What does the southern border of the United States look like?
For all the talk of “securing the border” and “building a wall,” there is surprisingly little visual material that conveys just how vast this stretch of space is.
In total, the U.S.-Mexico border spans 1,954 miles. According to Google Maps, it would take 34 hours to drive its entire length. In places, there already is a border fence — more than 650 miles of it. Pushed and pulled by various forces, some 1 million people are estimated to pass through the official ports of entry every day.
But what does the geography of this landscape look like? Is it industrial? Desolate? Populated? All of the above?
Using the geographic coordinates of the international boundary line, in addition to location data for the existing border fence (which has been mapped by journalists at NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting), I wrote a small computer script to download satellite imagery for the entire border.
I ended up with about 200,000 images.
Using a command-line tool called ffmpeg, I programmatically stitched the images together, and then worked with Laura Poitras and her team at Field of Vision to edit them into a short film. Jace Clayton, the artist and author known as DJ /rupture, developed an original score for the piece.
Rivers of Data
Borders begin as fictions. They are performed. They are lines drawn in the sand, spaces that bend and break and make exceptions for certain kinds of bodies.
But borders are made real by the policies built around them. The fact that borders are performed does not make them any less real. The border is quite literally what gives the nation its shape.
One way the border is performed — particularly the southern border of the United States — can be understood through the lens of data collection. In the border region, along the Rio Grande and westward through the desert Southwest, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) deploys radar blimps, drones, fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, seismic sensors, ground radar, face recognition software, license-plate readers, and high-definition infrared video cameras. Increasingly, they all feed data back into something called “The Big Pipe.”
As my colleague Roger Hodge reported in 2012, the Big Pipe is “a surveillance network developed by Kenneth Knight, the deputy executive director of national air-security operations for the Office of Air and Marine (OAM), a lesser-known division of CBP that operates the largest law-enforcement air force in the world.”
He continues:
CBP, which encompasses the Border Patrol, has in turn deployed increasingly advanced means not only to scrutinize, search out, and seize an immense stream of drugs and bodies (to use CBP parlance), but also to channel a concomitant river of data — electronic manifests, lists of travelers’ names, dates of entry, and untold terabytes of video footage — all of which must be analyzed, quantified, indexed, and stored.
In thinking about rivers of data, and untold terabytes of video footage, I found myself returning to Rebecca Solnit’s “River of Shadows” — and an idea Trevor Paglen introduced in a series of essays about what he calls “seeing machines.”
Seeing Machines
In his 2014 essay “Geographies of Photography,” Paglen sketched out the role of seeing machines in creating relational geographies capable of collapsing space and time.
Seeing machines create noncontiguous spatial and temporal geometries. They collapse the near into the distant, and the present into the past and future. To illustrate these “relative” geographies of seeing machines, I’ll use the example of a Reaper drone. What exactly is a Reaper drone? In essence, it’s a camera attached to a remote-controlled airplane. Sometimes it carries missiles. What’s particular about a Reaper drone (and other drones in its larger family, including the Predator and the Sentinel) is that airplane, pilot, navigator, analysts, and commander don’t have to be in the same place. The aircraft might be flying a combat mission in Yemen by a pilot based in Nevada, overseen by a manager in Virginia, and supported by intelligence officers in Tampa (geographer Derek Gregory has written about what he calls “Drone Geographies.”) The drone creates its own “relative” geographies, folding several noncontiguous spaces around the globe into a single, distributed, “battlefield.” The folding of space-time that the Reaper drone system enables is a contemporary version of what Marx famously called the “annihilation of space with time,” i.e. the ability to capitalize on the speed of new transportation and communications technologies to bring disparate spaces “closer” together, relatively speaking. Photography has been a part of this space-time annihilation from the start.
Although seeing machines have played a part in the “annihilation of space with time” since the 19th century origins of the phrase, they are increasingly playing a role in creating new relative temporal geographies, perhaps something akin to an “annihilation of time with space.” … There’s every reason to suspect that if the 19th Century saw the annihilation of space with communication and transport technologies, then the 21st Century may see a similarly dramatic reconfiguration of time through persistent monitoring, storage, and analytic technologies that can “reach into the past” in unprecedented ways.
