How Israeli High-Tech Firms Are Turning the U.S.-Mexico Border into a New Kind of Hell<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nU.S. borderlands are laboratories for nightmarish innovations.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBy<\/em> Todd Miller<\/a><\/em> \/ TomDispatch<\/a><\/div>\nJanuary 25, 2015<\/em><\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/files\/styles\/story_image\/public\/story_images\/shutterstock_123782347.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\nPhoto Credit: ruskpp\/Shutterstock.com<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nTo stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nIt was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country\u2019s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. \u201cWe have learned lots from Gaza,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cIt\u2019s a great laboratory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology — the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet.<\/p>\n
Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.<\/p>\n
Just a few more minutes on foot and Elkabetz could have watched green-striped U.S. Border Patrol vehicles inching along the trickling Rio Grande in front of Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexico\u2019s largest cities filled with U.S. factories and the dead of that country\u2019s drug wars. The Border Patrol agents whom the general might have spotted were then being up-armored with a lethal combination of surveillance technologies, military hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and drones. This once-peaceful place was being transformed into what Timothy Dunn, in his book\u00a0The Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border<\/em><\/a>, terms a state of \u201clow-intensity warfare.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Border Surge<\/strong><\/p>\nOn November 20, 2014, President Obama\u00a0announced<\/a> a series of executive actions on immigration reform. Addressing the American people, he referred to bipartisan immigration legislation\u00a0passed<\/a> by the Senate in June 2013 that would, among other things, further up-armor the same landscape in what\u2019s been termed — in language adopted from recent U.S. war zones — a \u201cborder surge.\u201d The president bemoaned the fact that the bill had been stalled in the House of Representatives, hailing it as a \u201ccompromise\u201d that \u201creflected common sense.\u201d It would, he pointed out, \u201chave doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, while giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\nIn the wake of his announcement, including executive actions that would protect five to six million of those immigrants from future deportation, the national debate was quickly framed as a conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Missed in this partisan war of words was one thing: the initial executive action that Obama announced involved a further militarization of the border supported by both parties.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst,\u201d the president said, \u201cwe\u2019ll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over.\u201d Without further elaboration, he then moved on to other matters.<\/p>\n
If, however, the United States follows the \u201ccommon sense\u201d of the border-surge bill, the result could add more than $40 billion dollars\u00a0worth of<\/a> agents, advanced technologies, walls, and other barriers to an already unparalleled border enforcement apparatus. And a crucial signal would be sent to the private sector that, as the trade magazine\u00a0Homeland Security Today<\/em> puts it, another \u201ctreasure trove<\/a>\u201d of profit is on the way for a border control market already, according to the latest forecasts, in an \u201cunprecedented boom period<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\nLike the Gaza Strip for the Israelis, the U.S. borderlands, dubbed a \u201cconstitution-free zone<\/a>\u201d by the ACLU, are becoming a vast open-air laboratory for tech companies. There, almost any form of surveillance and \u201csecurity\u201d can be developed, tested, and showcased, as if in a militarized shopping mall, for other nations across the planet to consider. In this fashion, border security is becoming a global industry and few corporate complexes can be more pleased by this than the one that has developed in Elkabetz\u2019s Israel.<\/p>\nThe Palestine-Mexico Border<\/strong><\/p>\nConsider the IDF brigadier general\u2019s presence in El Paso two years ago an omen. After all, in February 2014, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency in charge of policing our borders, contracted with Israel\u2019s giant private military manufacturer\u00a0Elbit Systems<\/a> to build a \u201cvirtual wall,\u201d a technological barrier set back from the actual international divide in the Arizona desert. That company, whose U.S.-traded stock shot up by 6% during Israel\u2019s massive military operation against Gaza in the summer of 2014, will bring the same databank of technology used in Israel\u2019s borderlands — Gaza and the West Bank — to Southern Arizona through its subsidiary\u00a0Elbit Systems of America<\/a>.