As much as people hate the idea of a wall, and the entire concept has become politicized, it would make that process a lot easier, but the truth is that if you're going to monitor a border and prevent people from illegally crossing it, that will involve humans having to drive/fly out to wherever there are people are crossing in order to turn them away or arrest/process/deport them.
Will the border patrol get there in, say, 20 minutes? And we have cameras covering all the land within 20 minutes of the border, so we don't lose them in that time?
More people on the ground does cost money, but the good news is that those government jobs would be a real boon for people living near the border.
Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is).
Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
Will nobody acknowledge how ridiculous a concept absolute security of a border is? Nobody would want what this would actual look like—extremely violent and expensive with little benefit to anyone.
What do you think the ideal solution should look like? Keep in mind that you'll have to defend against or allow into the country economic migrants looking for higher wages, millions of truly desperate climate refugees who don't have homes to go back to, as well as terrorists and criminals.
Absolute border security - it is literally impossible by land/sea/air/tunnel to cross into the US territory from Mexico without rapid detection and response.
...
Open border - the US does not impede general traffic from Mexico, bringing certain goods remains illegal but enforcement of this is limited to additional penalties after apprehension.
We are pretty far from both of those right now. I don't think the person you initially replied to was arguing for an open border. But surely it's not an ideal use of resources to stop all of these border based crimes in real time?
Most people are not crossing illegally. Those that do are going to have to actively evade those consequences as long as they continue an unpermitted stay. How much of our GDP should we spend to move "up" that spectrum? What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do we face?
Just ask any city that has had to deal with a massive unexpected influx of people. Try NYC for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social services, housing, they all depend on planning for funding and to keep pace with population to avoid being overrun. Things are bad enough right now with the massive numbers of economic migrants coming into the country, but once there are literal billions of climate refugees things will be much worse unless we are prepared.
Now is the time to invest in the regulation of immigration and defense of our borders so that we can safely accommodate as many of the people climate change displaces as we can. We also need to be thinking about what climate change will do to populations within the US.
See for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/clim...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-america-3-millio...
If you think it isn't worth the investment, even in low cost expenses like cameras, I can only imagine you aren't living near the boarder or aren't considering the refugee crisis that is coming.
But there's plenty of America that isn't NYC.
Furthermore, Eric Adams is... ugh. How do I put it? The Wikipedia article on him has an above-the-fold mention of him doing community work with Nation of Islam[0], as an NYPD cop. He got elected because NY liberals would vote for Trump if he had a D next to his name. Furthermore, federal investigations have revealed he's a foreign agent of Turkiye and Erdogan, up to and including denying the Armenian Genocide[1]. He's hilariously incompetent and malicious at the same time.
[0] I mentioned this on a Discord call with a friend, who responded, "OH MY GOD, HE'S INTO THE BLITLER SHIT?"
[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/10/04/eric-adams-brooklyn-turki...
Speaking of Hitler, denying the Armenian Genocide is a thing Literally Hitler Literally Joked About
I mean, yeah, places like NYC and Chicago genuinely do have some really messed up situations, but almost any large city would become quickly overwhelmed when a bunch of people unexpectedly show up needing help, smaller cities don't stand a chance.
Almost nobody is arguing for absolute open borders or absolute closed borders.
The relevant border policies inside the EU are literally called open borders. I don’t know what would you call open borders if not what we have between EU countries.
> interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going over the border for a holiday are very different from the situation we have with our southern border
This is undeniable.
On the other hand, EU external immigration is extremely controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-right that's polling extremely well, and the liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by basically copypasting their entire external immigration playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration debate boil down to "do we just turn away all asylum seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don't like too?"
The reason why this happened is that the EU suuuuucks at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that, like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those that didn't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US at least has family migration, which means we've spent the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience the EU's member states lack.
[0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and illegally) far-right biker gangs
Yes, absolutely.
Talking about "defending" your country from economic migrants is like "defending" your country from having a strong economy.
Meanwhile, border security does little to prevent actual criminals from entering your country, nor does it help with the ones already there.
for instance, face recognition works, especially if we are tolerant of a very small % of false positives.
Facial-recognition scan plus rudimentary SIGINT to identify any e.g. cell phones or devices broadcasting a MAC address. I don't like it, less because of what it means at the border and more in that it requires, for step two, doing the same surveillance across the country. But it's not unsolveable. We just don't particularly have consensus it should be solved.
I think that is going to change as increasingly people see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked immigration. I fear that most people won't be personally impacted until the worst of it hits (due to climate change) and by then it'll be too late to make the sensible preparations needed to offset the coming refugee crisis.
I'm not a fan of domestic surveillance either, and hopefully we can place limits on its use internally to minimize the impacts to citizens within the US.
Doubtful. Wealthy communities profit from the wage disparity and can afford to insulate themselves from the problem. And the voters most animated by this remain hyper-responsive to performative solutions.
That way you can move your enforcement crews to where most people enter. That won't catch all, of course, but should be more performant than guessing.
How would you propose to respond to detections, if the cameras all worked?