[News] How Israel’s war industry profits from violent US immigration "reform"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  How Israel’s war industry profits from violent US immigration "reform"

Gabriel Schivone <http://electronicintifada.net/people/gabriel-schivone>
* 
http://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israels-war-industry-profits-violent-us-immigration-reform/13283 
<http://electronicintifada.net/people/electronic-intifada> *
8 April 2014

*Bill approved by Senate and stalled in the House guarantees more deaths 
along the US-Mexico border and huge payouts to Israeli contractors whose 
military technology has been “battle-proven” on Palestinians living 
under occupation*

Im/migrant rights advocates in the US organized a national day of action 
<http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/take-action/april-5th-day-of-action-against-deportations/> 
on 5 April, the day they expected President Barack Obama’s 
record-breaking rate of deportations to reach a total of 2 million 
during his administration.

But scant attention has been paid to the list of global benefactors 
awaiting the profits from legislation escalating border militarization.

Israel, America’s closest ally, tops the lineup of patrons eager for 
rewards while advocates demanding a meaningful overhaul of US 
immigration and border enforcement continue their defiant battle in the 
streets 
<http://www.msnbc.com/all/activists-arrested-outside-white-house>. In 
this setting, rights supporters must know which global partners stand 
beside the US in repressing undocumented im/migrant communities.

But how does the situation in Palestine — thousands of miles away — 
affect US immigration reform and /vice versa/? What does one have to do 
with the other?

Quite a lot, actually.


    “Border security on steroids”

Take the recent news that Israeli arms manufacturing giant Elbit Systems 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/elbit> won a US Department of 
Homeland Security 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/department-homeland-security> (DHS) 
contract 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/jimmy-johnson/contractor-israels-apartheid-wall-wins-us-border-contract> 
to provide surveillance technology along the southern divide with Mexico 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/mexico>, initially in Arizona 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/arizona>.

Specifically, Elbit will provide its sensor-based Peregrine 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npu3LeYyRkA> surveillance system for 
Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Integrated Fixed Tower 
<https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=ecb6c4b068620b12ce32c7661fe6f5a7&tab=core&_cview=1> 
project, which consists 
<http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/kmd/hst_201402/#/10> of ground radar 
and camera technology mounted on towers strewn throughout the 
borderlands. Congress approved the plan earlier this year.

A Bloomberg trade analyst estimated that Elbit’s $145 million award “may 
eventually reach $1 billion if legislation to rewrite US immigration 
laws passes Congress and helps fund the project’s expansion in the 
Southwest” (“Israel’s Elbit wins US border work after Boeing dumped 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-27/israel-s-elbit-wins-u-s-border-surveillance-contract.html>,” 
27 February 2014).

The little-discussed Corker-Hoeven amendment 
<http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44372> attached to the 2013 Border 
Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 
744 <https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/s168>) is the key 
legislation referenced by the Bloomberg analyst. The Senate passed the 
bill last June; the House of Representatives has stalled on voting on 
the package in any form.

Promoted as “border security on steroids” by the bill’s co-author, 
Republican Senator from Tennessee Bob Corker, the measure sets aside $46 
billion for security “triggers” that must be in place in areas including 
Arizona before a pathway to citizenship can be opened for an estimated 
11 million people living undocumented in the US today.

No wonder that DHS’s $145 million payment to Elbit could skyrocket by 
700 percent. And that’s just one bid by one Israeli company. There could 
be many more to come.


    Israel and the “homeland security” industry

Journalist Todd Miller, author of the book /Border Patrol Nation 
<http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100874610&fa=author&person_id=16890>/ 
(City Lights Books), interviewed numerous corporate leaders and scoured 
boundary-enforcement security fairs and expos across the Southwest.

Miller described to The Electronic Intifada his constant encounters with 
Israeli security peddlers in the borderlands.

During his research for the book, Miller wasn’t looking for Israel 
anywhere. Yet the state’s agents kept surfacing at every turn, he said.

Israeli companies, specialists and top military brass have become an 
increasingly visible presence at border and “homeland security” trade 
shows in the years since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The US has spent $100 billion on immigration enforcement 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175723/todd_miller_surveillance_surge> 
in the decade since then.

In that time, Israel became the world’s sixth-largest defense exporter 
and a leading supplier and consumer in the budding border-security 
industrial complex (“Israel ranks as the world’s sixth largest arms 
exporter in 2012 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.531956>,” 
/Haaretz/, 25 June 2013).