<\/p>\nWith approximately 12,000 employees and, as it boasts, \u201c10+ years\u00a0securing<\/a>the world\u2019s most challenging borders,\u201d Elbit produces an arsenal of \u201chomeland security systems.\u201d These include surveillance land vehicles, mini-unmanned aerial systems, and \u201csmart fences,\u201d highly fortified steel barriers that have the ability to sense a person\u2019s touch or movement. In its role as lead system integrator for Israel\u2019s border technology plan, the company has already installed smart fences in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.<\/p>\nIn Arizona, with up to a billion dollars potentially at its disposal, CBP has tasked Elbit with creating a \u201cwall\u201d of \u201cintegrated fixed towers\u201d containing the latest in cameras, radar, motion sensors, and control rooms. Construction will start in the rugged, desert canyons around Nogales. Once a DHS evaluation deems that part of the project effective, the rest will be built to monitor the full length of the state\u2019s borderlands with Mexico. Keep in mind, however, that these towers are only one part of a broader operation, the\u00a0Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan<\/a>. At this stage, it\u2019s essentially a blueprint for an unprecedented infrastructure of high-tech border fortifications that has attracted the attention of many companies.<\/p>\nThis is not the first time Israeli companies have been involved in a U.S. border build-up. In fact, in 2004, Elbit\u2019s Hermes drones were the first unmanned aerial vehicles to take to the skies topatrol<\/a> the southern border. In 2007, according to Naomi Klein in\u00a0The Shock Doctrine<\/em><\/a>, the Golan Group, an Israeli consulting company made up of former IDF Special Forces officers,provided<\/a> an intensive eight-day course for special DHS immigration agents covering \u201ceverything from hand-to-hand combat to target practice to \u2018getting proactive with their SUV.\u2019\u201d The Israeli company NICE Systems evensupplied<\/a> Arizona\u2019s\u00a0Joe Arpaio<\/a>,\u201cAmerica\u2019s toughest sheriff,\u201d with a surveillance system to watch one of his jails.<\/p>\nAs such border cooperation intensified, journalist Jimmy Johnson\u00a0coined<\/a> the apt phrase \u201cPalestine-Mexico border\u201d to catch what was happening. In 2012, Arizona state legislators,\u00a0sensing<\/a> the potential economic benefit of this growing collaboration, declared their desert state and Israel to be natural \u201ctrade partners,\u201d adding that it was \u201ca relationship we seek to enhance.\u201d<\/p>\nIn this way, the doors were opened to a new world order in which the United States and Israel are to become partners in the \u201claboratory\u201d that is the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Its testing grounds are to be in Arizona. There, largely through a program known as\u00a0Global Advantage<\/a>, American academic and corporate knowhow and Mexican low-wage manufacturing are to fuse with Israel\u2019s border and homeland security companies.<\/p>\nThe Border: Open for Business<\/strong><\/p>\nNo one may frame the budding romance between Israel\u2019s high-tech companies and Arizona better than Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. \u201cIf you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times,\u201d he says, \u201cyou might not be able to tell the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Global Advantage is a business project based on a partnership between the University of Arizona\u2019s Tech Parks Arizona and the Offshore Group, a business advisory and housing firm which offers \u201cnearshore solutions for manufacturers of any size\u201d just across the border in Mexico. Tech Parks Arizona has the lawyers, accountants, and scholars, as well as the technical knowhow, to help any foreign company land softly and set up shop in the state. It will aid that company in addressing legal issues, achieving regulatory compliance, and even finding qualified employees — and through a program it\u2019s called the Israel Business Initiative, Global Advantage has identified its target country.<\/p>\n
Think of it as the perfect example of a post-NAFTA world in which companies dedicated to stopping border crossers are ever freer to cross the same borders themselves. In the spirit of free trade that created the NAFTA treaty, the latest border fortification programs are designed to eliminate borders when it comes to letting high-tech companies from across the seas set up in the United States and make use of Mexico\u2019s manufacturing base to create their products. While Israel and Arizona may be separated by thousands of miles, Rothschild assured\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em> that in \u201ceconomics, there are no borders.\u201d<\/p>\nOf course, what the mayor appreciates, above all, is the way new border technology could bring money and jobs into an area with a nearly 23% poverty rate. How those jobs might be created matters far less to him. According to Molly Gilbert, the director of community engagement for the Tech Parks Arizona, \u201cIt\u2019s really about development, and we want to create technology jobs in our borderlands.\u201d<\/p>\n
