The fact that the boarder is huge does not mean that monitoring it is not necessary or that it is impossible. The fact that tunnels exist doesn't either. We have the technology to detect tunnels and tunneling. The fact that people sneak past at busy check points doesn't make the situation not worth trying to address.

Every area where a person could cross can and should be monitored. Walls, cameras, drones, satellites, sensors, and guards are all valid tools for border protection. The question just comes down to where and how they are deployed and maintained.

> The bigger question though is whether other approaches besides just trying to catch and stop people could be better.

No one so far has managed to come up with an anything better. Have you?

I’ve always thought the real answer was to stop the businesses from hiring people. Make an actually useful national ID system that employers can use to identify if someone is allowed to work in the US, and then come down like the hammer of god on anyone found to be employing people under the table.

People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the opportunity for people who enter without permission, and they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with more than just border crossings.

Yes, you could stop it at the point of demand. I remember AZ implemented eVerify or some such, don’t know what effect or loopholes it had. In Texas:

  Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...

I agree that that would stop a lot of the people crossing illegally today. It's a great idea! I wouldn't help with people crossing for criminal activity and it ignores the looming threat of billions of climate refugees coming because their survival depends on gaining entrance into another country.

That’s Canada’s approach and it is super effective. But when you look at who those employers are in the USA, say hotels, farms, construction companies, etc… people who are basically stereotypical rich Republicans (and even a former president/presidential candidate), it makes sense that this solution will never be proposed here. It also explains why only ineffectual solutions are proposed, it isn’t meant to be solved as neither side really wants it to be solved.

There is actually a large volume of research on what would work better than walls and surveillance systems. Scaremongering politicians don’t care to mention it.

The number one observation is that ports of entries are the largest area for illegal entry and violence and drug smuggling. Expediting bureaucracy there and improving the staffing of these areas would be far more effective than cameras watching the desert or god forbid some idiot’s delusion of “walls”

I’m not even arguing the politics of this. Focus the efforts on areas that are actual sources of problems. Stop appealing to idiots who want imagery of guns and fortifications. That’s not effective operations. The southern border patrol is underfunded. Adding more people to help manage the hotspots is more effective than cameras in cold spots.

I had a great-grandfather that was sent along the Southern border to try to map it — he was a surveyor. A lot of times he'd be at the top of a canyon, and the next place to drop the pin would be at the bottom. He'd just chuck the pin into the canyon and mark the point as "passable by neither man nor mule".

People who've never visited the border — especially in the western bits of it — have very little idea how absolutely inhospitable it is.

The good news is that there aren't a lot of illegal crossings to worry about at those absolutely inhospitable "passable by neither man nor mule" locations. That means that they can be electronically monitored but otherwise more or less left alone while the focus can be on those areas where people absolutely can and regularly do cross.

Or they could be ignored entirely and resources could be diverted into more effective measures

Do you see the nonsense of your own argument? You’re advocating for surveillance installations into a place that you think is easily ignored

I think passive surveillance with cameras in areas that are vulnerable to crossings but far less likely than other areas where we might want a stronger presence is extremely reasonable.

Without them you have massive blind spots which can be taken advantage of as soon as people realize that attempting illegal entry through the easier areas which are being monitored is likely to result in failure but there are locations which aren't being monitored in any way. The expected response to making it harder for people to cross illegally in one area is that they will try another place to do it.

Keeping an eye on those areas in the most cost effective way possible is the ideal. Keep in mind that the people illegally crossing today are mostly looking for higher paying work and citizenship for their children. Still they've already demonstrated that they can be very determined. The people crossing illegally tomorrow will be much more desperate and looking to survive. Intentionally leaving yourself blind to huge areas to save a few bucks on cameras is basically setting out a welcome mat.

The welcome mat is not the lack of cameras on a barren deathscape of desert.

The welcome mat is the understaffed border control ports of entry where the majority of problems arise.