Companies large and small such as Elta Systems, Elbit Systems and NICE 
Systems <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/nice-systems> have provided 
technologies including radar, virtual fencing and CCTV surveillance for 
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Phoenix, Arizona department, as Jimmy Johnson 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/jimmy-johnson> has reported (“A 
Palestine-Mexico Border 
<https://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/29/palestine-mexico-border>,” North 
American Congress on Latin America, 29 June 2012).

The Golan Group <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/golan-group> 
(founded by former Israeli special forces officers) provided training 
sessions for the US Border Patrol, as Naomi Klein notes in her 2007 book 
/The Shock Doctrine 
<http://electronicintifada.net/content/disaster-capitalism-israel-warning/>/.


    Israel aids deadly “deterrence” strategy

Elta Systems got a boost in late 2012 when, /Haaretz 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.531956>/ 
reported 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.531956>, the 
US Border Patrol hired the company to provide radar along the border “to 
protect the US-Mexico border against illegal migrant infiltration.” US 
Border Patrol’s deal offered the company “a potential market worth 
hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The US partnership with Israel is reciprocal: where the US has the 
finances, Israel has the expertise.

On the company’s end, according to Raanan Horowitz, CEO of Elbit Systems 
of America, the Peregrine system “will meet the demanding mission 
requirements of the Customs Border Protection (CPB) while enhancing its 
agents’ safety” (“Elbit Systems of America awarded contract for US 
Customs Border Protection integrated fixed towers project 
<http://ir.elbitsystems.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=61849&p=irol-newsArticle&id=1907341>,” 
Elbit Systems, 8 March 2014).

But what does this situation look like in terms of human consequences? 
In CBP’s stated mission <http://www.cbp.gov/about> of “keeping 
terrorists and their weapons out of the US,” under the pretext of 
personal safety, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 19 persons in 
recent years, often under the alleged threat of rock-throwing (“Border 
Patrol’s use of deadly force criticized in new report 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/27/nation/la-na-border-killings-20140227>,” 
/Los Angeles Times/, 27 February 2014).

In this deadly equation, the reform legislation’s amendment calls for a 
“military-style surge” of 700 more miles of “border fencing” and doubles 
the current number of Border Patrol agents to 40,000 (“Border security: 
Boost for Senate immigration bill 
<http://news.yahoo.com/border-security-boost-senate-immigration-bill-210012196.html>,” 
Associated Press, 20 June 2013).


    Two decades of border militarization

Increased deployment of military-style resources to strategic areas 
along the border has mushroomed since the early 1990s, as Joseph Nevins 
documents in his book /Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal 
Alien” and the Making of the US-Mexico Boundary/.

President Bill Clinton 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/bill-clinton>, expanding on past 
boundary security-enforcement trends under his predecessors Ronald 
Reagan and Jimmy Carter, instituted a new “deterrence” strategy designed 
to “reroute” migrants away from urban areas and into “geographically 
harsher,” more “remote and hazardous border regions” where the 
treacherous terrain would potentially kill them (“656 Weeks on the 
Killing Fields of Arizona 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gabriel-schivone/immigrant-border-crossings_b_2269547.html>,” 
/The Huffington Post/, 12 November 2012).

In such a way, planners devised 
<http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/apfunnel02-15-07.htm>, the “mortal 
danger” of the “geography would be an ally to us.”

This aggressive shift came less than a decade after the last immigration 
overhaul. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act 
<http://www.uscis.gov/tools/glossary/immigration-reform-and-control-act-1986-irca> 
opened the door to citizenship for three million people of extra-legal 
status and increased border controls for those continuing to come, but 
without addressing the US-based economic and political policies driving 
migration.

Predictably, within a decade of the “deterrence” policy’s onset, 
“Arizona had become a killing field,” Tucson-based journalist Margaret 
Regan describes 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=vIN8CBHCor4C&lpg=PT16&vq=killing%20field&pg=PT16#v=snippet&q=killing%20field&f=false> 
in her book /The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the 
Arizona Borderlands/.

Israel continues to reap the benefits from US border militarization as 
the levels of death and suffering grow in line with an enriching 
investment climate.


    Border death rate doubles

A June 2013 study by scholars and forensics specialists at the 
University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute and the local 
county medical examiner’s office found that the rate of migrant deaths 
had nearly doubled in the previous two years (“A continued humanitarian 
crisis at the border: undocumented border crosser deaths recorded by the 
Pima County office of the medical examiner, 1990-2012 
<http://bmi.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/border_deaths_final_web.pdf>” [PDF]).

As more and more bodies are recovered, government and media continue to 
report all-time lows in apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Yet the 
simultaneous increase in border deaths remains enormously underreported.

