If You’re Hearing About the Border, Someone Is Trying to Scare You
It could have been a dystopian suburban Tupperware party or a tidier version of a Yemeni arms market — a place to shop for everything from infrared rifle scopes to spyware to security contractors to materials for border fence sensors.
The U.S.-Mexico border was full of uncertainty in the days before May 11. Title 42, the Trump administration-crafted health ordinance that had been invoked millions of times to turn migrants back from the border, was about to expire, and nobody knew what to expect. Many predictions were lurid and sensationalistic: Masses of desperate people would pour into the country, flood the border towns first and then press northward.
“Right-wing media says there are 700,000 en route,” a friend texted me from the border city of El Paso. “What if true?” (It wasn’t.) The Biden administration sent 1,500 troops to help with the expected influx. Border Patrol agents handed out fliers urging migrants sleeping on El Paso’s sidewalks to surrender to custody.
Just up the road, in the middle of all that angst and all the scrambling preparations, a different kind of crowd massed in the El Paso Convention Center. These out-of-towners didn’t know what was coming, either, but they hoped to turn a profit. For a few heady days, just a short stroll from the trench where the Rio Grande draws a watery line between Mexico and the United States, law enforcement officers and salespeople played with virtual reality headsets and surveillance gadgets, spinning visions of a militarized and perfectly impenetrable border.
The speakers at the Border Security Expo included various luminaries from the Department of Homeland Security — including the Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz; prominent Border Patrol sector chiefs; and various Department of Homeland Security officials whose titles included words like “acquisition,” “contracting” and “procurement.”
Billed by organizers as “a valuable opportunity to demo products, talk to experts and form strategic partnerships,” the expo was, at heart, a sprawling marketplace. It could have been a dystopian suburban Tupperware party or a tidier version of a Yemeni arms market — a place to shop for everything from infrared rifle scopes to spyware to security contractors to materials for border fence sensors.
If this confluence of events sounds odd — the anticipated flesh-and-blood humanitarian crisis as a backdrop to a trade show for crises to come — you have not spent enough time along the border.
I first covered the border in the late 1990s, when walls weren’t part of the national debate and Border Patrol agents trolled deserts and river waters in a seemingly arbitrary game of cat and mouse. The national debate on immigration contemplated labor and economics, our collective values and, in a quieter but still palpable way, shifting racial demographics.
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The term “border security” became popular. The nation’s attention was gripped by the fear of terrorism, and everyone talked about border control. But this was just a phrase; at the border, there was little expectation that true control could ever be established — or was even sincerely desired.
The border is real, of course, the edge where two nations meet, the manifestation of laws and regulations and paperwork that govern the international movement of humans and things. But Americans have long played it like a game.
Here’s the truth: If you’re hearing about the border, it’s likely that somebody is trying to scare you. Broadly speaking, Republicans want you to be scared of immigrants, and Democrats want you to be scared of Republicans. Our fixation on terrorists has faded, but we have retained, as a legacy from that frightened era, the habit of thinking about the border as a security risk that must be mastered.