Readers' comments SBInet: dismal failure // from Lee Maril, Ph.D.

Professor Robert Mail adressing a conference // Source: ecu.edu

In your recent article entitled “SBInet Replacement Takes Shape” (19 May 2001), you referred to me as one of several skeptics of DHS’s most recent strategies to secure the Mexican border.

Words matter. I take strong issue with your labeling me a “skeptic.” A skeptic, according to the common dictionary usage, is someone who routinely or instinctively doubts or questions generally accepted conclusions. In point of fact, I strongly support, rather than doubt, both the major mission and objectives of the Department of Homeland Security along with its strategies and tactics.

My 6-year research of this specific DHS program, SBInet, however — resulting in my recent book The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border — clearly delineates the long list of dismal SBInet failures and the failure of its immediate precursor, the ISIS program. My scholarly research is supported by data gleaned from more than 250 cited sources, including documents authored by DHS, GAO, CBP, Congressional testimony, and relevant scholarly journals.

After documenting the undeniable failures of SBNnet at the cost of more than $1 billion, I am not a “skeptic” of DHS’s replacement of SBInet. Rather, as a social scientist with more than thirty-five years of experience studying the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as a realist, and as a patriotic American, I specifically doubt DHS has learned much from its failures. The public deserves much better than DHS has given us along the Mexican border, including a fair and objective investigation of Boeing’s waste of taxpayer’s money in hard economic times.

Lee Maril, Ph.D., Founding Director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research; Professor of Sociology, Thomas Hariott College of Arts and Sciences, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858