BlackNotBlack.com

Texas Hold ’em Hostage

I have to say, non-existent readers, that when I conceived my little tagline “becoming a citizen of the world” it was my intention to post about international events and write silly travel stories, all from a black point of view and with an emphasis on places I’ve visited or lived. But Stateside news items have been incomparably bizarre of late, so while I promise to discuss the preferred technique for drinking absinthe, the best city in which to buy bear liver paté, and everything you need to know to survive Rio's carnival, all those subjects come later. Today we're going to Texas.

Yee-Haw!

Lone star governor Rick Perry has launched a unique anti-illegal immigration program which consists of installing numerous webcams along the Texas/Mexico border, all linked to an interactive website which ordinary citizens can access in order to act as virtual border agents. From a private home any concerned civilian can log into texasborderwatch.com, sign up, access a webcam feed, and keep a vigilant eye peeled for sneaky migrants. In the event of suspicious activity they can e-mail the border patrol in Austin, at which point agents log and possibly investigate the sighting. This program is slated to cost approximately five million dollars.

The easiest way to get people to shut down their logic circuits is by appealing to their racial fears. It’s a time-honored technique perfected by a bunch of dead guys with umlauts over their names. While a plan to stem the tide of illegal immigration through south Texas is certainly within Rick Perry’s scope of duties as governor, I suspect that if people weren’t gripped by ethnic panic they’d wonder—as I do—how in the hell a program to install approximately one hundred webcams costs five million dollars. The entire website was built for $100,000 by Tactical Resource Gear Emergency Management Solutions of Plano, TX. Webcams to feed the site aren’t expensive. Even solar powered, night-vision equipped cams are less than $1,500. Servers, software, and techs to maintain the system shouldn’t cost even half a million dollars, let alone five. Where is the rest of this money going?

I believe it's possible Texas voters are being fleeced, and all the while Rick Perry gets to posture as if he’s doing something concrete about illegal immigration. Here’s the most concrete thing Texans can do: demand an itemized accounting of where the five million dollars is going. Then, with the list of service providers in hand, see how many of those businesses are owned, chaired or operated by Perry’s poker buddies. They might find that this hopeless scheme was hatched during a late-night game of Texas Hold ’em, and what’s really being held (hostage) is their tax money.

In addition to looking, walking and quacking like a boondoggle, Perry’s plan is a textbook example of the political tenet: Show the public you’re doing something even if what you’re doing is a farce. It’s very much like confiscating nail clippers before commercial airline flights. Nail clippers possess less potential for harm than a spiked heel or a good left jab, but banning them from flights is supposed to show travelers that nothing is too small to escape the notice of airline security. Here we have the same illusion in effect. Rick Perry is trying to dazzle south Texas taxpayers with the idea of virtual border security even as illegal immigrants continue to find the physical border wide open.

But I shouldn’t label Perry’s webcam flimflam a political fake without at least attempting to consider it as if its stated goals are real, so let’s examine it as a serious attempt to plug up the border. As such, the obvious technical flaw is that the smugglers who guide illegal immigrants—they are called coyotes in the American press but refer to themselves as polleros—can simply pull up the web feed on their own computers and map which areas to avoid. The secondary but no less serious flaw is that opponents to the plan can submit false sightings. It leaves the border patrol vulnerable to manipulation by both polleros and political enemies. The border patrol, incidentally, are also part of the U.S. drug interdiction effort, which means they may find themselves subject to the whims of drug lords as well.

The whole scheme brings to mind an occasion when I attended a technological seminar devoted to combating electronic piracy. The keynote speaker said something that always stuck with me: "When people construct a security system they usually think that building something 90 percent effective stops 90 percent of criminals. That’s like building a house and putting bars on every door and window except the one in the back leading to the basement. The bars don’t stop 90 percent of criminals—90 percent of criminals find the basement window and go through that." Rick Perry’s plan won't stop five million dollars worth of illegal immigration. It will at best redirect it.

I accessed texasborderwatch.com myself and, after downloading software to make it viewable, had a peek at the video feeds. I couldn't capture the images (or maybe I was too lazy to do it) so pictured in this post are samples from punkassblog.com, but they're accurate representations of what I saw. If You Tube looked this bad it would never have sold for a billion and a half dollars. When I finally did see something a thought came to mind: Am I seeing illegal immigrants or people out there for another reason? The website has a link answering the question of what, exactly, to report. Their explanation is about as clear as Rio Grande floodwater. The idea of possibly e-mailing a false report brought up the question of who would filter these out, and how. It also made me wonder how they would determine an accidental false report from an intentional one. Intentionally falsifying a report to law enforcement is a crime, but who, exactly, is going to come for me and are they willing to chase me down in, say, Mexico City or Amsterdam?

Truly, I understand the concerns Texans have about illegal immigration. A version of their concern exists from Sweden to Germany to Australia. More than a dozen trips through Texas have taught me exactly how annoyed folks there get when strangers troop through their ranchland. Can you blame them? Conversely, numerous stints in Mexico have likewise taught me how desperately illegal immigrants crave a better life for themselves and their families. Nothing will deter them in their quest for what many say—and I agree—is a basic human right. Would anything deter you? I think progress on the issue can only be made when the debate is reframed in two ways—first, so that it focuses on illegal employers rather than illegal immigrants, and second, so that it focuses on free trade policies that drive Mexican wages down below a liveable standard. But I think the day when most people agree with me is a long way off—panic has shut down brains all along the Texas border, and they've accepted a non-solution from an opportunistic politician.

Which brings another question to mind. If webcams only serve to warn traffickers and drug dealers which areas to avoid, perhaps what Texans should really investigate is whether most of the webcams are slated to be installed on the property of men who contributed to Rick Perry’s war chest.

Just a thought.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 2:31 PM