EoW July 2008

Transat lant ic Cable

While the debate in the United States centres on Mexico as the cause of job losses in the US, Dr Dussel locates the source of the problem elsewhere. “There’s a fourth uninvited guest at the NAFTA party,” he said, alluding to China. Goods entering Mexico from China and other Asian countries moreover have dissipated the surge in American exports to Mexico that was expected to flow from NAFTA. Ten years ago, almost 80% of Mexico’s imports came from the United States. Last year, that dropped to below 50%.

Boeing’s ‘virtual fence’ on the Mexican border falls short of expectations

Boeing Co makes airplanes, not virtual fences. Or, at least, it does not make good ones, according to the US government, which has scrapped Project 28, the $20 million Boeing prototype for the monitoring system being installed along a 28-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border. Officials cited the failure of the design to adequately alert Border Patrol agents to illegal crossings from Mexico into the United States. The decision against the design was announced on 23 rd April, just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff approved the Boeing system – a line of nine electronic surveillance towers installed along the border, southwest of Tucson, Arizona. But dissatisfaction had emerged much earlier. On 22 nd February, less than a week after Mr Chertoff accepted Project 28, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told Congress that it “did not fully meet user needs.” Accordingly, “the project’s design will not be used as the basis for future developments.” The major problem identified by the GAO was a time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area. Officials said Chicago-based Boeing is to replace Project 28 with a series of towers equipped with communications systems, new cameras, and new radar capability. Meanwhile, the fence is still functioning. But according to the deputy director of the Secure Border Initiative programme, in Washington, it does not come close to meeting the goals of the border patrol. The virtual fence represents only a fraction of the technology and equipment for cross-border interception that Boeing is to provide under an $860 million government contract. The work under way in Arizona is the first phase of a federal undertaking to secure first the Mexican border to the south, then the border with Canada on the north. The US-Canadian interface is the longest undefended border in the world. Of related interest . . . According to a study commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce, a ❈ ❈ government plan to clamp down on illegal workers could cost American employers more than $1 billion a year. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would require employers to fire workers unable to resolve mismatches between their names and their Social Security numbers – those assigned to US citizens with their first jobs and retained by them for life. The Chamber of Commerce challenges the DHS contention that this method of ferreting out uncredentialled workers would not place a heavy burden on companies. The chamber also estimates the wages lost by legal workers in consequence of mistaken mismatches at up to $37 billion a year. Over the last two years, more than 3 million Latin American immigrants in the ❈ ❈ United States have stopped sending money home to their families in their home countries, according to a survey released 30 th April by the Inter-American Development Bank. Only 50% of some 18.9 million Latino immigrants in the US now send money regularly to relatives, compared with 73% two years ago. The survey traced the drop in the number of people sending money home to pressures on the immigrants deriving from the slump in the low-wage job market and the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

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EuroWire – July 2008 EuroWire – Jan ary 2006