Stimulus plan includes "virtual fence".

• Position: Illegal Immigration

One of the many unnoticed pet projects included in the massive $800,000,000,000 economic stimulus plan is $100,000,000 for Boeing Inc. to resume work on the troubled "virtual fence"--the $8,000,000,000 2006 plan to construct a highly sophisticated electronic barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico.

As a result of the technical problems, the Department of Homeland Security put the virtual fence project on hold in 2008 after spending billions to make technology take the place of a physical fence. In total, DHS built only 28 miles of virtual fence in a pilot project south of Tucson, Ariz., before declaring it a failure and mothballing the project because of insurmountable technical problems, including rain, according to a Wall Street Journal report. DHS objected to the story, claiming that, even though more virtual fence was not going to be built to extend the 28-mile project, the Fiscal Year 2009 DHS budget would include $775,000,000 to continue deployment of technology along the border. The problem with the virtual fence is that the complex set of electronic detection devices Boeing wants to put on the border with Mexico will stop virtually no one, critics insist. Still, this did not restrain Democrats in the Senate from slipping more money into the plan.

Mark Borkowski, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative program, has stated that the virtual fence project still faces significant challenges, among which is the need to tamp down public expectations that technology can solve the nation's problems with illegal immigration and border security.

After getting the additional funds for Boeing, DHS immediately began promising very little. "We fell into a message that this technology was going to be a great, God-given gift to border security," notes Borkowski, the third official to head the virtual fence project for DHS in the last three years. "Now we need to do a better job of marketing what it will--and won't--be producing." Borkowski...