Most of the technologies used to enforce the border, or perform the border, can be understood as “seeing machines.” This film is an attempt to linger on that idea for a moment, and to explore ways of using those technologies — in this case satellites — to better visualize some of the spaces they are enforcing.
What would it mean to try to “see” the entire southwest border at once? To travel the whole 1,954 miles in, say, six minutes?
Might simply looking at a place that has been so heavily politicized — a place abstracted into a sound bite — give a small amount of texture and meaning to a phrase like “build that wall”?
The southern border is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor. It is not even a geography. Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography.
By focusing on the physical landscape, I hope viewers might gain a sense of the enormity of it all, and perhaps imagine what it would mean to be a political subject of that terrain.
You could have done the interstate highways for thousands of miles, complete with toll booths, cameras, lights, road sensors (even bluetooth reading your phone now), 20-foot sound barriers in places, a few five-layer interchanges, police radar traps, and aerial speed surveillance. In your vid, most sections of the border already have a side road. But a border wall, that’s impossible!
So here’s an easy answer. Reverse Obama’s stand-down orders on Border Patrol. FORGET THE WALL. JUST STOP HANDING ILLEGALS BUS TICKETS TO FRESNO, PHOENIX, AND CHICAGO; AND DRIVER’S LICENSES ONCE THEY ARRIVE, SO THEY CAN VOTE ALINSKY OPERATIVES INTO OFFICE. SOLVED!!
For your next trick, show us Mexico’s southern border wall, guard towers and all, to keep out Guatemalans seeking work. Mexico cut through a jungle! Amazing! Maybe Trump can hire Mexican engineers, since America can’t build across the Sonoran Desert!
Then hit Israel’s wall around Palestine. For your grand finale, do the DMZ separating North and South Korea. I hear the safety zones for Americans in Iraq have some pretty impressive thickness, too.
Build that wall!
I have traveled through the country along the border on both sides. I have worked on the border. I work in an industry that is full of people that have come across the border, recently, a generation ago or their families crossed back 200 years.
I have never seen any news report or comments from readers that have any conception of the realities of the Frontera. Those in the US don’t have an inkling of how the border works. Anyone living away from the border can’t understand how closely the linkage is between the people and the economies are on both sides of the border. I have seen 7 or 8 miles of semi trucks waiting to cross into the US. There are large areas of warehouses outside of Laredo , along the World Trade Bridge if you look at google maps you will see thousands of truck lined up and waiting to cross. Million of people cross it day. Crossing the border is a way of life, necessary for business and routine as most of our daily commutes. We have stupid laws that say we will allow some to cross and not others based on ignorance, bigotry and fear. I think it is so shameful that those workers that cross the border wanting just a job and the pittance they get paid to be treated so badly, so inhumanly and so disrespectful. We aren’t really civilized until we treat others in a civilized fashion.
This is good entry for the Venice Art Biennale in 2017
Dizzying at times, but nothing like I’ve seen before. Cool.
Of course “Wallers” aren’t in the real world — the only place this wall could ever exist is in their detached reality.
Workers building the wall would be targets for long range weapons and war-like improvised explosives and booby-traps. Heavy equipment would be subject to sabotage or theft. The construction sites would have be protected like a war zone — bringing military-like conflict to a border often just a few feet from suburban homes.
The 2000 miles would take a decade to build:
1. never be supported by two subsequent Presidencies
2. planning, laws, contracts, budgets, would take years to reach agreement
3. large government projects invariably meet with political opposition and delays
4. cost too much to ever be built
5. cost too much to maintain
6. cost too much to be guarded and patrolled, land, sea, air and underground
7. vulnerable to simple attack (weapons easily brought to Mexico from Iraq)
8. vulnerable to floods, unstable ground and earthquakes
Any military weapon would be able to breach the wall. Each shoulder-fired missile or small vehicle loaded with improvised explosives would create enough damage to drain USA resources in taxing repair operations.
