variety of ways: The Queen Mother sang the American national anthem at Buckingham Palace’s Changing of the Guard, while in Brazil, Rio de
Janeiro put up huge billboards that showed the city’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue embracing the New York City skyline. Meanwhile,
statesmen and women rushed to condemn the attacks and to offer whatever aid they could to the United States. Russian
president
Vladimir Putin called the strikes “a blatant challenge to humanity,” while German chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder declared that the events were “not only attacks on the people in the United States, our
friends in America, but also against the entire civilized world, against our own freedom, against our own
values, values which we share with the American people.” He added, “We will not let these values be
destroyed.” Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien denounced the “cowardly and depraved assault.” He tightened security along the
border and arranged for hundreds of grounded airplanes to land at Canadian airports. Even leaders of countries that did not tend to get along
terribly well with the American government expressed their sorrow and dismay. The Cuban foreign minister offered airspace and airports to
American planes. Chinese and Iranian officials sent their condolences. And the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, visibly dismayed, told reporters
in Gaza that the attacks were “unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable.” “We completely condemn this very dangerous attack,” he said, “and I
convey my condolences to the American people, to the American president and to the American administration.” But public reaction was
mixed. The leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas announced that “no doubt this is a result of the injustice the U.S. practices against the
weak in the world.” Likewise, people in many different countries believed that the attacks were a consequence of America’s cultural hegemony,
political meddling in the Middle East and interventionism in world affairs. The Rio billboards hadn’t been up for long before someone defaced
them with the slogan “The U.S. is the enemy of peace.” Some, especially in Arab countries, openly celebrated the attacks. But most people,
even those who believed that the United States was partially or entirely responsible for its own misfortune, still expressed sorrow and anger at
the deaths of innocent people. On
September 12, the 19 ambassadors of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) declared that the attack on the United States was an attack on all of the member nations. This
statement of solidarity was mostly symbolic–NATO did not authorize any specific military action–but it
was still unprecedented. It was the first time that the organization had ever invoked the mutual defense
section of its charter (intended to protect vulnerable European nations from Soviet invasion during the
Cold War). NATO eventually sent five airplanes to help keep an eye on American airspace. Likewise, on
September 12 the United Nations Security Council called on all nations to “redouble their efforts” to
thwart and prosecute terrorists. Two weeks later, it passed another resolution that urged states to
“suppress the financing of terrorism” and to aid in any anti-terrorism campaigns. But these declarations of
support and solidarity didn’t mean that other countries gave the United States a free hand to retaliate however, and against whomever, it
pleased. Allies and adversaries alike urged caution, warning that an indiscriminate or disproportionate reaction could alienate Muslims around
the world. In the end,
almost 30 nations pledged military support to the United States, and many more
offered other kinds of cooperation. Most agreed with George Bush that, after September 11, the fight against terrorism was “the
world’s fight.”
A2: No escalation
Nuclear terrorism causes global nuclear escalation – national retaliation goes global
Morgan 9 (Dennis Ray, Professor of Foreign Studies at Hankuk University, “World on Fire: Two Scenarios
of the Destruction of Human Civilization and Possible Extinction of the Human Race,” Futures, Vol. 41, Issue
10, p683-693, ScienceDirect)
In a remarkable website on nuclear war, Carol Moore asks the question "Is Nuclear War Inevitable??"
[10].4 In Section 1, Moore points out what most terrorists obviously already know about the nuclear
tensions between powerful countries. No doubt, they've figured out that the best way to escalate
these tensions into nuclear war is to set off a nuclear exchange. As Moore points out, all that
militant terrorists would have to do is get their hands on one small nuclear bomb and explode it
on either Moscow or Israel. Because of the Russian "dead hand" system, "where regional
nuclear commanders would be given full powers should Moscow be destroyed," it is likely that
any attack would be blamed on the United States" [10]. Israeli leaders and Zionist supporters
have, likewise, stated for years that if Israel were to suffer a nuclear attack, whether from
terrorists or a nation state, it would retaliate with the suicidal "Samson option" against all major
Muslim cities in the Middle East. Furthermore, the Israeli Samson option would also include
attacks on Russia and even "anti-Semitic" European cities [10]. In that case, of course, Russia
would retaliate, and the U.S. would then retaliate against Russia. China would probably be
involved as well, as thousands, if not tens of thousands, of nuclear warheads, many of them
much more powerful than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would rain upon most of the
major cities in the Northern Hemisphere. Afterwards, for years to come, massive radioactive
clouds would drift throughout the Earth in the nuclear fallout, bringing death or else radiation disease
that would be genetically transmitted to future generations in a nuclear winter that could last as
long as a 100 years, taking a savage toll upon the environment and fragile ecosphere as well.
Retaliation increases terrorism—more violence, easier recruitment
John A. Nevin, Behavior and Social Issues, 12, 109-128 (2003). Behaviorists for Social Responsibilit
Retaliation may reduce terrorism in several ways. Arresting terrorists takes them out of action and trying them within the criminal
justice system legitimizes authority. Targeted killings of the leaders of terrorist organizations disrupt their operations and buy time while the
terrorists regroup. Finally, large-scale attacks on terrorist groups and their supporters, coupled with mass arrests, reduce their numbers and
may deter potential recruits to their cause. On
the other hand, retaliation in any form may increase terrorism in
several ways. It may incite terrorists to escalate the level of violence, increase their support in the
population, and make it easier to recruit new members to their cause.
Retaliation is risky—multitude of escalation scenarios
Mallow 97
(Brittain P., 1997, The Industrial College of the Armed Forces, “Terror vs. Terror: Effects of Military
Retaliation on Terrorism,” http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/icaf/97-e-12.pdf)
Like terrorism, retaliation is a form of communication through violence. It can affect multiple audiences for many
purposes: bolstering public opinion, destroying/disrupting terrorist infrastructure, and potentially deterring the choice of the terrorist tactic.
Symmetry, proportionality, and discrimination in the targeting of retaliation all vary its effects on audiences. To deter terrorists and their
supporters, retaliation must meet the requirements of deterrence theory: credibility, shared interest, and rationality. Examples of
retaliation for terrorism indicate there are significant problems with its effectiveness as a deterrent. Its
viability is diminished by the transience and fragility of credibility, the moral and legal "baggage" of
retaliation itself, and the differences in values and interests between terrorists/supporters and
retaliating states. Retaliation also presents substantial risks beyond its failure to deter. Force protection,
dangers of escalatory violence, and risks of condemnation by the world community accompany the use
of retaliation. These risks, combined with its questionable viability as a deterrent, make retaliation a
difficult policy choice.
