Border Control and Security

I have mostly stayed out of this debate, mainly because I can’t think of much to contribute beyond some more whining. There’s one piece I will touch on, though, because I think it’s leading to some low quality thinking…

Recently the folks who are agitating for better border control have frequently — in fact, nearly universally — tied in the notion of border security against terrorism as more justification for drastically increased control at the border.

But this notion doesn’t withstand scrutiny. As others have observed, the vast majority of the folks agitating for increased border control are only asking for increased control at the Mexican border. If security against terrorism were really the issue that was motivating them, they would be agitating for across-the-board border control: the Canadian border, airlines, ships, and any other way people can enter this country. That’s not happening; the focus is entirely on the Mexican border. Therefore there must something else motivating those folks who are blathering on about border security, and that something is easy to identify: the economic impacts of illegal immigration. Not security.

I’m not going to engage the topic of illegal immigration here, just border security.

Suppose you really did want to secure America from any terrorist trying to enter. What do you suppose it would take to have a reasonable chance of success? It seems to me that a great many people simply don’t comprehend the magnitude of this problem. We’re talking about over 5,000 miles of land borders, even more ocean borders, hundreds of airports, and dozens of ships ports. We’re also talking about a large number of methods that a terrorist (or a group of them) could use to enter the U.S.

Without even trying hard, I can think of several different scenarios, each of which I believe is completely impracticable to defend against.

Example 1: Prevent any single human from walking across the Canadian border. That border is roughly 5,500 miles long. Technology can help (infrared scopes, UAVs, etc.), but in the end the only reliable “human detector” we know if is a pair of Mark I eyeballs. Let’s get really, really optimistic and suppose that one pair of eyeballs for every half-mile was adequate (and I think the real answer is probably more like half that, or even less) To man the Canadian border with a full time guard for every half mile would require 11,000 guards per shift. To handle three shifts a day, weekends, and vacation, you’d need about 50,000 guards! If you figure that with salary, benefits, expenses, equipment, and management overhead each guard cost $120,000 a year (that’s a very conservative number), then you’re talking about $6 billion per year. And that’s just for the Canadian border!

Example 2: Prevent any single human from sneaking into the US on a small boat (e.g., motorboat or sailboat) launched from a “mother ship” outside US territorial waters. The only way I can imagine how to do this (no matter what technology I invoke) is to surveil every single ship within a few hundred miles of the US, 24 hours a day (at night with infrared equipment). And even this wouldn’t work with bad weather — how could you possibly detect a sailboat departing under cover of fog or rainsqualls? I don’t think you need to be a very smart terrorist to see the attractions of this method (and it’s not the only “attractive” one I can think of). For starters, nobody even pretends to control small boats — many thousands of them depart and arrive our ports and beaches every day.

I think that effective border control, to the point of excluding terrorists from US territory, is simply infeasible. From a security perspective, clamping down on the Mexican border is useless (all but the absolutely most stupid terrorist would simply switch to Canada, or some other method of entry), and needlessly diverts resources from more promising approaches. Note that I’m speaking strictly from a security perspective, and I’m not making any arguments about illegal immigration (I’ll tackle that another day). If we’re trying to make the US safer from terrorists, I’d like to see the resources spent in a more useful way…