This reminds me of an article discussing the property owners, business, families and the real world lives and activities of people impacted by the US – Mexico border.
I can’t find the original work, but it has been repeated along similar lines.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-01/giant-border-wall-between-us-and-mexico-here-are-five-images-show-how-complicated
In short: it can’t be done without the government imposing itself upon people, taking their lands, ending their business and changing their lives.
Hi Pam
Thanks for your great comments. As an Imperial Beach – IB – CA native who’s lived here and in San Diego her whole life your comments were spot on! People want to believe that this wall can be built so I do mybest to ignore them and vote against them. Katie
So how do we build a wall to keep out the fascist oligarchy, who is the root cause of all the problems in the world?
Try as I might, I can’t see the video. Could it be my browser (Mozilla Firefox with AdBlock Plus)?
Likewise (Firefox on Android)
My bro, who works that border, sent me this: “…not exactly accurate : According to the International Boundary and Water Commission, this continental border follows the middle of the Rio Grande—according to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the two nations, “along the deepest channel” (also known as the thalweg)—from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico a distance of 2,019 km (1,255 mi) to a point just upstream of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.[9]
It then follows an alignment westward overland and it is marked by monuments for a distance of 859 km (534 mi) to the Colorado River, when it reaches its highest elevation at the intersection with the Continental Divide. Thence it follows the middle of that river northward a distance of 38 km (24 mi), and then it again follows an alignment westward overland and marked by monuments a distance of 227 km (141 mi) to the Pacific Ocean (excluding the maritime boundaries of 18 miles (30 km) in the Pacific Ocean and 12 miles (20 km) in the Gulf of Mexico).
So the actual land border is some 675 miles.
I will omit his name, so his Clintonista bosses cannot zero in on him.
The Great Wall of China is 13,170 miles long so it can certainly be done from an architectural standpoint, but I agree there are much better solutions.
No they got it all wrong , we need a dome built over America to keep them in so the rest of us are safe.
There is absolutely no need for a wall.
The easiest solution is to tax those businesses who hire non-citizens. If they can’t afford that, then they are in the wrong business.
I would say that is the best answer.
Problem solved.
Spending billions of tax dollars on a wall as well as border patrol/enforcement will never guarantee success. It is beyond stupid, but you can bet your bottom dollar that is exactly what the Wealthy/powerful would prefer as they dump the cost onto naive American tax payers while claiming that Latinos are rapists and drug traffickers . Business likes that cheap labor to increase profit margins, god forbid that the wealthy would have to pay actual American citizens a living wage.
Until the Mexican-American war of 1848 one third of America was once Mexico, it was just too big for the Mexican authorities to manage/hold onto as the USA kept getting more and more immigrants(the original cheap labor) and the influx of immigrants pushed America’s borders further and further west.
And the Mexican migrants, illegal aliens, immigrants are hardly foreigners and/or immigrants, they are mostly indigenous Americans. They can’t go back to Europe or Africa. America is their homeland.
It isn’t a Latino immigrant problem. It is a concentration of American wealth into the hands of the American wealthy problem.
Nice representation. Very Center for Land Use Interpretation of you. http://www.clui.org
Sail over in primitive ships. Check. Murder and enslave the indigenous peoples with slightly less primitive techniques than they had to defend themselves with. Check. Get comfortable. Check. Call yourselves The Natives. Check. Claim God wanted it so. Check. Ignore God’s commandments and Covet thy Earthly Neighbour’s stuff. Check. Make trouble in the wider neighbourhood, play the neighbours off each other, undermine them all and bitch-slap the Bolshy ones. Check. Call yourselves Patriots. Check. Draw a clear line around the whole lot and secure it from the neighbours with a whole bunch of nukes. Check. Get incredibly rich. Check. Need a whole bunch of cheap labour, whores, and drug suppliers. Check. Let the Mexicans sneak in at much danger and discomfort to work, whore and supply without nuking them. Check. Complain the fuck about it like whining fucking Yanks whilst missing the fact that you are being mugged off by your own elite. Check. Tell everyone you are Exceptional and that your Constitution is Perfect, a mirror of thyselves no less, and believe everyone hates you because they are envious. Check.