So consider it anything but an irony that, in this developing global set of boundary-busting partnerships, the factories that will produce the border fortresses designed by Elbit and other Israeli and U.S. high-tech firms will mainly be located in Mexico. Ill-paid Mexican blue-collar workers will, then, manufacture the very components of a future surveillance regime, which may well help locate, detain, arrest, incarcerate, and expel some of them if they try to cross into the United States.<\/p>\n
Think of Global Advantage as a multinational assembly line, a place where homeland security meets NAFTA. Right now there are reportedly 10 to 20 Israeli companies in active discussion about joining the program. Bruce Wright, the CEO of Tech Parks Arizona, tells\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em> that his organization has a \u201cnondisclosure\u201d agreement with any companies that sign on and so cannot reveal their names.<\/p>\nThough cautious about officially claiming success for Global Advantage\u2019s Israel Business Initiative, Wright brims with optimism about his organization\u2019s cross-national planning. As he talks in a conference room located on the 1,345-acre park on the southern outskirts of Tucson, it\u2019s apparent that he’s buoyed by predictions that the Homeland Security market will grow from a $51 billion annual business in 2012 to\u00a0$81 billion<\/a> in the United States alone by 2020, and\u00a0$544 billion<\/a> worldwide by 2018.<\/p>\nWright knows as well that submarkets for border-related products like video surveillance, non-lethal weaponry, and people-screening technologies are all advancing rapidly and that the U.S. market for drones is poised to create 70,000 new jobs by 2016. Partially fueling this growth is what the\u00a0Associated Press <\/em>calls an\u00a0\u201cunheralded shift\u201d<\/a> to drone surveillance on the U.S. southern divide. More than 10,000 drone flights have been launched into border air space since March 2013, with plans for many more, especially after the Border Patrol doubles its fleet.<\/p>\nWhen Wright speaks, it\u2019s clear he knows that his park sits atop a twenty-first-century gold mine. As he sees it, Southern Arizona, aided by his tech park, will become the perfect laboratory for the first cluster of border security companies in North America. He\u2019s not only thinking about the 57 southern Arizona companies already identified as working in border security and management, but similar companies nationwide and across the globe, especially in Israel.<\/p>\n
In fact, Wright’s aim is to follow Israel\u2019s lead, as it is now the number-one place for such groupings. In his case, the Mexican border would simply replace that country\u2019s highly marketed Palestinian testing grounds. The 18,000 linear feet that surround the tech park\u2019s solar panel farm would, for example, be a perfect spot to test out motion sensors. Companies could also deploy, evaluate, and test their products \u201cin the field,\u201d as he likes to say — that is, where real people are crossing real borders — just as Elbit Systems did before CBP gave it the contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we\u2019re going to be in bed with the border on a day-to-day basis, with all of its problems and issues, and there\u2019s a solution to it,\u201d Wright said in a 2012 interview, \u201cwhy shouldn\u2019t we be the place where the issue is solved and we get the commercial benefit from it?\u201d<\/p>\n
From the Battlefield to the Border<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen Naomi Weiner, project coordinator for the Israel Business Initiative, returned from a trip to that country with University of Arizona researchers in tow, she couldn\u2019t have been more enthusiastic about the possibilities for collaboration. She arrived back in November, just a day before Obama announced his new executive actions — a promising declaration for those, like her, in the business of bolstering border defenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve chosen areas where Israel is very strong and Southern Arizona is very strong,\u201d Weiner explained to\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>, pointing to the surveillance industry \u201csynergy\u201d between the two places. For example, one firm her team met with in Israel was\u00a0Brightway Vision<\/a>, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems. If it decides to set up shop in Arizona, it could use tech park expertise to further develop and refine its thermal imaging cameras and goggles, while exploring ways to repurpose those military products for border surveillance applications. The Offshore Group would then manufacture the cameras and goggles in Mexico.