There’s a loud and growing chorus of opposition to a physical border wall. That view is shared by leaders of border cities like McAllen, Texas, by every congressman representing a district along our 2000-mile-long southern border, and by the majority of Americans (to say nothing of a long list of bygone societies stretching from the Ming Dynasty to East Germany). Tying a partial government shutdown to funding for the wall has also been deeply unpopular, and the president’s historically low approval ratings were slumping further during the shutdown.
The reality is that technology, while part of the equation for sensible immigration management and border security, can only do so much. Squaring off against the indomitable human drive for survival, a better life, or economic gain (oftentimes all three), even the most cutting edge deterrent and detection technology is bound to falter. It’s beyond troubling that the one group of migrants on the rise as this debate continues is families, with record crossings for that group in recent months. For many, migration is about desperation.
Given that context, it’s not primarily a security crisis we’re talking about, but a humanitarian crisis. And combatting a humanitarian crisis with technology designed for the battlefield is not sensible. It’s certainly not the panacea many people across the political spectrum — and recently Democrats have been just as keen to champion border technology as Republicans — would hope.
None of which is to say technology doesn’t have an important role to play alleviating massive problems with U.S. immigration, just as immigration has a critical role to play in the competitiveness of the American tech sector. (In fact, the tech community has been one of the major losers in this trumped up war against immigrants.) I’m all for putting our brightest minds to work on these pressing issues.
Fortunately, some progress is already being made. Right now, technologists in the federal government are tackling one of the biggest challenges to the national immigration infrastructure: a backlog of nearly 750,000 asylum applications. And as Katharine Schwab points out in Fast Company, a new generation of technology startups is taking dead aim at the byzantine maze of immigration bureaucracy. One of those startups, Boundless, is helmed by an immigrant.
But inevitably technology will only be part of the answer to an economic and geopolitical problem as dynamic as international migration. Healthy immigration and true security at the border require deft political, economic, and diplomatic leadership, not quick fix solutions. The worst thing we can do is act rashly and out of accordance with our deepest values as a society.
Building walls — real or virtual — certainly qualifies.
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(TechRepublic)
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