New technologies developed to deal with growing illegal migration

New technologies developed to deal with growing illegal migration

Published 17 June 2015

 

Mass migration driven by climate change is pushing the global demand for border security solutions. It is not just that climate change displaces people through floods, storms, and rising sea levels; it also displaces them through scarcity of food and water, and by the conflicts that are in turn sparked by scarcity and migration. Companies specializing in border solutions are developing new technologies to help border agents track and identify illegal migrants.

During April’s Defense, National Security, and Climate Change Symposium in Washington, D.C., Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project think tank, discussed “conflict and climate change” with representatives from homeland and national security agencies as well as industry representatives from defense contractors. A few months before the symposium, the Obama administration issued a warning that the warming of the planet is “an urgent and growing threat to our national security.”
Much of the conversation about climate change in national security and defense circles have revolved around bulking up military and defense infrastructure at home and abroad to combat the effects of climate change. The U.S. Army’s “Net Zero” initiative aims to make its U.S. bases water-and-energy-independent through green technology. The army is also assessing the vulnerability of its roughly 7,000 overseas bases to climate change.
Migration is one result of climate change which will, and has already, led to conflict and war. A drought of “unparalleled length and severity” in Syria in the mid- 2000s, Cheney explained, led to the mass internal migration of about 1.5 million Syrians from rural to urban areas, such as Damascus, “where they had no jobs, no food — that’s what started and fomented the civil war.”
Today, Syrian refugees are flooding into Europe.
“We know for a fact that (climate change) is already driving internal and cross-border migration,” Cheney said. Bangladesh, considered the “ground zero” of global warming, is expected to see rising sea levels that could displace fifteen million people by 2050. Environmentalist Norman Myers has projected that there could be as many as 200 million “climate refugees” by mid-century. The desertification in the borderlands between Chad and Nigeria “has caused a lot of migration,” and Boko Haram has “taken advantage of that,” Cheney added.
Mass migration driven by climate change is pushing the global demand for border security solutions. In These Times notes that it is not just that climate change displaces people through floods, storms, and rising sea levels; it also displaces them through scarcity of food and water, and by the conflicts that are in turn sparked by scarcity and migration.
Sociologist Christian Parenti calls this “collision” of political, economic, and ecological disasters the “catastrophic convergence.” “One of the important drivers of strife,” Cheney noted, is “high prices and drought.” The influx of Central American migrants into the United States via the southern U.S. border last summer was partly due to severe droughts in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, which caused massive crop failures.
Companies specializing in border solutions are developing new technologies to help border agents track and identify illegal migrants and contrabands. The Democratic Republic of Congo uses American Science and Engineering’s “Z Backscatter Van” (ZBV), a cargo and vehicle screening system, to detect tropical wood that is illegally logged and smuggled out of the country. The X-ray-based technology is the top-selling cargo and vehicle screening system in the world, capable of detecting drugs, explosives, and other organic threats. At the ninth annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix this past April, more than 100 vendors displayed their latest border security solutions to representatives of both U.S. and foreign border agencies. Engineering company Gans & Pugh Associates displayed surveillance cameras designed to look like rocks. “(A) log, all kinds of things. You name it. We basically need a sample or a picture … and you tell us what you want to put in it,” said the company’s vendor.
These innovations help add to what some consider the most massive border enforcement apparatus in U.S. history. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents have increased from 3,500 in the early 1990s to more than 18,000 today. The state of Texas claims to have spent nearly $700 million on border security operations since 2012, and Governor Greg Abbott wants Congress to reimburse the state for its border security-related expenses.
“Texas is willing to shoulder the responsibility; we expect the federal government to foot the bill,” he said.
Abbott recently signed the $310 million House Bill 11, part of an $800 million border security package, to bolster the ranks of state police, increase technology, and establish intelligence operations unit on the Texas-Mexico border.
Just a few days after the signing of House Bill 11, Paul Mackler, President & CEO of Eagle Eye Expositions, producers of Border Security Expo, announced that the annual event would move to San Antonio, Texas for the 2016 exhibition. “Given the confluence of federal and state events over the past year on the southwest border, including the newly formed Joint Task Force West, Southern Border Approaches Campaign, headed up by Director Robert Harris, being headquartered in San Antonio, and the sweeping $800 million border security legislation signed into law by Texas Gov. Abbott, a change of venue to Texas in 2016 is in order to continue to best serve the needs of the border security community.”