Repeat until Nuclear Annihilation or Environmental Catastrophe.
Very cool, would be great to watch stoned. The music is out there. I’m going to spend some time with Google Earth, I love satellite images.
YEAH! try this 1 too! http://youtu.be/UGPuEDyAsU8
Skip the wall. Armed drones, job done.
Seems legit.
I can’t wait until all borders are gone, allowing free rein of the entire planet.
The tribalists need to get over themselves.
Nice music. Heard of Henry Cow, Mr. Clayton??
You can experience this bliss right now in Somalia, DRC, or maybe the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rinkeby/Tensta, Stockholm is also a less extreme possibility.
Borders are filters, they limit what tribal rules apply to a contained space so that other people with different strongly-held opinions on right & wrong can adopt or avoid as appropriate. Without borders to delineate what is the laws and customs, one never knows what will happen on any encounter with other people because all the tribes will still enforce their tribal rules around them.
This unpredictability is why everyone in borderless regions travel in packs, carry AK-74’s and know how to use them from an early age.
People won’t be upgraded to “People 2.0″ for a long time, just look at us civilized folks: We think it is entirely reasonable to send a combat robot out to murder someone 12000 km away because they are not us and don’t share our values, We think it is perfectly OK to bully, shame and blame political opponents because we don’t share their values and can’t make them share ours.
People are tribal. If we remove borders, they just move closer, form around the individual. The new border becomes a set of decisions on – who can enter a bar (and which bar), who can open a bank account, who can afford a house in a gated community, who gets healthcare, jobs …, language ….
– The new “borderless society” basically just upped the filter from specific physical locations to filtering on “Values”, Culture, Speech, Appearance. The borderless society became much more racist by being borderless, basically.
“Without borders to delineate what is the laws and customs, one never knows what will happen on any encounter with other people because all the tribes will still enforce their tribal rules around them.”
Like I wrote, the tribalists need to get over themselves.
AK-74’s?
Like I wrote – They Won’t “get over themselves”. Demanding that people change for the sake of others is like building a beach house and then asking gravity or the moon to stop pulling all that water into ones basement.
AK-74 is the new kit. Any Riff-mountaineer kid needs the 600 meter effective range.
“Demanding that people change for the sake of others is like building a beach house and then asking gravity or the moon to stop pulling all that water into ones basement.”
No one’s demanding that people change, just hoping for it.
Thanks for the upgraded AK.
<3Loved it! Loved the Post rockish sound as well. It would be great to see all the journalists who contribute to the intercept using more field of vision / video Great Job Josh!
“Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography.”
Preach, brother.
Marvelous work, Mr. Begley (who I’m vainly hoping against any sensible logic would actually bother to read this comment section). As a student/enthusiast of geography, I love material like this; something that links abstract political concepts with an actual physical space. This movie could totally be something I would expect to see from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (which, coming from me, is no small compliment!).
BUILD THE WALL!!!
Use some of those idle coal strip mine machines. Dig a trench 50yds wide with a double fence on the USA side. Fill the trench with landmines.
Nicely done.
The Chinese attempted to build a wall to keep out “barbarians”…
…the Mings shot their wad building it & squabbling endlessly (sound familiar?) and the Manchus said ‘thank you very much, we’ll take that now’ when that was done.
the wall worked fine
what failed were the guards at the gate who took bribes like any elite politician in the US does.
Hellary loves money in politics.
Hellary loves the roundabout bribery ways.
BUILD THE WALL.
Hey barabbas ,while you’re at it, what about the porous border to the north? Why turn a blind eye to it barabbas?