But this is all good news to Senator Corker, who urged those concerned 
with border security not to worry because the bill is so tough that it’s 
“almost overkill 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/20/corker-my-border-security-deal-is-almost-overkill/>.”

In fact, the package “is not only sufficient, it is well over 
sufficient,” Arizona Republican Senator John McCain 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/john-mccain> concurred. “We’ll be 
the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” McCain 
boasted 
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mccain-u-s-will-have-most-militarized-border-since-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-video>.


    More drones

One provision in S. 744 would add 18 more unmanned aerial vehicles (also 
known as drones <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/drones> or UAVs) to 
the already ballooning fleet operated by Customs and Border Protection.

Israeli-built “Hermes <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/hermes>” 
drones were the first deployed 
<http://www.cbp.gov/xp/CustomsToday/2004/Aug/other/aerial_vehicles.xml> 
along the southern border with Mexico as early as 2004. Currently, the 
fleet buzzing throughout the borderlands skies is wholly comprised of 
US-made Predator B drones, according to a CBP spokesperson.

Rivaling the US as the world’s leader in such technology, Israel can 
still view immigration reform as a hefty bounty for its “battle-proven 
<https://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/29/palestine-mexico-border>” military 
technology that is “tried and tested 
<https://nacla.org/news/2013/4/23/israel%E2%80%99s-proxy-war-guatemala> 
on the West Bank and Gaza.”

As proposed in the legislation, the path to citizenship for the 11 
million undocumented people in the US would take at least 13 years. Even 
then, the measures would benefit only those who are able to afford the 
mounting fees associated with the process, according to an analysis by 
Coalición de Derechos Humanos 
<http://www.derechoshumanosaz.net/2013/04/senates-gang-of-8-reform-bill-enormous-expenditure-for-walls-drones-surveillance-agents-national-id-system-guarantees-for-big-business-mass-firings-increases-in-depo/>.

Though it won overwhelming approval in the Democrat-controlled Senate, 
the bill has stalled for nine months in the Republican-controlled House 
of Representatives.

Many House members are hostile to any pathway to citizenship for 
undocumented people. Worse, House Republicans, like their Senate 
counterparts, have shown a penchant for fueling the fantasy of border 
security as a sound solution to US immigration issues.


    A new military occupation

The US and Israel both continue to dispossess indigenous people of their 
lands, and even of their existence.

In the US, Native peoples are left out of the “immigration reform” 
discourse altogether. Even though some are US-born, they are 
“undocumented” in every sense of the term, since they were born at home 
and lack a birth certificate.

The ancestral lands of the Tohono O’odham people span from modern-day 
Sonora, Mexico into southern Arizona — bisected by the Mexico-US border 
wall. Some were born on one side of the divide but grew up or spend most 
of their time on the other side and are therefore considered suspect by 
Border Patrol.

Miller writes in Border Patrol Nation: “While it may seem that the days 
of killing or corralling Native Americans and annexing their territories 
are an ancient and forgotten chapter in US history, the experience of 
the Tohono O’odham Nation show us that nothing can be further from the 
truth.” O’odham people regularly face abuse, harassment and even death 
at the hands of US Border Patrol.

Some of the country’s largest Border Patrol stations (and at least one 
US military outpost in a remote location, known as a “forward-operating 
base”) surround the Tohono O’odham Nation as the second-largest 
reservation in the US, and military-style checkpoints control all 
movement entering and leaving the nation. According to Miller, this 
presence of federal forces occupying permanent positions on Tohono 
O’odham lands is the largest in US history.

The extra layers of militarized infrastructure isolates the nation while 
still in Arizona, Miller observes, “as if the nation itself were a 
foreign country under a new, post-9/11 form of military occupation.”


    Israel benefits either way

Whether or not Congress passes the reform bill, Israel will benefit from 
any security legislation subsidized through the emerging border-security 
complex. Even without anticipated reform boosts in funding, for 
instance, Congress passed its 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act 
earmarking 
<http://www.hstoday.us/single-article/elbit-wins-cbp-s-integrated-fixed-towers-contract/b54c8c0c1492e875a136a3031c3f62c3.html> 
some $351 million for “border security fencing, infrastructure and 
technology” through 2016 — nearly half of which DHS dished out right 
away for Elbit’s Peregrine contract.

The first time Elbit won 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/11/14/barricading-the-border/> a major 
border enforcement contract was in 2006, subcontracted by leading US 
firm Boeing <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/boeing> for “virtual 
fence” technology. The contract was part of the George W. Bush 
administration’s 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/bush-administration> “Secure Border 
Initiative.” Security-based programs continue to be funded, and appear 
likely to increase, so long as US policy remains fixed on border 
militarization.