Breakdown of relations between the US and Pakistan causes conflict
Stephen Tankel, professor at American University and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, A Pakistan-Based Terrorist Attack on the U.S. Homeland, August
2011
A successful terrorist attack of any proportion by a Pakistan-based group or groups would have significant domestic and foreign policy
implications for the United States. Although the economic repercussions are unlikely to be as severe as those following 9/11, even a small
attack could trigger a short-term dip in already shaky global markets. An
attack also would reintroduce a sense of domestic
vulnerability, particularly if it claims hundreds as opposed to tens of lives and/or the target is an iconic one. The origin of the
attack—Pakistan—would cause a distraction from other pressing foreign policy concerns. All of these issues
would be magnified by the forthcoming presidential campaign season. The immediate impact on U.S.-Pakistan relations would depend on
several factors—the nature and scale of the harm committed; which group(s), if any, claimed responsibility; the immediate public response by
the Pakistan civilian government and military; and the level of cooperation they subsequently offered. The number of people killed is likely to
be among the largest determining factors in a response, though an attack against a political or military target that causes few casualties could
also have a major impact. Any
indication that individuals or entities associated with the Pakistan army or ISI had
foreknowledge of the strike or had in any way aided it would have severe consequences for the bilateral
relationship. Even if there were no smoking gun, the involvement of a culprit with institutional ties to the state
would be incredibly deleterious, as would Pakistan’s failure to cooperate with U.S. authorities in the
wake of the attack. Much rests on the bilateral relationship. A complete rupture is unlikely because both sides
have a lot to lose. A further deterioration in relations could seriously compromise counterterrorism and
nonproliferation interests, not to mention regional diplomatic initiatives, especially in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s security establishment also might enact a short-term closure of corridors through which U.S. supplies pass into Afghanistan. Were
a complete rupture to occur, this could lead to an indefinite closure of these corridors, an end to
Pakistani support along the Durand Line, and an increased flow of insurgents across the border. The U.S.
diplomatic mission to Pakistan could shrink significantly, Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation could cease, and in a worst-case scenario the
threat to American
2NC—Agency PIC
Solves DEA Surveillance
Also solves the DEA surveillance
Barrett 15
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-spies-on-millions-of-cars-1422314779; DEVLIN BARRETT is a writer for the wall street journal January 26,
2015; “U.S. Spies on Millions of Drivers”] //duff
The primary goal of the license-plate tracking program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is
to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according to one government document.
But the database’s use has expanded to hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential
crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the matter. READ MORE
ON CAPITAL JOURNAL 5 Questions About the DEA’s Car-Tracking Program Americans’ Cellphones
Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program (Nov. 13, 2014) U.S. Marshals Service Personnel Dressed as Mexican
Marines Pursue Cartel Bosses (Nov. 21, 2014) U.S. Charges Russian Banker in Spy Case Officials have
publicly said that they track vehicles near the border with Mexico to help fight drug cartels. What hasn’t
been previously disclosed is that the DEA has spent years working to expand the database “throughout
the United States,’’ according to one email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Many state and local
law-enforcement agencies are accessing the database for a variety of investigations, according to people
familiar with the program, putting a wealth of information in the hands of local officials who can track
vehicles in real time on major roadways. The database raises new questions about privacy and the scope
of government surveillance. The existence of the program and its expansion were described in
interviews with current and former government officials, and in documents obtained by the American
Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by The Wall Street
Journal. It is unclear if any court oversees or approves the intelligence-gathering. A spokesman for
Justice Department, which includes the DEA, said the program complies with federal law. “It is not new
that the DEA uses the license-plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow of drugs in
areas of high trafficking intensity,’’ the spokesman said.
2NC—Terror DA
Links
2NC Link Wall
Terrorists will smuggle nukes across the border – cartels
HSNW 4-21, Homeland Security News Wire, April 21, 2015, "Nuclear smuggling, dirty bomb, terrorists,
drug cartels," No Publication, http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150421-drug-cartelsterrorists-may-cooperate-in-smuggling-materials-for-a-nuclear-device-into-u-s)//GV
Detonating a nuclear device or dirty bomb in the United States has long been goal of terrorists groups
including al-Qaeda. Doing so, however, would require access to nuclear materials and a way to smuggle them into the country. Experts note
the nexus between drug organizations, crime groups, and violent extremists and the trafficking of
radiological and nuclear materials. A new report points out that al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Colombia’s FARC are the
three organizations with the motivation and capability to obtain a radiological or nuclear device .
Detonating a nuclear device or dirty bomb in the United States has long been goal of terrorists groups including al-Qaeda. Doing so, however, would require access
to nuclear materials and a way to smuggle them into the country. For now, considerable roadblocks exists that would prevent such a plan from coming into fruition,
but Steven
Sin, a senior researcher in the unconventional weapons and technology division of the
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START), says that what seems
like a plot in a spy thriller could become a real-life nightmare scenario . According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC), a radiological device, or dirty bomb, is a conventional explosive with radioactive materials such as Cesium 137 attached. A nuclear device, now limited to a
few nation states, involves splitting the atoms of a radioactive material such as highly enriched uranium. The Tampa Tribune reports that last week, Sin released a
study about the nexus between drug organizations, crime groups, and violent extremists and the trafficking of radiological and nuclear materials. In it he points out
that al-Qaeda,
Hezbollah, and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) are the three
organizations with the motivation and capability to obtain a radiological or nuclear device . These groups, Sin
explains, are hybrid organizations, a meld between the ideological and criminal, driven primarily by ideology and using crime to fund their ideological actions. Of the
three groups, only al-Qaeda and Hezbollah would be likely to use such a device in the United States. FARC makes a
bulk of its money selling cocaine to users in the United States, and would not want to unleash a radioactive bomb on its best customers. Still, Sin explains that while
a drug trafficking organization may make too much money from the United States to want to help unleash chaos and
disrupt business, a rogue high-ranking member of a drug trafficking group may use his or her position
and the respective organization’s capability to smuggle radiological or nuclear devices into the United States
on behalf of a terror group. Should al-Qaeda or Hezbollah find a way to smuggle a radiological or nuclear weapon into the United States, the group
would still have to get its hands on the device or nuclear material. The technical complexities, and its limits to a few nation states, make it unlikely that terrorist
groups would obtain a nuclear weapon. Radioactive materials, on the other hand, which are useful for a dirty bomb, could be obtained from MRI and X-Ray
scanners, but recent cases show that the quest still remains a challenge for terror groups. According to the NRC, “Since September 11, 2001, terrorist arrests and
prosecutions overseas have revealed that individuals associated with al-Qaeda planned to acquire materials for a (dirty bomb) or radiological dispersal device
(RDD).” In 2004 British authorities arrested Dhiren Barot and seven associates on various charges, including conspiring to commit public nuisance by the use of
radioactive materials. Barot admitted to plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund headquarters, and the World Bank,
among other targets. In another 2004 case, British police arrested British national Salahuddin Amin and six associates on terrorism-related charges. According to the
NRC, al-Qaeda linked-Amin “is accused of making inquiries about buying a ‘radioisotope bomb’ from the Russian mafia in Belgium.” Neither Barot nor Amin’s plans
came close to an operational stage, but they demonstrate “the continued interest of terrorists in acquiring and using radioactive material for malicious purposes,”
the NRC points out.
