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The Spectacle Blog

Why bricks and mortar are better

By Conor Friedersdorf on 4.23.08 @ 4:16PM

On immigration it's sometimes hard to decide whether the Bush Administration is guilty of gross incompetence or outright mendacity.

An argument for the former:

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.

The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co.

And evidence of the latter from the same article:

Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington....

Project 28 was not intended to be the final, state of the art system for catching illegal immigrants, Giddens said. "I think some people understood that and some didn't. We didn't communicate that well."

More evidence that opponents of "comprehensive" immigration reform were right to doubt that securing the borders would actually happen.

topics:
Immigration