More broadly, Israeli access to the gargantuan US defense industry is 
mutually serving. Grateful for its own piece of the pie, the Arizona 
state legislature observed in a unanimous 2012 resolution: “Israel 
receives vital military and security assistance from the United States, 
much of which, in turn, is spent here in Arizona with its defense 
contractors” (“Arizona-Israel bill raises some unsettling questions 
<http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2012/03/25/20120325arizona-israel-bill-raises-some-unsettling-questions.html>,” 
The Arizona Republic, 25 March 2012).

Israel’s security merchants eagerly hope US immigration reform passes; 
if not, they’ll look out for the next gravy train.


    “Not 1 More” deportation

On 11 October 2013, I and others in Tucson, Arizona kicked off 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/palestine-solidarity-activists-protest-us-deportation-policies-arizona> 
the first of many efforts to shut down Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement (ICE).

The actions have been cropping up across the country, known as the “Ni 
Uno Mas/Not 1 More <http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/>” campaign.

Early that October morning, a group of us stopped two deportation buses 
— run by British security giant G4S 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/g4s>, a major Israeli contractor in 
the occupied Palestinian territories — off the I-10 freeway and locked 
our arms into devices around the buses’ front tires.

The prison vehicles were on their way to the downtown federal courthouse 
(around whose front gates a group of six others locked their arms) to 
dump their newly captured “human cargo” into a mass prosecution program 
called Operation Streamline 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/under-operation-streamline-fast-track-proceedings-for-illegal-immigrants/2014/02/10/87529d24-919d-11e3-97d3-f7da321f6f33_story.html>.

But the buses never made it to their destination that day, sparing 72 
detainees from a ghastly show trial that epitomizes the inhumanity of 
current US immigration and border enforcement policies.

Every day, Operation Streamline takes approximately seventy apprehended 
migrants and gives them criminal records and often lengthy jail 
sentences. The US government does this instead of processing 
undocumented migrants’ cases through civil or administrative immigration 
courts, a long-established legal practice in such situations.

Thanks to such industrial-scale prosecutions, Latin at s now represent more 
than half of all those sentenced to federal prisons.

As of 2012, more than 200,000 people have been prosecuted 
<http://azstarnet.com/laestrella/ciudad/immigration-bill-could-swamp-overwhelmed-tucson-court/article_be71df17-623e-52af-80ba-64a6f8e408b9.html> 
through Streamline-related enforcement throughout the Southwest and US 
interior since the program’s onset in 2005 — with 74,000 prosecutions in 
Tucson alone since January 2008.

The “triggers” contained in S. 744 would expand Streamline by 300 percent.

Since October, civil disobedience actions — many of them 
nationally-coordinated, involving both non-citizen and citizen activists 
alike — have spread all over the United States. Tactics range from 
blocking deportation buses to shutting down ICE offices, facilities and 
jails.

Immigrant youth climbed 
<http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/2013/12/23/fresno/> up on ladders 
in Fresno, California, to block deportations from the city jail.

In New Jersey, snow fell on activists as they lay on their backs, locked 
together, blocking 
<http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/2013/12/10/jersey/> the entrance 
of a detention center in Elizabeth.

There have been similar efforts in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los 
Angeles, Atlanta, Tacoma, Austin and Washington, DC, among other cities.

In Arizona on 17 February, outside Eloy Detention Center, family members 
of detainees — some imprisoned for years — began 
<http://www.kpho.com/story/24788801/hunger-strike-continues-outside-phoenix-ice-office> 
a two-week hunger strike.

The longer the possibility of immigration reform is delayed, the greater 
the levels of social indignation may escalate.

With these actions, im/migrant justice advocates have created a “left 
flank” to dramatize the human voices and stories left out of 
“immigration reform” debates. Such efforts can potentially pull the 
liberal-rightist agenda, crystallized in S. 744, away from the current 
path of more mass death in the deserts and higher family separations in 
the cities.

As Israeli war profiteers and their US paymasters act as the syringe for 
the deadly “steroids” injection into efforts at immigration reform, 
im/migrant and Palestinian justice advocates can and must strengthen 
their resistance to these injustices — from Palestine to Arizona.

/Gabriel M. Schivone is a youth organizer with UNIDOS indigenous ethnic 
studies group in Tucson, Arizona and an ad hoc steering committee member 
of National Students for Justice in Palestine./

-- 
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