ISIS will smuggle a nuke across the border – enforcement is key
Edwin Mora 6-3 2015washington, D.C. 0, xx-xx-xxxx, "Dabiq: ISIS Could Transport Nuke from Nigeria
into U.S. Through Mexico," Breitbart, http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/06/03/dabiqisis-could-transport-nuke-from-nigeria-into-u-s-through-mexico/)//GV
The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), in the latest edition of its propaganda magazine, indicated that it could purchase a nuclear weapon in
Pakistan, take it to Nigeria, and then smuggle it into the U.S. through Mexico by using existing
trafficking networks in Latin America. In an op-ed article published in the ninth edition of ISIS’ Dabiq magazine released in late May, the
jihadist group claims it could transport a nuclear device in the same way illicit drugs are smuggled into Europe through West Africa, adding that Boko Haram’s
presence in Nigeria could facilitate the transaction. The Nigeria-based
Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, pledged
allegiance to ISIS in March. In March, Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), warned that Islamic terrorist
groups such as ISIS could exploit the capabilities and knowledge of Latin American smuggling
networks to infiltrate the U.S. through Mexico and possibly bring in weapons of mass destruction. The
general, in October 2014, acknowledged that illegal drugs from South America move “through West Africa, up the Maghreb and into Western Europe,” adding that
ISIS enemy al Qaeda and its affiliates take “a lot of money to allow it to flow.” According to the alleged author of the Dabiq op-ed article, kidnapped British
photojournalist John Cantlie,
ISIS could smuggle a nuke into the U.S. by using the same route and reversing the
flow — moving the nuke from West Africa into South America, from where it could be transported
into the United States through Mexico. “Let me throw a hypothetical operation onto the table,” Cantlie wrote in the article entitled “The
Perfect Storm.” “The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilāyah [province] in Pakistan to
purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region.” He
addded: The weapon is then transported over land until it makes it to Libya, where the mujāhidīn [fighters] move it south to Nigeria. Drug shipments from Columbia
bound for Europe pass through West Africa, so moving other types of contraband from East to West is just as possible. The nuke
and accompanying
mujāhidīn arrive on the shorelines of South America and are transported through the porous borders
of Central America before arriving in Mexico and up to the border with the United States. “From there it’s just
a quick hop through a smuggling tunnel and hey presto, they’re mingling with another 12 million ‘illegal’ aliens in America with a nuclear bomb in the trunk of their
car,” he also wrote. If
not a nuke, ISIS could easily smuggle in “a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate
explosive” that is easy to manufacture, said the article. Cantlie wrote that ISIS, which started as a movement in Iraq, has suddenly morphed
into a global phenomenon that the West and the democratic world as a whole is ill-prepared to handle. He said that Boko Haram controls most of Nigeria, home to
“an exhausted and smashed national army that is now in a virtual state of collapse”. While testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, Gen.
Kelly noted, “Last year, ISIS adherents posted discussions on social media calling for the infiltration of the U.S. southern border. Thankfully, we have not yet seen
evidence of this occurring, but I am deeply concerned that smuggling networks are a vulnerability that terrorists could seek to exploit.” “While there is not yet any
indication that the criminal networks involved in human and drug trafficking
are interested in supporting the efforts of terrorist
groups, these networks could unwittingly, or even wittingly, facilitate the movement of terrorist
operatives or weapons of mass destruction toward our borders, potentially undetected and almost
completely unrestricted,” he added. The general, speaking at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. in October 2014, warned that
Latin American drug cartels were working with jihadist groups in West Africa, namely Sunni group Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its affiliates.
Terrorist organizations working with drug cartels
Barkoukis 14 (Leah, the online features editor and web editor at Townhall.com, “ISIS, Mexican Drug
Cartels Teaming Up?”, August 21st 2014, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3195711/posts)
The relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism has long existed, and can take many forms
depending on the goals and needs of each party.
Sometimes
hybrid criminal-terrorist organizations
form in which terrorist groups become involved in the drug trade to fund operations, purchase
equipment, and pay foot soldiers. In return, they provide safe passageways for the drugs and give
traffickers tips for circumventing customs and security forces.
Other times a localized criminal organization or
terrorist group lacks expertise, so increased contacts and business with major drug cartels helps advance the sophistication of their operation.
Ultimately, though,
both have logistical needs and working with or even talking to each other allows the
groups to share lessons learned, important contacts to corrupt officials, and operational methods.
Thus, it’s not surprising to hear that the
Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is already talking to Mexican drug cartels.
Rep. Ted
Poe (R-TX), a member of the House Judiciary Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, said as much on Newmax TV’s “America’s
Forum” on Wednesday when asked if there’s any interaction between the two. “My opinion is yes,” he replied. “There seems to be at least a
talking to each other. How much? I don’t know. But ...
drug cartels use the same operational plan as terrorist groups
do. They kill their opponents, they behead their opponents, they brag about it and they have
operational control of many portions of the southern border of the United States.
United States doesn’t. Otherwise they wouldn’t be crossing daily with their drugs.
Mexico doesn’t. The
They’re as vicious as some of these other
terrorist organizations. We need to recognize them that this is an organized international crime
group. And we have to deal with them as such.” Even amid all the domestic and international crises
going on at the moment, it’s important that the American people and lawmakers not give up on
putting pressure on this administration to beef up border security.
than just the illegal immigration of tens of thousands of Central Americans—it’ s
The crisis at the Southwest border is about more
about national security. Criminals, violent
gang members, drug cartel members, and yes, terrorists, are also coming in and will continue to do
so as long as this administration puts politics
and political correctness
ahead of security.