Cameras in the desert address only the uninformed fantasy of how illegal immigration works.

I'd agree that the lack of adequate enforcement at ports of entry is a major part of the problem and it would be good to correct that as well.

This is a bigger part of the answer than most realize.

The border is some of the most rugged and remote terrain on Earth. A lot (most?) of it is in country not well served by paved roads, cell service, electricity, etc. Even if you could have some sort of magic sensor network that alerted you with perfect accuracy every time someone crossed the border, the logistics of responding to every single crossing are incredibly hard. There are plenty of sections where there isn't even a road on the border.

How are you going to respond to a border crossing alert 10+ miles from the nearest agent, in terrain where it will take hours to get there by land?

By staffing agents closer than 10+ miles, building out the necessary infrastructure, and not waiting until after someone crosses the border to respond and head out in that direction.

It's wild that packs of migrants can travel over desert wastelands on foot and swim across rivers to cross over the border but it's seen as impossible to get a border control officer to them when we've got access to trucks, helicopters, drones, sensors, and all the advanced technology we could ever want at our disposal.

You keep saying to just do it, but it is clear that you don’t understand the reality of that environment. Have you been out to the remote parts of Arizona, Texas or New Mexico? I’ve spent a lot of time in that country and it is not for the faint of heart. Hikers and backcountry people go out there and get lost. SAR with helicopters, drones, horses, ATVs and a subject that WANTS to be found fail all the time. It can take years to find a body in an area with a 5 square mile radius.

Border patrol already has tons of access to all of the things you listed, and they can’t come close to keeping up. That’s because the task is incredibly difficult.

The solution you are describing requires tens of thousands of miles of additional access roads, hundreds of guard posts, electricity and plumbing for that, thousands of staff willing to live in remote places or commute for hours. And that’s just for the people to watch the border. Add in vehicles for all of them, thousands of sensor stations, monitoring facilities, an entire Air Force of helicopters. Realistically, you are looking at something that is going to look a lot like the logistics for the war in Afganistan. And with about the same expenses and chance of success.

It’s a bit like saying that going to the moon is as easy as sending a rocket up there.

I mean, yeah, securing a border is difficult and expensive work and we've so far had the luxury of leaving most of it entirely unsecured, but the situation has changed and the billions of climate refugees, along with the growing masses of economic migrants means that leaving the border neglected the way we have is no longer reasonable.

Major cities, with far more resources than most, like Chicago, NYC, Minneapolis, and Denver are already overwhelmed to the point of crisis just from a (relatively) small number of economic migrants and asylum seekers

See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-cope-4...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/white-house-chicago-...

https://www.startribune.com/migrants-fill-third-of-hennepin-...

These cities can't accommodate the levels they have now. How are they, or any city, going to handle an unregulated influx of migrants orders of magnitude greater in the near future?

I understand that the task is incredibly difficult. It's also critically important. It's such a massive project that the effort needs to be started quickly. Border patrol is currently underfunded, understaffed, poorly trained, ill-equipped, and terribly managed. We're starting from a very bad position, and we don't have a lot of time. What's worse is that a large part of the country is far enough away from the problems caused by the current migrant crisis and are unaware of what climate change will mean in terms of the migration of people within the US or the influx of climate refugees so they don't see securing the border or unregulated migration as a concern. The very concept of regulating immigration has become over-politicized. The short term benefits of sustaining an easily exploitable underclass of non-citizens to be used essentially as slave labor makes keeping things they way they are now very popular with the corporations who buy off our representatives. Only after cities are overwhelmed do they start asking for the federal government to do something about the problem.

We can secure our borders, properly regulate immigration and prepare our country for what's coming now, which could allow us to accommodate as many climate refugees as we can without overwhelming our cities and further destroying our environment or we can allow ourselves to be increasingly overwhelmed by the unchecked stream of migrants coming into the country every day until we're eventually blindsided by the climate refugees and powerless to stop them from surging in uncontrolled.