The Transborder Immigrant Tool is part technology endeavor, part art project. It introduces a high-tech twist to an old debate about how far activists can go to prevent migrants from dying on the border without breaking the law.
Immigration hard-liners argue that the activists are aiding illegal entry to the United States, a felony. Even migrants and their sympathizers question whether the device will make the treacherous journey easier.
The designers - three visual artists on UCSD’s faculty and an English professor at the University of Michigan - are undeterred as they criticize a US policy that they say embraces some illegal immigrants for cheap labor while letting others die crossing the border.
“It’s about giving water to somebody who’s dying in the desert of dehydration,’’ said Micha Cardenas, 32, a UCSD lecturer.
The effort is being done on the government’s dime - an irony not lost on the designers, whose salaries are paid by the state of California.
“There are many, many areas in which every American would say, ‘I don’t like the way my tax dollars are being spent.’ Our answer to that is an in-your-face ‘So what?’ ’’ says UCSD lecturer Brett Stalbaum, 33, a self-described news junkie who likens his role to chief technology officer.
Migrants walk for days in extreme heat, often eating tuna and crackers handed out at migrant shelters in Mexico. On Arizona ranches, they sip desperately from bins used by cows when their water runs out.
Hundreds have perished each year since heightened US border enforcement pushed migrants out of large cities like San Diego and El Paso in the 1990s. In response, migrant sympathizers put jugs or even barrels of water in the desert.
The designers want to load inexpensive phones with GPS software that takes signals from satellites, independent of phone networks. Pressing a menu button displays water stations, with the distance to each. A user selects one and follows an arrow on the screen.
Some worry the software could lead migrants to damaged or abandoned water stations. Others wonder if it would lull them into a false sense of security, or alert the Border Patrol and volunteer border enforcers to their whereabouts.