Un-surveilled cartels and ISIS will cooperate to smuggle weapons
Siouxland News 6/26 (News report for Northwest Iowa, “Isis Expansion Along U.S. Borders”, June 26th
2015, http://www.siouxlandnews.com/story/29413634/isis-expansion-along-us-borders)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Our southern border is long and U.S. border patrol agents work to fight illegal activity
like illegal immigration, drugs and now according to an FBI consultant, the border could be an
attractive region for ISIS thanks in part to powerful drug lords. " Drug dealers have found a way to
move money without it being followed,”
out and they found a way to move product."
said Tyrone Powers, Former FBI Agent. “They found a way to move people in and
That product powers refers to is tons and tons of meth, heroin and
pot transferred through a labyrinth of tunnels from Mexico.
Drugs that are headed for the streets of the U.S.
But
these tunnels could easily be an underground highway for ISIS to spawn its brutality here. "The
stronger they get over there, the more power they have so I can definitely see, in the future,
collaboration between terrorist groups and drug dealers to our south,"
said Senator Lindsey Graham, South
Carolina, 2016 Presidential Candidate "It's individuals they bring into this country, maybe at some point, suicide bombers which is really scary
and then weapons of mass destruction," said Powers.
Terrorist experts say the epidemic of unstable leadership in
Mexico, combined with ruthless drug cartels creates a vacuum. " What's been going on in Mexico
creates an opportunity for any organization to try to take advantage of it, whether it's ISIS or Al
Shabbab ," said Brandon Behlendorf, Terrorist Targeting Strategist . Two major drug cartels that could attract ISIS
cover a lot of land in Mexico.
Both skirt the U.S. border. The Sinalos Federation takes up western Mexico and borders Texas to
California. Los Zetas occupies eastern Mexico and hugs the southern Texas
border. Experts say Al Qaeda already tried
linking up with drug lords in Mexico roughly 15 years ago.
than Al Qaeda.
But to no avail.
But Isis is far more determined
"It makes logical sense for ISIS to do this,” said powers. “But I do not think they'll be catching the intelligence agencies
off guard, because this has been a persistent problem whether it was Al Qaeda or any other group."
ISIS will sneak weapons of mass destruction across the border w/o surveillance
Cantilero 7/1 (Monica, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City with expertise in
Communication and Media, “ISIS could smuggle fighters, weapons into US via Mexican tunnels, says exFBI agent”, July 1st 2015,
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/isis.could.smuggle.fighters.weapons.into.us.via.mexican.tunnels.
says.ex.fbi.agent/57653.htm)
A former FBI agent has warned that tunnels used by drug dealers to smuggle drugs and cash into the
US from Mexico could be used by the Islamic State to move its jihadist fighters, including suicide
bombers and even a nuclear warhead, into the United States . "Drug dealers have found a way to move money
without it being followed," said former FBI agent Tyrone Powers during a recent remark on national television. " They
found a way to
move people in and out and they found a way to move product." ISIS agents may find a way to enter
the US and "may be, at some point, suicide bombers, which is really scary, and then weapons of mass
destruction ," said Powers. Two major drug cartels that could be involved are the Sinaloa Federation , which
controls western Mexico's borders from Texas to California,
and the Los Zetas , which occupies eastern Mexico. Experts say al-
Qaeda once tried to establish links with Mexican drug lords,
Newsmax reported. "It makes logical sense for ISIS to do
this," said Powers. "But I do not think they'll be catching the intelligence agencies off guard, because this has been a persistent problem
whether it was al-Qaeda or any other group." Mexico's unstable leadership mixed with drug cartels can create a dangerous concoction that
could be used by ISIS, according to experts. "What's been going on in
Mexico creates an opportunity for any organization
to try to take advantage of it, whether it's ISIS or Al Shabbab ," said Brandon Behlendorf, a terrorist targeting
strategist.
The jihadist group claimed earlier this month that it plans to acquire a nuclear weapon from
Pakistan and to sneak it into US territory using drug and human smuggling routes.
Judicial Watch reported in
April that ISIS is managing a camp in northern Mexico just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, and that "coyotes" of the Juarez Cartel are helping to
"move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico ."
ISIS fighters are
also being smuggled "through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas." The
locations are being eyed by ISIS "because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces , and
the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing." In a related development,
the CIA is now reassessing the view that the ISIS is mostly a "regional threat" following the "Bloody
Friday" attacks that covered three countries on different continents.
The group is transforming into a global threat
because of its ability to "evangelise followers," said retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who helped create the US military campaign against alQaeda. "This will only continue unless something is done to destroy ISIL and reduce its appeal to the extremist fringe in the Islamic community,"
he added.
2NC—Disease DA
Extension
Disease surveillance on US Mexico border key to solve mosquito-borne viruses –
Chikungunya proves
Utepnews 2/19 (news reporting from The University of Texas at El Paso, “Mosquito Experts Prepare
for Chikungunya Threat Along U.S.-Mexico Border”, Febuaray 19th 2015,
http://news.utep.edu/?p=29135)
National mosquito experts will gather at The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss and strengthen
U.S. border plans related to the surveillance and control of mosquito-borne viruses. The meeting was
created to prepare for the likely onslaught of chikungunya, an emerging infectious disease
Eastern Hemisphere that first appeared in the Caribbean last year; it is
from the
expected to spread north to the southern United
States. “With the recent understanding that chikungunya virus is endemic in Mexico, we felt that a
meeting to assess virus surveillance activities along the U.S.-Mexico border would be appropriate at
this time ,” said Doug Watts, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert on mosquitoes and the viruses they transmit. “ The
opportunity to bring together those responsible for infectious disease surveillance will lead to
improved strategies for the detection and control of emerging infections, such as chikungunya and
dengue viruses that threaten the health of the border communities.”
The goal of the meeting is to strengthen
mosquito disease surveillance and control. The experts will focus on four objectives during the two-day conference :
1) improved
diagnostic and surveillance capacity for chikungunya 2) expanded training for health care providers in
recognizing and managing chikungunya cases 3) improved surveillance of mosquitoes that can carry
chikungunya 4) improved local mosquito control capacity Attendees will include scientists from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , such as Chief of the Arboviral Diseases Branch Roger Nasci, Ph.D., and Scott
Weaver, Ph.D, an expert in human infections and immunity at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The media and public are
invited to listen in as the scientists present their areas of specialty and work together in response to the possibility of a widespread epidemic.
The meeting is supported by UTEP’s Border Biomedical Research Center and a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health
Disparities.
Disease border surveillance key to challenged HIV/AIDS
Strathdee et al 12 (the Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences, Harold Simon Professor and Chief of
the Division of Global Public Health in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San
Diego School of Medicine, “The Emerging HIV Epidemic on the Mexico-US Border: An International Case
Study Characterizing the Role of Epidemiology in Surveillance and Response”, June 22nd 2012,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3361703/)
Surveillance data plays a critical role in monitoring epidemiologic trends and programmatic
responses to infectious disease threats, both nationally and globally.