<\/p>\nArizona, as Weiner puts it, possesses the \u201ccomplete package\u201d for such Israeli companies. \u201cWe\u2019re sitting right on the border, close to Fort Huachuca,\u201d a nearby military base where, among other things, technicians control the drones surveilling the borderlands. \u201cWe have the relationship with Customs and Border Protection, so there\u2019s a lot going on here. And we\u2019re also the Center of Excellence on Homeland Security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weiner is referring to the fact that, in 2008, DHS designated the University of Arizona the lead school for the\u00a0Center of Excellence<\/a> on Border Security and Immigration. Thanks to that, it has since received millions of dollars in federal grants. Focusing on research and development of border-policing technologies, the center is a place where, among other things, engineers are studying locust wings in order to create miniature drones equipped with cameras that can get into the tiniest of spaces near ground level, while large drones like the Predator B continue to buzz over the borderlands at 30,000 feet (despite the fact that a\u00a0recent audit<\/a> by the inspector general of homeland security found them a waste of money).<\/p>\nAlthough the Arizona-Israeli romance is still in the courtship stage, excitement about its possibilities is growing. Officials from Tech Parks Arizona see Global Advantage as the perfect way to strengthen the U.S.-Israel \u201cspecial relationship.\u201d There is no other place in the world with a higher concentration of homeland security tech companies than Israel. Six hundred tech start-ups are launched in Tel Aviv alone every year. During the Gaza offensive last summer,\u00a0Bloomberg<\/em> reported<\/a> that investment in such companies had \u201cactually accelerated.\u201d However, despite the periodic military operations in Gaza and the incessant build-up of the Israeli homeland security regime, there are serious limitations to the local market.<\/p>\nThe Israeli Ministry of Economy is painfully aware of this. Its officials know that the growth of the Israeli economy is \u201clargely fueled<\/a> by a steady increase in exports and foreign investment.\u201d The government coddles, cultivates, and supports these start-up tech companies until their products are market-ready. Among them have been innovations like the \u201cskunk,\u201d a liquid with a putrid odor meant to stop unruly crowds in their tracks. The ministry has also been successful in taking such products to market across the globe. In the decade following 9\/11, sales of Israeli \u201csecurity exports<\/a>\u201d rose from $2 billion to $7 billion annually.<\/p>\nIsraeli companies have sold surveillance drones to Latin American countries like\u00a0Mexico<\/a>, Chile, and\u00a0Colombia<\/a>, and massive security systems to India and Brazil, where an electro-optic surveillance system will be deployed along the country\u2019s borders with Paraguay and Bolivia. They have also been involved in preparations for policing the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. The products of Elbit Systems and its subsidiaries are now in use from the Americas and Europe to Australia. Meanwhile, that mammoth security firm is ever more involved in finding \u201ccivilian applications\u201d for its war technologies. It is also ever more dedicated to bringing the battlefield to the world\u2019s borderlands, including southern Arizona.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nPhoto Credit: ruskpp\/Shutterstock.com<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country\u2019s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. \u201cWe have learned lots from Gaza,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cIt\u2019s a great laboratory.\u201d<\/p>\n Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology — the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet.<\/p>\n Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.<\/p>\n Just a few more minutes on foot and Elkabetz could have watched green-striped U.S. Border Patrol vehicles inching along the trickling Rio Grande in front of Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexico\u2019s largest cities filled with U.S. factories and the dead of that country\u2019s drug wars. The Border Patrol agents whom the general might have spotted were then being up-armored with a lethal combination of surveillance technologies, military hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and drones. This once-peaceful place was being transformed into what Timothy Dunn, in his book\u00a0The Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border<\/em><\/a>, terms a state of \u201clow-intensity warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n The Border Surge<\/strong><\/p>\n On November 20, 2014, President Obama\u00a0announced<\/a> a series of executive actions on immigration reform. Addressing the American people, he referred to bipartisan immigration legislation\u00a0passed<\/a> by the Senate in June 2013 that would, among other things, further up-armor the same landscape in what\u2019s been termed — in language adopted from recent U.S. war zones — a \u201cborder surge.\u201d The president bemoaned the fact that the bill had been stalled in the House of Representatives, hailing it as a \u201ccompromise\u201d that \u201creflected common sense.\u201d It would, he pointed out, \u201chave doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, while giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n In the wake of his announcement, including executive actions that would protect five to six million of those immigrants from future deportation, the national debate was quickly framed as a conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Missed in this partisan war of words was one thing: the initial executive action that Obama announced involved a further militarization of the border supported by both parties.