A photo essay reveals a startling dissonance between the reality at the border and our national anxiety about its defense.
 | By Cornelia Channing Editorial Assistant, Sunday Opinion |
Like the Equator or a horizon line, national borders are as much ideas as they are physical things. Their reality is created and reinforced by laws and infrastructure, but their meanings, and the stories we tell about them, are open to interpretation. |
It is news to no one that, over the past few decades, the story some on the right have been telling Americans about the U.S.-Mexico border has grown increasingly dire, with tales of chaos, drug smuggling and crime being utilized to bolster arguments for boosting security, separating migrant families, turning away asylum seekers and, famously, building a wall. |
That these breathless accounts hardly match the sobering, even wrenching, reports from journalists on the ground in border towns like Laredo, Brownsville and El Paso of people languishing in crowded homeless shelters and detention centers is also not exactly breaking news. |
But the dissonance has perhaps never been as starkly visible as it was last week, when — against the backdrop of a mounting humanitarian migrant crisis — a border-themed arms expo came to El Paso. |
The photographer Mike Osborne attended the event, which featured speakers from the Department of Homeland Security and boasted a dazzling display of dystopian technology, including A.I.-equipped surveillance cameras, cutting-edge drones and Tasers, bulletproof armor and particularly nightmarish robotic guard dogs. |
Osborne's understated black-and-white images capture the eerily mundane environment in which these products are being presented. The booths, posters and mannequins make the event look like a macabre science fair. |
In a guest essay accompanying the photographs, Megan Stack — a journalist who has spent decades covering the area — writes that Osborne's "carnivalesque images" of the event "portray yet another way to imagine the border: as a business, an entrepreneur's playground, a corporate profit center in which you can get rich in direct proportion to popular fear." |
Stack's essay, which is grounded in her deep understanding of the policy and politics around the border, is the perfect accompaniment to Osborne's photos. Together, they produce a cleareyed portrait of an industry that is selling a very particular story — one that would have Americans believe that the only things standing between their backyard and a lawless wasteland are a "big, beautiful wall" and a robotic dog. |
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