Actually, this video makes it clear that the wall is easier than the numbers would suggest. You look at the map and you see the entire western half is 699 miles. The eastern half is 1255 miles! Why? Because as shown in the video, amazingly often the U.S. is south of Mexico! The dang river is just one big squiggle. Which I suppose is why some farmers in Texas sometimes are heard complaining that a wall plan leaves them on the wrong side. I imagine a certain amount of sacrifice on their part can convert a 2000-mile wall into a 1500-mile wall.
The movie is actually self-disproving in my mind, because you try to show that surveillance of the wall is difficult by means of acquiring images of every inch of the wall. All the government has to do is make your video from scratch every 6.5 minutes with satellites or drones or something, and have *their* clever programmers look for people to arrest on it.
That said, the “wall” is more a virtual wall, which is more a surveillance state, and so we all know that the true intended course of the wall extends over every square foot of land inside and outside the U.S., and that doesn’t depend on who wins next month. Good luck trying to make a movie out of that.
“Good luck trying to make a movie out of that.”
See Peter Bo Rappmund’s, Tectonics, for a film that follows the entire wall, on the ground.
“Good luck trying to make a movie out of that.”
Check out Peter Bo Rappmund’s film, Tectonics, that follows the entire border.
Check out Peter Bo Rappmund’s film, Tectonics, that follows the entire border.
By 1850, 9,000 miles (14,000 km) of railroad lines had been built.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_the_United_States
It might take longer then some railroad but it can definitely be done.
Walls tend to be a little taller than railroad tracks. Which might, incidentally, add to the cost in comparison to a railroad track. But hey, I guess you’re going to help build it … right? You’re going to contribute both your muscle and your money over the “might take longer” period of time that your wall will be in the process of being erected?
Nice work. A suggestion: place the video at the end of the narrative.
mexico’s fantasy of reclaiming the US will be wall off.
Grupo Beta and other projects of theirs will be vanquished.
The occupation of the US by mexico must be reversed.
israel has a wall, the US needs a wall.
The mexican way of doing things is not the US way of doing things.
Do you see Americans invading mexico? no.
Build the wall.
You do know the number of Mexicans going to the US illegally has been decreasing, right? I’m a gringo who lives in Mexico. Trust me, most do not want to even come to the US. They would MUCH rather stay in Mexico with their families. Only very poor and desperate Mexicans go to the US.
Also building a wall will do nothing to stop anything! They’ll just build tunnels and smuggle people and drugs through. In fact, as the article says, there is a lot of wall up right now. What do they do? Build god damn tunnels. This wall you want, would be a massive waste of tax payer money and would do nothing.
You mention is Israel. Ridiculous. They have a tiny country and area to patrol, and guard. We have 2,000 miles and that’s only with Mexico. We still have to pay for resources for the north border and the seas. Apples to oranges comparison.
Agreed. There is an interesting article in the current issue of MIT Technology Review that calls out Trump’s lie over the cost, and points to Israel’s $2.3 Billion expenditure to date with only about 10% completion.
Some folks have their minds made up, so don’t confuse them with facts!
oh gee – you mean that drug runners and hired killers come to the US, make the money, go home to retire while others come to the US to replace them but since most of those jobs are taken there is a net attrition?
i know that there have been average 1 million invade the US every year since 1975. You do know that dont you?
Building a wall is a giant – PLEASE DO NOT INVADE THE US billboard. I like the idea. Why is it that mexicans cannot make mexico a mirror image of the US they pretend to like so much? hmmmm. MAYBE because mexico is just another syria? maybe we should supply arms to the rebels in mexico so they could effect proper change?
If my argument is apples to oranges, yours is apples to dirt.
I’m visualizing when the intercept wasn’t a sister site to CNN.
Clinton n NSA must have something awesome on you guys.
You’ve completely sold out and fallen in line.
Poor Snowden, he trusted you.
Thank you Eugene for the call out-I thought it was just me.
Yeah, that silly child Snowden who obviously must be a know-nothing goof was really taken for a ride, huh. Have you can read Snowden all over his twitter account complaining about The Intercept? No? Have you seen his videos where he complains and castigates The Intercept? No? You mean to tell me that you’re talking out of your ass? Oh no!
Kudos, Kitt!