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst,\u201d the president said, \u201cwe\u2019ll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over.\u201d Without further elaboration, he then moved on to other matters.<\/p>\n If, however, the United States follows the \u201ccommon sense\u201d of the border-surge bill, the result could add more than $40 billion dollars\u00a0worth of<\/a> agents, advanced technologies, walls, and other barriers to an already unparalleled border enforcement apparatus. And a crucial signal would be sent to the private sector that, as the trade magazine\u00a0Homeland Security Today<\/em> puts it, another \u201ctreasure trove<\/a>\u201d of profit is on the way for a border control market already, according to the latest forecasts, in an \u201cunprecedented boom period<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Like the Gaza Strip for the Israelis, the U.S. borderlands, dubbed a \u201cconstitution-free zone<\/a>\u201d by the ACLU, are becoming a vast open-air laboratory for tech companies. There, almost any form of surveillance and \u201csecurity\u201d can be developed, tested, and showcased, as if in a militarized shopping mall, for other nations across the planet to consider. In this fashion, border security is becoming a global industry and few corporate complexes can be more pleased by this than the one that has developed in Elkabetz\u2019s Israel.<\/p>\n The Palestine-Mexico Border<\/strong><\/p>\n Consider the IDF brigadier general\u2019s presence in El Paso two years ago an omen. After all, in February 2014, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency in charge of policing our borders, contracted with Israel\u2019s giant private military manufacturer\u00a0Elbit Systems<\/a> to build a \u201cvirtual wall,\u201d a technological barrier set back from the actual international divide in the Arizona desert. That company, whose U.S.-traded stock shot up by 6% during Israel\u2019s massive military operation against Gaza in the summer of 2014, will bring the same databank of technology used in Israel\u2019s borderlands — Gaza and the West Bank — to Southern Arizona through its subsidiary\u00a0Elbit Systems of America<\/a>.<\/p>\n With approximately 12,000 employees and, as it boasts, \u201c10+ years\u00a0securing<\/a>the world\u2019s most challenging borders,\u201d Elbit produces an arsenal of \u201chomeland security systems.\u201d These include surveillance land vehicles, mini-unmanned aerial systems, and \u201csmart fences,\u201d highly fortified steel barriers that have the ability to sense a person\u2019s touch or movement. In its role as lead system integrator for Israel\u2019s border technology plan, the company has already installed smart fences in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.<\/p>\n In Arizona, with up to a billion dollars potentially at its disposal, CBP has tasked Elbit with creating a \u201cwall\u201d of \u201cintegrated fixed towers\u201d containing the latest in cameras, radar, motion sensors, and control rooms. Construction will start in the rugged, desert canyons around Nogales. Once a DHS evaluation deems that part of the project effective, the rest will be built to monitor the full length of the state\u2019s borderlands with Mexico. Keep in mind, however, that these towers are only one part of a broader operation, the\u00a0Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan<\/a>. At this stage, it\u2019s essentially a blueprint for an unprecedented infrastructure of high-tech border fortifications that has attracted the attention of many companies.<\/p>\n This is not the first time Israeli companies have been involved in a U.S. border build-up. In fact, in 2004, Elbit\u2019s Hermes drones were the first unmanned aerial vehicles to take to the skies topatrol<\/a> the southern border. In 2007, according to Naomi Klein in\u00a0The Shock Doctrine<\/em><\/a>, the Golan Group, an Israeli consulting company made up of former IDF Special Forces officers,provided<\/a> an intensive eight-day course for special DHS immigration agents covering \u201ceverything from hand-to-hand combat to target practice to \u2018getting proactive with their SUV.\u2019\u201d The Israeli company NICE Systems evensupplied<\/a> Arizona\u2019s\u00a0Joe Arpaio<\/a>,\u201cAmerica\u2019s toughest sheriff,\u201d with a surveillance system to watch one of his jails.<\/p>\n As such border cooperation intensified, journalist Jimmy Johnson\u00a0coined<\/a> the apt phrase \u201cPalestine-Mexico border\u201d to catch what was happening. In 2012, Arizona state legislators,\u00a0sensing<\/a> the potential economic benefit of this growing collaboration, declared their desert state and Israel to be natural \u201ctrade partners,\u201d adding that it was \u201ca relationship we seek to enhance.\u201d<\/p>\n In this way, the doors were opened to a new world order in which the United States and Israel are to become partners in the \u201claboratory\u201d that is the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Its testing grounds are to be in Arizona. There, largely through a program known as\u00a0Global Advantage<\/a>, American academic and corporate knowhow and Mexican low-wage manufacturing are to fuse with Israel\u2019s border and homeland security companies.