There is a long history in public health
disease control and prevention in which epidemiologic and surveillance data have informed policy and interventions to reduce or alter risk even
in the absence of knowing the underlying mechanisms of disease transmission.1 In 1983,
epidemiologic studies prior to the
isolation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) had already identified many risks factors for which
control measure policies were subsequently developed. 1,2 However, national and regional HIV/AIDS surveillance data
can sometimes mask dynamic sub-epidemics that vary by country, region, sex or HIV transmission group, especially when HIV incidence is
increasing in vulnerable populations that under-utilize HIV testing and treatment services. In many countries,
HIV/AIDS surveillance
data are limited to programmatic data from clinics testing antenatal women, those being screened
for sexually transmitted infections (STI), or routine HIV testing among military personnel. The
reliance on these types of sources, rather than HIV testing data drawn from community-based
populations, can lead to erroneous conclusions about country-level HIV epidemic trends and the
presumed impact of prevention interventions and policies. 3 Among the country-level HIV prevalence estimates across
the Americas, Mexico’s nationwide prevalence of 0.3% is among the lowest.
By 2007, there were an estimated 200,000
HIV-positive persons living in Mexico, and at the end of 2008, a total of 124,505 reported AIDS cases,
among whom the vast majority were attributed to homosexual/bisexual activity. Since the first AIDS
case was reported in Mexico in 1983 until 2007, the male:female AIDS case ratio dropped from 10:1
to 3:5.4 Trends in national HIV prevalence data by gender and risk group were similar to AIDS
incidence data , but among Mexico’s 32 states, Baja California –abutting California, USA-- has consistently had the highest cumulative
AIDS incidence, second only to Mexico’s federal district, and the corresponding rate in the border state of Chihuahua has remained above the
national average.5
In this case study, we contrast Mexico’s national and state-level HIV epidemic profile
with data drawn from cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies conducted in two northern
Mexican cities bordering the United States
(Tijuana in Baja California and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua).
We then discuss
how HIV/AIDS surveillance data initially perpetuated spurious assumptions about the HIV epidemic
profiles in these states and in Mexico overall , which hampered timely responses for targeting appropriate prevention and
treatment.
We show how epidemiologic data used in conjunction with qualitative data led to the
recognition that the HIV epidemic in the Mexico-US border region
had already become well established in specific
subgroups that had been presumed to be insignificant and isolated, many of whom were highly mobile. These data played a significant role in
stimulating calls for action from researchers, NGOs and state policy makers. Several successful outcomes included formal endorsement and
expansion of needle exchange programs as a critical component to a combined HIV prevention response and the creation of a nation-wide
mobile HIV prevention program targeting marginalized populations. We discuss this experience in an international context and provide lessons
learned to suggest ways in which other countries may benefit from how epidemiology played a key role in formulating policy for HIV prevention
efforts. This case study also highlights the benefits of integrating research with training in a binational context, which is critical for capacity
building and sustained policy responses in resource-limited settings.
Disease Surveillance Now
Health Surveillance now
Humble 13 [“International Data Sharing”; http://directorsblog.health.azdhs.gov/international-data-sharing/; Will Humble is the M.P.H.
Director Arizona Department of Health Services; October 8th, 2013] //duff
Arizona and Sonora have a long history of collaborating on many projects over the years. We long ago understood that disease
doesn’t stop at the
border. Arizona and Sonora were the 1st states along the U.S.-Mexico Border to share information on cross border cases in an organized way. Since 2008,
we’ve been sharing this information electronically with Sonora Secretaria de Salud epidemiologists via
our MEDSIS (Medical Electronic Disease Surveillance Intelligence System)- providing a secure, two-way communication
of real-time information so Arizona and Sonora can take action to prevent further disease spread. In October of 2012,
CDC brought all four border states together to pilot information sharing of bi-national case to include
the federal level of both countries, CDC Division of Global Migration and Quarantine and Mexico’s Dirección General de Epidemiología. At this
year’s Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists meeting, our experience provided support to successfully pass (by vote
of all state and territorial epidemiologists) a policy to add a binational variable to the National
Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS). Because of the long history of bi-national case sharing, Arizona and Sonora have
provided an example of best practices in North America. This regular sharing of information on bi-national cases helps to protect the
health of residents on both sides of the border. We just posted a report on bi-national tracking of infectious disease.
Congress is pushing bipartisan health surveillance legislation now - the aff blocks passage
BHSA 15 [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/1537/text; S.1537 - Border Health Security Act of 2015; 06/10/2015]
//duff
Congress makes the following findings: (1) The
United States-Mexico border is an interdependent and dynamic region of
more than 15,000,000 people with significant and unique public health challenges. (2) These challenges
include low rates of health insurance coverage, poor access to health care services, high
unemployment rates, low educational attainment, and high rates of dangerous diseases, such as
tuberculosis, diabetes, obesity, and other non-communicable diseases . (3) As the 2009 novel influenza A (H1N1)
diseases do not respect international boundaries , and a strong public health effort at and
along the borders is crucial to not only protect and improve the health of Americans but also to help
secure the country against threats to biosecurity and other emerging threats. (4) For 11 years, the United
States-Mexico Border Health Commission has served as a crucial binational institution to address
these unique and truly cross-border health issues. (5) More than 75 percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the United States
border. The 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome caused more than 250 illnesses in the
pandemic illustrated,
Greater Toronto Area, just 80 miles from New York.
