Don't Leave Home Without It!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Sneaking across the border from Mexico to the United States can be a deadly endeavor. A recent report by the U.S. Border Patrol stated that the remains of 191 humans were found in the Tucson Sector in the past year, a number that is up twenty percent over the year before.

The Sonora Desert is hard, hot, and hostile to humans. Those trying to walk into the United States must struggle against the elements while being on the lookout for rattlesnakes, scorpions, rabid coyotes, border patrol agents, and the occasional whack job with a rifle who wants do his or her bit to "protect" white America.

The long walk through the desert is not for sissies!

But the odds of making a safe crossing appear to be improving, thanks to a technological breakthrough by a professor at the University of California at San Diego. Working from a humanitarian perspective, Professor Ricardo Dominguez has invented a cell phone application that guides people across the desert. He said that it locates where the traveler is in relation to where he wants to go - highlighting the best way to get to that point. The program also tells the traveler what to expect when he reaches his destination.

Professor Dominguez calls his application the Transborder Immigrant Tool, and he says simply that it gives people crossing the border "a way not to die." Law enforcement officials are opposed to this new technology, arguing that it will be used by drug smugglers and human traffickers - most of whom have the resources to enter the country in a much less dangerous manner.

Law enforcement also opposes the purely humanitarian practice of leaving jugs of water in the desert to keep people from dying. The jugs of water and this new locator technology aren't going to draw people into the United States - they are coming anyway, forced across the border by an unbelievably cruel poverty that makes our own modest circumstances seem like grotesque affluence. The water and the Transborder Immigrant tool are efforts to save lives.

Maybe for Professor Dominguez's next project he will come up with a way to open minds to the Golden Rule!