<\/p>\n The Border: Open for Business<\/strong><\/p>\n No one may frame the budding romance between Israel\u2019s high-tech companies and Arizona better than Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. \u201cIf you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times,\u201d he says, \u201cyou might not be able to tell the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n Global Advantage is a business project based on a partnership between the University of Arizona\u2019s Tech Parks Arizona and the Offshore Group, a business advisory and housing firm which offers \u201cnearshore solutions for manufacturers of any size\u201d just across the border in Mexico. Tech Parks Arizona has the lawyers, accountants, and scholars, as well as the technical knowhow, to help any foreign company land softly and set up shop in the state. It will aid that company in addressing legal issues, achieving regulatory compliance, and even finding qualified employees — and through a program it\u2019s called the Israel Business Initiative, Global Advantage has identified its target country.<\/p>\n Think of it as the perfect example of a post-NAFTA world in which companies dedicated to stopping border crossers are ever freer to cross the same borders themselves. In the spirit of free trade that created the NAFTA treaty, the latest border fortification programs are designed to eliminate borders when it comes to letting high-tech companies from across the seas set up in the United States and make use of Mexico\u2019s manufacturing base to create their products. While Israel and Arizona may be separated by thousands of miles, Rothschild assured\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em> that in \u201ceconomics, there are no borders.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, what the mayor appreciates, above all, is the way new border technology could bring money and jobs into an area with a nearly 23% poverty rate. How those jobs might be created matters far less to him. According to Molly Gilbert, the director of community engagement for the Tech Parks Arizona, \u201cIt\u2019s really about development, and we want to create technology jobs in our borderlands.\u201d<\/p>\n So consider it anything but an irony that, in this developing global set of boundary-busting partnerships, the factories that will produce the border fortresses designed by Elbit and other Israeli and U.S. high-tech firms will mainly be located in Mexico. Ill-paid Mexican blue-collar workers will, then, manufacture the very components of a future surveillance regime, which may well help locate, detain, arrest, incarcerate, and expel some of them if they try to cross into the United States.<\/p>\n Think of Global Advantage as a multinational assembly line, a place where homeland security meets NAFTA. Right now there are reportedly 10 to 20 Israeli companies in active discussion about joining the program. Bruce Wright, the CEO of Tech Parks Arizona, tells\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em> that his organization has a \u201cnondisclosure\u201d agreement with any companies that sign on and so cannot reveal their names.<\/p>\n Though cautious about officially claiming success for Global Advantage\u2019s Israel Business Initiative, Wright brims with optimism about his organization\u2019s cross-national planning. As he talks in a conference room located on the 1,345-acre park on the southern outskirts of Tucson, it\u2019s apparent that he’s buoyed by predictions that the Homeland Security market will grow from a $51 billion annual business in 2012 to\u00a0$81 billion<\/a> in the United States alone by 2020, and\u00a0$544 billion<\/a> worldwide by 2018.<\/p>\n Wright knows as well that submarkets for border-related products like video surveillance, non-lethal weaponry, and people-screening technologies are all advancing rapidly and that the U.S. market for drones is poised to create 70,000 new jobs by 2016. Partially fueling this growth is what the\u00a0Associated Press <\/em>calls an\u00a0\u201cunheralded shift\u201d<\/a> to drone surveillance on the U.S. southern divide. More than 10,000 drone flights have been launched into border air space since March 2013, with plans for many more, especially after the Border Patrol doubles its fleet.<\/p>\n When Wright speaks, it\u2019s clear he knows that his park sits atop a twenty-first-century gold mine. As he sees it, Southern Arizona, aided by his tech park, will become the perfect laboratory for the first cluster of border security companies in North America. He\u2019s not only thinking about the 57 southern Arizona companies already identified as working in border security and management, but similar companies nationwide and across the globe, especially in Israel.<\/p>\n In fact, Wright’s aim is to follow Israel\u2019s lead, as it is now the number-one place for such groupings. In his case, the Mexican border would simply replace that country\u2019s highly marketed Palestinian testing grounds. The 18,000 linear feet that surround the tech park\u2019s solar panel farm would, for example, be a perfect spot to test out motion sensors. Companies could also deploy, evaluate, and test their products \u201cin the field,\u201d as he likes to say — that is, where real people are crossing real borders — just as Elbit Systems did before CBP gave it the contract.