SEC. 3. UNITED STATES-MEXICO BORDER HEALTH COMMISSION ACT
AMENDMENTS. The United States-Mexico Border Health Commission Act (22 U.S.C. 290n et seq.) is amended— (1) in section 3— (A) in paragraph (1), by striking “;
and” and inserting “;”; (B) in paragraph (2), by striking the period and inserting a semicolon; and (C) by adding at the end the following: “(3) to cooperate with the
Canada-United States Pan-Border Public Health Preparedness Council (referred to in this Act as the ‘Council’), as appropriate; and “(4) to serve as an independent
and objective body to both recommend and implement initiatives that solve border health issues.”; (2) in section 5— (A) in subsection (b), by striking “should be the
leader” and inserting “shall be the Chair”; and (B) by adding at the end the following: “(d) Providing Advice And Recommendations.—Members of the Commission
and the Council may at any time provide advice or recommendations to the Secretary, Congress, or any Member of Congress concerning issues that are considered
by the Commission or Council. Such advice or recommendations may be provided regardless of whether a request for such is made and regardless of whether the
member or individual is authorized to provide such advice or recommendations by the Commission or Council or any other Federal official.”; (3) by redesignating
section 8 as section 12; (4) by striking section 7 and inserting the following: “SEC. 7. BORDER HEALTH GRANTS. “(a) Eligible Entity Defined.—In this section, the term
‘eligible entity’ means a State, public institution of higher education, local government, Indian tribe, tribal organization, urban Indian organization, nonprofit health
organization, trauma center, critical access hospital or other hospital that serves rural or other vulnerable communities and populations, faith-based entity, or
community health center receiving assistance under section 330 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 254b), that is located in the United States-Mexico border
area or the United States-Canada border area. “(b) Authorization.—From
amounts appropriated under section 11, the
Secretary, in consultation with members of the Commission and Council and in coordination with the
Office of Global Affairs, shall award grants to eligible entities to address priorities and
recommendations outlined by the strategic plan and operational work plan of the Commission and the Council, as authorized under section 9, to improve
the health of United States-Mexico border area and United States-Canada border area residents. “(c) Application.—An eligible entity that desires a grant under
subsection (b) shall submit an application to the Secretary at such time, in such manner, and containing such information as the Secretary may require. “(d) Use
Of Funds.—An eligible entity that receives a grant under subsection (b) shall use the grant funds for any of the following:
“(1) Programs relating to any one or more of the following: “(A) Maternal and child health. “(B) Primary care and preventative
health. “(C) Infectious disease testing, monitoring, and surveillance. “(D) Public health and public health
infrastructure. “(E) Health promotion. “(F) Oral health. “(G) Behavioral and mental health. “(H) Substance
abuse prevention and harm reduction. “(I) Health conditions that have a high prevalence in the United
States-Mexico border area or United States-Canada border area. “(J) Medical and health services
research. “(K) Workforce training and development. “(L) Community health workers and promotoras. “(M) Health care infrastructure
problems in the United States-Mexico border area or United States-Canada border area (including planning and construction grants). “(N) Health disparities in the
United States-Mexico border area or United States-Canada border area. “(O) Environmental health. “(P) Health education. “(Q) Outreach and enrollment services
with respect to Federal programs (including programs authorized under titles XIX and XXI of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396 et seq. and 1397aa et seq.)). “(R)
Trauma care. “(S) Health research with an emphasis on infectious disease and pressing issues related to noncommunicable diseases. “(T) Epidemiology and health
research. “(U) Cross-border health surveillance coordinated with Mexican Health Authorities or Canadian Health Authorities. “(V) Obesity, particularly childhood
obesity. “(W) Crisis communication, domestic violence, health literacy, or cancer. “(X) Community-based participatory research on border health issues. “(Y)
Violence prevention. “(Z) Cross-border public health preparedness. “(2) Other programs determined appropriate by the Secretary. “(e)
Supplement, Not Supplant.—Amounts provided to an eligible entity awarded a grant under subsection (b) shall be used to supplement and not supplant other funds
available to the eligible entity to carry out the activities described in subsection (d). “SEC. 8. GRANTS
FOR EARLY WARNING INFECTIOUS
DISEASE SURVEILLANCE (EWIDS) IN THE BORDER AREA. “(a) Eligible Entity Defined.—In this section, the term ‘eligible entity’ means a State, local
government, Indian tribe, tribal organization, urban Indian organization, trauma center, regional trauma center coordinating entity, or public health entity. “(b)
Authorization.—From funds appropriated under section 11, the Secretary shall award grants for Early Warning Infectious Disease Surveillance (EWIDS) to eligible
entities for infectious disease surveillance activities in the United States-Mexico border area or United States-Canada border area. “(c) Application.—An eligible
entity that desires a grant under this section shall submit an application to the Secretary at such time, in such manner, and containing such information as the
Secretary may require. “(d) Uses Of Funds.—An eligible entity that receives a grant under subsection (b) shall use the grant funds, in coordination with State and
local all hazards programs, to— “(1) develop and implement infectious disease surveillance plans and networks and public health emergency and readiness
assessments and preparedness plans, and purchase items necessary for such plans; “(2) coordinate infectious disease surveillance planning and interjurisdictional
risk assessments in the region with appropriate United States-based agencies and organizations and appropriate authorities in Mexico or Canada; “(3) improve
infrastructure, including surge capacity, syndromic surveillance, and isolation/decontamination capacity, and policy preparedness, including for mutual assistance
and for the sharing of information and resources; “(4) improve laboratory capacity, in order to maintain and enhance capability and capacity to detect potential
infectious disease, whether naturally occurring or the result of terrorism; “(5) create
and maintain a health alert network, including
risk communication and information dissemination that is culturally competent and takes into
account the needs of at-risk populations, including individuals with disabilities; “(6) educate and train clinicians,
epidemiologists, laboratories, and emergency management personnel; “(7) implement electronic data and infrastructure inventory systems to coordinate the triage,
transportation, and treatment of multicasualty incident victims; “(8) provide
infectious disease testing in the United StatesMexico border area or United States-Canada border area; and “(9) carry out such other activities identified by the Secretary, members
of the Commission, members of the Council, State or local public health authorities, representatives of border health offices, or
authorities at the United States-Mexico or United States-Canada borders.
Unchecked diseases cause extinction- Put away your generic defense
Guterl 12 – [Fred, award-winning journalist and executive editor of Scientific American, worked for ten
years at Newsweek, has taught science at Princeton University, The Fate of the Species: Why the Human
Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, 1-2, Google Books, online
Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, bur avian influenza, or bird flu. It had been making
the rounds among birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called for the culling of thousands
of birds and put virologists and health workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasn't much of a threat to humans, scientists fretted over the
possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people caught the virus, but more than half of them died. What would happen if this bird flu
virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to spread from one person to another, through tiny droplets of saliva
in the air? One bad spin of
the genetic roulette wheel and a deadly new human pathogen would spread
across the globe in a matter of days . With a kill rate of 60 percent, such a pandemic would be devastating, to say the
least.¶ Scientists were worried, all right, but the object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain if such a supervirus
was even possible. To cause that kind of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The
more optimistically minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it
would lose its ability to kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the
pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go each season.¶ The optimists, we found out last fall, were
wrong. Two groups of
scientists working independently managed to create bird flu viruses in the lab that had that killer combination of
lethality and transmissibility among humans. They did it for the best reasons, of course—to find vaccines and medicines to treat
a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If we're lucky, the scientists will get there before
nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the genetic blueprints and turns this knowledge against us. ¶
Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We
have created the conditions for new viruses to flourish—
among pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a connected world of international trade and travel—and we've
gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant
presence on the planet, begun to multiply the risks to our own survival
2NC—Iran Deal DA
Link Wall
Border Links
McCain supports border surveillance and the current trend – their evidence
Tevizo 13 (Perla, border reporter at the Arizona Daily Star, “Drones: key tool to border security,”
Arizona Daily News, 6-13-2013, http://tucson.com/business/drones-key-tool-to-bordersecurity/article_9291e57b-bab5-5d78-b79b-dc7f01aacff5.html)//duff
The most commonly used drone, the Predator B, can fly about 20 hours without having to refuel, compared with a helicopter's average flight
time of just over two hours. With new technology such as VADER, Alles said the agency is getting more use out of the aircraft than before.
