Just two months after Homeland Security head honcho Michael Chertoff extolled the wonderful test project of the Virtual Border Fence prototype near Tucson, Arizona. The project has been scrapped.
The fence consisted of 9 towers constructed along a 28 mile length of the Arizona/Mexico boarder. Armed with all sorts of exotic gadgetry this virtual fence was supposed to alert immigration officials of people crossing the border. The $20 million prototype appears to have been an abject failure.
One would think that having frittered away $20 mil of the $860 mil originally awarded the government might want to reconsider the Boeing contract. I know I would. Not so though, Boeing are instead going to try again. They are going to build some new towers, and put better cameras and radar systems on them. No doubt it will be a $50 million fiasco in round two. One can only assume that the Virtual Fence contact is the government’s way of keeping Boeing sweet following the air tanker fiasco!
Why was it a failure? Apparently Boeing did not seek the input of the border agents, and instead developed the system in isolation. The end result is a system that is unusable at the field level.
AP has an interesting article, that contains the following:
A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area, the GAO reported.
Maybe the Fed’s would be better off giving Lou Dobbs a few million dollars, and he could whip the lunatic fringe into a vigilante frenzy to patrol the border instead. Who knows, with the right sort of incentive he might take the mission on full time, and we would not have to put up with the insufferable boor on our TV screens.
Simon Barrett
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3 users commented in " Immigration Virtual Fence, A Very Real Headache For Boeing "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback“Maybe the Fed’s would be better off giving Lou Dobbs a few million dollars, and he could whip the lunatic fringe into a vigilante frenzy”
Seems to me you and Lou are on the same side of the fence on this one: the U.S. government is inept and unwilling to enforce our borders. Meanwhile we are picking up the tab for millions of peasants who are rapidly forming the next great underclass of America.
Immigration has direct massive negative consequences on today’s and yesterdays economy.
Are you now living from paycheck to paycheck, wondering how your going to feed your family, making your mortgage payment.
You need to be aware of how much Uncle Sam is secretly skimming off your taxes and diverting into government freebies
for immigrants and illegal foreign nationals.
This is a document that should disturb you, because the globalist open border, free traders do not want you to see it. This is an thoroughly researched analysis of immigration costs, that the hierarchy of the U.S. government and special interests groups do not want you to read.
Now you can read the disturbing details in the new 70-page document called “The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration” by Edwin S. Rubenstein (www.eagleforum.org/sources). A Manhattan Institute adjunct academic with a mile-long scholarly resume, he has been doing financial analysis ever since he directed the studies of government waste for the Grace Commission of 1984.
Did you know that taxpayers are supporting immigrants to the tune of $9.000 each. That means your subsidizing each family of four with $36.000.
More than 37 million immigrants in the United States, both legal and illegal, cost the federal government more than $346 billion last year, twice as much as the nation’s fiscal deficit, according to a report released yesterday. The loss estimates, the report said, included $100 billion in federal taxes lost “from the reduction of native incomes caused by immigrant workers.” He also stated that even programs that are not usually associated with immigration, he said, have actually added financial burdens to the taxpayers.
Our students are short-changed in overcrowded classrooms, because teachers must spend more time with illegal immigrant children.
The financial burden immigrants inflict on education starts with the 3.8 million K-12 students enrolled in more-expensive classes for the non-English-speaking. When we add up the costs of hiring specialized teachers, training regular teachers, student identification and assessment, and administration costs, the total amounts to an estimated $1,030 per pupil, or $3.9 billion. Of the 48.4 million public school children, pre-K through 12th grade, 9.2 million or 19 percent are immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the next few years, immigration will account for almost all the increase in public school spending.
Look at the $1.5 billion cost of incarcerating 267,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons. That’s not the worst of it; prison capacity is limited, so 80,000 to 100,000 other criminal aliens have been prematurely released to prowl our streets. Then their is the expenditure to hunt down 676,847 fugitive warrants by (ICE) and special agents. Actual cost for incarcerating illegal foreign nationals since 2001, over $1,407.798.965 dollars.
The Manhattan Institute report includes all sorts of costs that pundits conveniently ignore, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. EITC gives an average cash payment of $1,700 per year to 25 percent of immigrant households.
The emergency medical treatment given ‘gratis’ to illegal immigrants is another enormous cost, causing many border state hospitals and emergency rooms to close. Emergency means any complaint from morning sickness to athlete’s foot, gunshot wounds to AIDS.Even after some restrictions were imposed in 1996, 24.2 percent of immigrant households still receive Medicaid, whereas the figure for native-born Americans is 14.8 percent.The stiudy calculates that Hispanics account for 19.2 percent of Medicaid enrollment, while they are 13.7 percent of the U.S. population.
This is just the tip of the iceberg about these outrageous costs.
Please go to (www.eagleforum.org/sources) and know what your taxes are paying for…?
A cynic might suspect that the virtual border was a hi-tech fraud to satisfy an angry population while maintaining the status quo.
By the way, the Los Angeles Times had an excellent frontpage article on Monday on the acute shortage of trained specialists, from nursing to engineering, in Los Angeles and California. Of course, the shortage has lead to a lowering of standards - including making the ability to speak English evidently optional!
THe failure of our public schools to adequately train Americans to become nurses, engineers, and safety inspectors remains another national scandal. Unfortunately, we’ve become dependent on foreign born and trained labor. We should, therefore, at least raise the level of English instruction to prevent Los Angeles from becoming a modern Babel.
Let’s make sure all immigrants learn English so they can bring their intelligence, creativity, and ambition into the American workforce.
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