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019re going to be in bed with the border on a day-to-day basis, with all of its problems and issues, and there\u2019s a solution to it,\u201d Wright said in a 2012 interview, \u201cwhy shouldn\u2019t we be the place where the issue is solved and we get the commercial benefit from it?\u201d<\/p>\n From the Battlefield to the Border<\/strong><\/p>\n When Naomi Weiner, project coordinator for the Israel Business Initiative, returned from a trip to that country with University of Arizona researchers in tow, she couldn\u2019t have been more enthusiastic about the possibilities for collaboration. She arrived back in November, just a day before Obama announced his new executive actions — a promising declaration for those, like her, in the business of bolstering border defenses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve chosen areas where Israel is very strong and Southern Arizona is very strong,\u201d Weiner explained to\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>, pointing to the surveillance industry \u201csynergy\u201d between the two places. For example, one firm her team met with in Israel was\u00a0Brightway Vision<\/a>, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems. If it decides to set up shop in Arizona, it could use tech park expertise to further develop and refine its thermal imaging cameras and goggles, while exploring ways to repurpose those military products for border surveillance applications. The Offshore Group would then manufacture the cameras and goggles in Mexico.<\/p>\n Arizona, as Weiner puts it, possesses the \u201ccomplete package\u201d for such Israeli companies. \u201cWe\u2019re sitting right on the border, close to Fort Huachuca,\u201d a nearby military base where, among other things, technicians control the drones surveilling the borderlands. \u201cWe have the relationship with Customs and Border Protection, so there\u2019s a lot going on here. And we\u2019re also the Center of Excellence on Homeland Security.\u201d<\/p>\n Weiner is referring to the fact that, in 2008, DHS designated the University of Arizona the lead school for the\u00a0Center of Excellence<\/a> on Border Security and Immigration. Thanks to that, it has since received millions of dollars in federal grants. Focusing on research and development of border-policing technologies, the center is a place where, among other things, engineers are studying locust wings in order to create miniature drones equipped with cameras that can get into the tiniest of spaces near ground level, while large drones like the Predator B continue to buzz over the borderlands at 30,000 feet (despite the fact that a\u00a0recent audit<\/a> by the inspector general of homeland security found them a waste of money).<\/p>\n Although the Arizona-Israeli romance is still in the courtship stage, excitement about its possibilities is growing. Officials from Tech Parks Arizona see Global Advantage as the perfect way to strengthen the U.S.-Israel \u201cspecial relationship.\u201d There is no other place in the world with a higher concentration of homeland security tech companies than Israel. Six hundred tech start-ups are launched in Tel Aviv alone every year. During the Gaza offensive last summer,\u00a0Bloomberg<\/em> reported<\/a> that investment in such companies had \u201cactually accelerated.\u201d However, despite the periodic military operations in Gaza and the incessant build-up of the Israeli homeland security regime, there are serious limitations to the local market.<\/p>\n The Israeli Ministry of Economy is painfully aware of this. Its officials know that the growth of the Israeli economy is \u201clargely fueled<\/a> by a steady increase in exports and foreign investment.\u201d The government coddles, cultivates, and supports these start-up tech companies until their products are market-ready. Among them have been innovations like the \u201cskunk,\u201d a liquid with a putrid odor meant to stop unruly crowds in their tracks. The ministry has also been successful in taking such products to market across the globe. In the decade following 9\/11, sales of Israeli \u201csecurity exports<\/a>\u201d rose from $2 billion to $7 billion annually.<\/p>\n Israeli companies have sold surveillance drones to Latin American countries like\u00a0Mexico<\/a>, Chile, and\u00a0Colombia<\/a>, and massive security systems to India and Brazil, where an electro-optic surveillance system will be deployed along the country\u2019s borders with Paraguay and Bolivia. They have also been involved in preparations for policing the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. The products of Elbit Systems and its subsidiaries are now in use from the Americas and Europe to Australia. Meanwhile, that mammoth security firm is ever more involved in finding \u201ccivilian applications\u201d for its war technologies. It is also ever more dedicated to bringing the battlefield to the world\u2019s borderlands, including southern Arizona.<\/p>\n