VADER, which stands for Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, was developed for the war in
Afghanistan. It lets agents track activity in real time and distinguishes humans from animals from an
altitude of 25,000 feet. Last year, CBP borrowed the radar from the military to test it in Arizona. U.S. Sen.
John McCain is among VADER's supporters. "It seems to me that's an incredible technology tool,"
McCain told Alles during a congressional hearing in April. "Don't you believe that VADER plus drones could be absolute vital tools in
attaining effective control of our border?" As lawmakers started to debate the immigration bill last week, McCain said the
government needed to use more technology such as drones and VADER to increase border security.
Alles would not comment on possible requirements of the immigration bill, saying his immediate goal is to get better use out of the drones he
has by training more personnel, flying the dones longer and attaching better surveillance equipment to the aircraft.
All elements of congress support border surveillance – past bills prove and even
progressive caucuses support it
Barry 10 [“Fallacies of High-Tech Fixes for Border Security”; Tom Barry; April 2010; writer for the
Center for International Policy; http://www.ciponline.org/images/uploads/1004_TBP.pdf] //duff
The massive outlays of DHS dollars for high-tech fixes, like the so-called virtual fence and the deployment of UAVs
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), have sparked little or no public opposition—in marked contrast, for example, to the surge of
opposition to the border fence from community groups, environmentalists, and immigrant-rights organizations. Environmental organizations
like the Sierra Club have positioned themselves on the side of aerial and electronic surveillance while opposing the border wall and the setting
aside of environmental impact statements in the name of border security. The organization’s Borderlands Campaign, for example, urged those
who opposed the border wall to support the “Border Security and Responsibility Act of 2009.” The “Border Security and Responsibility Act of
2009,” a bill introduced by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), “provides guidance to move toward a more sane and just border policy.” The bill calls for
the end of the construction of the border fence (authorized by the Security Border Fence Act of 2006) while advocating “giving priority to the
use of remote cameras, sensors… additional manpower, unmanned aerial vehicles, or other low impact border enforcement techniques.” The
“Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity” (CIR ASAP), introduced by Rep. Luis Guitierrez (D-Ill.), is widely
deemed, even by its advocates, as too left-of-center to be seriously considered by Congress. Yet
even this progressive bill, which
counts on the strong support of the Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, attempts to bolster
the security credentials of CIR advocacy with its backing of high-tech, immensely expensive and
unproven border-security strategies. A summary of the bill provided by Gutierrez’s office states that CIR ASAP “minimizes
wasteful spending by developing and studying comprehensive uses of advanced technologies, such as aerial and automated surveillance.” The
Gutierrez CIR bill proposes that DHS should develop “a comprehensive plan for the systematic surveillance of the international land and
maritime borders of the United States.” According
to this CIR bill, which is the only one that has been introduced,
DHS should take acts “to gain operational control of the international land borders of the United
States.” To do this, the DHS secretary should “give first priority to the use of remote cameras, sensors,
removal of nonnative vegetation, incorporation of natural barriers, additional manpower, unmanned
aerial vehicles, or other low impact border enforcement techniques.” What is more, CIR ASAP recommends that the
secretary of defense consider increasing “the availability and use of Department of Defense equipment, including unmanned aerial vehicles,
tethered aerostat radars, and other surveillance equipment, to assist the Secretary in carrying out surveillance activities conducted at or near
the international land borders.”
There is a massive drone lobby in congress that supports border surveillance
Barry 10 [“Fallacies of High-Tech Fixes for Border Security”; Tom Barry; April 2010; writer for the
Center for International Policy; http://www.ciponline.org/images/uploads/1004_TBP.pdf] //duff
Since the start of DHS’s drone program, it has counted on the strong support of the Congressional UAV
Caucus, whose mission is to “educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of UAVs, actively
support further development and acquisition of more capable UAVs, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on UAV
use and safety.” Congressional representatives in this 33-member caucus include Howard “Buck” McKeon, Duncan Hunter, Silvestre Reyes, Alan
Mollohan, Jerry Lewis, and Brian Bilbray. Representative McKeon, the Republican congressman who represents the San Diego-area district that
is home to Predator manufacturer General Atomics, is the leading voice of the new congressional caucus and a regular beneficiary of companysponsored international trips to promote UAVs. Caucus members say they are working with “the military, industry, NASA, DHS, and FAA to seek
fair and equitable solutions to the challenges created by UAV operations in the U.S. national air space,” as well as supporting “policies and
budgets that promote a larger, more robust national security UAV capability.” Congressional
UAV proponents are not
working alone. The newly created industry association intended to parallel the UAV Caucus, the
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Systems Association (UAVSI), has its own congressional advocacy
committee and sponsors events. In close cooperation with members of the Congressional UAV Caucus, UAVSI sponsors an annual
UAVSI Action Day on Capitol Hill, and congressional tours of UAV manufacturing facilities. In addition the UAV National Industry Team (UNITE)
formed in 2002 to promote expanded UAV use. Its leading members are General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
The principal market for UAVs is the military. Drone purchases accounted for more than one-third of the Air Force’s proposed 2010 aircraft
budget. While the Predators have thus far been favored by DoD and DHS, other military contractors, notably Northrop Grumman and Lockheed
Martin, are seeking to make more inroads into this booming market with its own UAVs. Congress has
passed a flurry of laws
and budget authorizations to foster UAVs. In 2003, Congress directed DHS to study the feasibility of using UAVs, and has
repeated this directive in numerous instances since then. The 2003 DoD Authorization Act (P.L. 108-136) required the president to issue a
report “on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for support of homeland security missions.” As part of the 2007 appropriations bill, Congress
urged DHS to work with the FAA to implement a pilot program that would use UAVs for surveillance
on the northern border. Along the southern border, politicians such as Texas Governor Rick Perry and
congressional members such as Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) and Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) are increasingly
vocal about the need for UAV surveillance, mirrored on the northern border by North Dakota’s Democratic senators Byron
Dorgan and Kent Conrad.
