HSNW conversation with Lee MarilBorder patrol needs better training, diversity, and resources
Homeland Security NewsWire’s executive editor Eugene Chow recently got the opportunity to catch up with Lee Maril, a professor at East Carolina University and the director of the university’s Center on Diversity and Inequality Research; Maril specializes in border security and immigration issues along the southern border and recently published The Fence: Human Smuggling, Terrorists, and Public Safety along the US Mexico Border; in his interview with HSNW, Maril discusses the government’s ongoing attempts to build a virtual border fence, improving the border patrol, and the motives behind the latest push for a fence along the border
Prof. Lee Maril of East Carolina University // Source: ecu.edu
Homeland Security NewsWire: The federal government has made several attempts in the past to build a border fence both virtual and physical. With the current budget climate in Washington, do you believe that these efforts are a cost-effective way to enforce immigration, especially given the $1 billion DHS spent on the failed SBInet project?
Lee Maril: I have argued since 2004 that smaller and cheaper low-tech security solutions can often trump big, expensive contracts handed out to our defense industry.That assertion, published in my books Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas (Texas tech University Press, 2004) and, most recently, in The Fence: Human Smuggling, Terrorists, and Public Safety along the US Mexico Border (Texas tech University Press, 2011), arises out of my spending a significant amount of time actually watching what the Border Patrol (BP) does, how it best performs its daily job on the line, the problems that it faces on a regular basis, and interviewing BP agents, supervisors, and managers at length. But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Congress are still following the perilous path, while lobbied hard by our defense contractors, that dictates one-size-fits-all technological solutions and/or the domain assumption that there is a satisfactory high tech solution for every problem.
The failure of two major DHS security projects that wasted several billion dollars clearly demonstrates this DHS domain assumption is inadequate. What has worked best since 9/11 is more agents on the ground who are given the resources, including hardware like vehicles, boats, and laptops, to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Based upon what agents on the line tell me, they could use more low-tech support, all of which is readily available at this point in time and already tested by our military. One example is now having state-of-the-art ground sensors in contrast to the many years BP was burdened by Vietnam-era sensors which functioned very poorly.
HSNW: As a follow up, are there more cost-effective ways to enforce immigration? In other words, if the U.S. government were to divert funds from border fence projects, where could the government get the most “bang for their buck” in terms of immigration enforcement programs?
LM: Yes, there are. One way among others is to invest in the Border Patrol itself. By that I mean to provide better quality academy training for new recruits, including more time at the academy instead of
