If you want quality people, it costs money. You get what you pay for. And we do.
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Exactly. Is never an issue of how much money a person has, he can be a millionaire and still do all kinds of corrupt things (See Donald Trump). It’s all about greed, you can pay the CBP officer 200K, if the man is greedy he will still take the 5K per event that drug runners offer him.
Our local paper The Arizona Daily Star ran a story on this yesterday…
I suppose this fits right in with trump’s concepts of this folks from south of the border.
Tens of millions of people are working hard for less, and managing to do it without breaking an oath and the law.
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Let’s have this discussion when we actually pay CBP officers anywhere near that.
Until then, it’s not a legit comparison point to make.
If you did pay that well, then you’d get a lot higher-qualified candidates.
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I don’t think anyone disagrees with you on that point. We just don’t believe that a pay increase that is within reason is going to go very far to fix the problems with CBP agents as a whole.
Again, we have a supposedly Wharton School graduate billionaire in the White House. And he cannot avoid doing all kinds of petty acts of corruption like list price billing for the SS agents in his clubs, or encouraging foreign visitor to stay at his hotels. Again my conviction is that corruption has nothing to do with training and education, much less wealth. It’s about integrity.
U.S. Border Patrol Agent Matthew Bowen is an example of why the Border Patrol enjoys the reputation is has…which is not a good one.
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In trump’s world integrity would get you fired.
Unfortunately I am all too familiar with the subject of integrity. Years ago my honesty cost me a very good job and it took 4 months to get employed again. I had been employed in a large medical school. Luckily I got hired on in a different department in that same University’s medical school. And my reputation for calling it as I saw it followed me. Which as it turned out was not a bad thing in the long run. The original boss I had was, shall we say, not the best. He was sent to Phoenix to work on the medical school’s secondary campus. Sort of a sideways move to remove any conflict.
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About the only thing keeping him from being a war criminal is that Trump hasn’t declared a shooting war on immigrants…yet.
My unexpert view is that good training is indicative of good culture and good management. Good training doesn’t make somebody less corrupt, but it is part of an environment where corruption doesn’t easily take root.
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Which is cause and which is effect?
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Projecting just like his hero in the Whitehouse. MAGA.
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Somewhere up the chain, his ancestors were the same ‘subhuman’ sh…, which makes him one as well! But then idiots like him have no brain power to think that logically - after all he very likely is a Trump worshiper and so you cannot expect anything better from this piece of garbage and others like him in the ‘agency’!
I lived in the El Paso Sector for 27 years. We heard it on the local news once or twice a month. As my barber was fond of saying, “Money talks and bullshit walks.” CBP uniformed personnel are not particularly well-paid, and the folks who want to bring contraband across the border are very well-funded.
They are also experts at harassment. I was westbound on I-10 from Las Cruces to Deming with a friend who is fluent in Spanish. My Spanish always needs assistance, so we were speaking Spanish. We didn’t think to switch to English (or just STFU) when we got to the checkpoint. He’d rolled the driver’s side window down early, and John Q. Law heard us speaking Spanish. He didn’t take our word for it when we said we are both US citizens (we are). We got out our D/Ls and handed them to him. He looked them over and pulled us out of line to park while he checked us out. (We are both as Bunny Bread white bread as it gets.) He kept us there for 10 minutes and let us go when our D/Ls checked out with the DMV. I figured he was going to search the car, but he didn’t bother.
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The Peter Principle in action. This one sounds like a lateral arabesque…
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the shirts are green I think.
I have lived near the border for 50 years. I have been pulled over and asked “Why’d you go to Mexico son?” My reply was “I like the food at the Caverns restaurant (in Nogales). D’you have a problem with that?” (I can get cheeky)… that got a smile.
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And we wonder why so many children are dying in Border Patrol and ICE custody?
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Bowen’s lawyer’s response to these disturbing messages? That his sentiments are “commonplace throughout the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector” and “part of the agency’s culture,” per his attorney, Sean Chapman.
Oh, well, then, carry on…
I didn’t know the grade-school defense known as “everyone else gets to” worked in courts of law. I’ll try that if I ever get busted.