Drones Links
Domestic drone regulation unpopular- Angers influential lobbyists
Morgan and Seetharaman 2/23 (David Morgan and Deepa Seetharaman: Journalists for Reuters,
““Industry lobbyists take aim at proposed FAA drone rules,” 2/23/15,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/24/us-usa-drones-lobbying-idUSKBN0LS04R20150224,
Accessed: 7/15/15, RRR)
Businesses hoping to capitalize on the commercial potential of drones are preparing to push back
against proposed regulations that would strictly limit how the aircraft can be used.¶ During a 60-day public comment period on the
rules, lobbyists representing a range of industries, from Internet giants Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc to aerospace firms and the news media,
say they will try to convince regulators that cutting-edge technologies make some of the limitations proposed last week by the Federal Aviation
Administration unnecessary.¶ Spending
on lobbying by special interests that list drones as an issue surged from
$20,000 in 2001 to $35 million in 2011 to more than $186 million in 2014, according to the nonpartisan Center for
Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying activity. And the proposed rules provide a new focus of lobbying efforts.¶ If approved as written, the
new FAA rules would lift the current near-ban on flying drones for commercial purposes, but its restrictions would make many business
applications, such as package delivery, unfeasible.¶ Among other constraints, the proposed rules would limit commercial drones to an altitude of
500 feet, allow flights only during daytime hours and require operators to keep the aircraft in their sights at all times. Drones could not be flown
near airports or directly over humans. Officials say these precautions are needed for safety.¶ But drone makers and other firms with a stake in
unmanned aircraft technology say they are already working on features that would allow drones to "sense and avoid" obstacles including other
aircraft and prevent link disruptions that could cause a drone to lose contact with ground operations.¶ For example, Amazon.com is developing
autonomous drones that would navigate via GPS and use redundant safety mechanisms and sensor arrays to avoid accidents as part of a "Prime
Air" drone delivery service it hopes to launch.¶ Industry representatives say they will use the 60-day comment period to try to convince
regulators that breakthrough safety features could make drone flights safe and dependable.¶ "This is the chance for all the parties who think the
FAA got it wrong to come forward and say why," said Jack Schenendorf, a former House Transportation Committee staff member who now works
for law firm Covington & Burling.¶ The current ban on most commercial drone flights will stay in place until the FAA finalizes its proposed rules -which could take anywhere from nine months to three years. During that period, companies can continue to apply for exemptions to use drones
under strict rules. But the FAA has so far granted only 28 of more than 325 exemption requests, according to government documents.¶ Amazon,
which applied for an exemption to allow outdoor testing at its own U.S. facilities last summer, says it has not yet received approval from the
agency. It has been testing a number of drone configurations at facilities in Washington state, Britain and Israel. But only in the Britain has the
company been able to conduct outdoor tests that it says are vital to its goal of developing a prototype that can be demonstrated to the FAA.¶
Meanwhile, a coalition of news media companies including NBC, the New York Times and Thomson Reuters hopes to test news-gathering drones
in coming months at an FAA site in Virginia.¶ Separate
forecasts by government and industry officials expect
businesses to invest nearly $90 billion in drones worldwide over the next 10 years, as the technology
takes root in hundreds of markets that now rely on manned flights or ground operations for activities
ranging from pipeline inspections to aerial photography.¶ The number of companies and groups
involved in drone lobbying now exceeds 50. Senate documents show a broad range of parties from high-tech and aerospace
manufacturers to electric utilities, realtors, filmmakers, universities, labor unions, state governments and broadcasters.¶ Business
interests have a potentially powerful lever in Congress , which must reauthorize the FAA’s funding and regulatory
direction by the end of September. That process allows lawmakers to direct regulatory agencies to take specific actions. For example, the last
reauthorization in 2012 directed the FAA to pursue rulemaking on drones.¶ Some
influential allies in Congress have already
begun questioning the proposed rules. U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer said last week the FAA's "line of sight" rule appears to be
a "concerning limitation on commercial usage, and this proposed rule should be modified."
Lack of experience with domestic drones inevitably draws skepticism to the plan- Drones
also gaining support rapidly
Curry 13 (Tom Curry: National affairs writer for NBC News, “Lawmakers voice concerns on drone
privacy questions”, NBC News, 3/20/13, http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/20/17389193lawmakers-voice-concerns-on-drone-privacy-questions?lite, Accessed: 7/15/15, RRR)
It was very clear Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on drones that senators in both parties are worried about
the threat to Americans’ privacy posed by the personal, commercial and law enforcement use of drones, or unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs). Senators expressed deep concerns about the spreading use of a technology that is rapidly evolving and comes at a
relatively affordable price tag. But
it was equally clear that they’ve only just begun to grasp the dimensions of
the drone controversy, and are very far from being decided on whether a federal law is need to
regulate the use of drones inside the United States -- much less what legislative approach to use. Last
year, Congress gave the Federal Aviation Administration until 2015 to devise rules to integrate drones into the national airspace system. The
agency predicted last year that 30,000 drones will be traveling the skies above America in the next 20 years. To some degree senators at
Wednesday’s hearing were still caught up in marveling at the gee-whiz, technological capabilities of UAVs. “How small can these things get?”
asked Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. A drone as small as a hummingbird is being developed, replied a witness at the hearing, Amie Stepanovich,
director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “The technology is increasing at an
exponentially rapid rate.” “Presumably at some point you could have one the size of a mosquito that has a battery that operates for weeks and
you could have the mosquito following you around and not be aware of it,” said Franken. “God help us if an adolescent boy gets hold of one of
these.” One witness at Wednesday’s hearing, Benjamin Miller of the Mesa County, Colo., sheriff’s office, who was representing the Airborne
Law Enforcement Association, brought a small two-pound UAV with him to the hearing and assured committee members that his department
was using its UAVs for traditional law enforcement functions. His office used a UAV last May to search for a missing woman, saving much time
by searching large areas at low cost. And
cost is a major factor in domestic law enforcement drone use: “drones
drive down the cost of aerial surveillance to worrisome levels,” said University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, adding
that he could imagine drones flying around with chemical sensors in order to detect drug trafficking. Miller estimated that “unmanned
aircraft can complete 30 percent of the missions of manned aircraft for two percent of the cost.” He
assured Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont that domestic law enforcement agencies would “absolutely not” seek to
arm UAVs with lethal weapons. Miller also testified that hours and hours of tracking a criminal suspect was “not affordable” and that need for
“persistent surveillance” – whether using an airplane or a drone – was “relatively low.” But EPIC’s Stepanovich told Leahy “persistent
surveillance” was the greatest threat from domestic use of drones. Some senators’ questions reflected a fear of an Orwellian Big Brother
monitoring Americans.