Border Crossings: There's an App for That

(Dec. 18) -- Ricardo Dominguez describes himself an "artivist" -- a cross between an artist and activist -- and he calls his newest act of civil disobedience a "Transborder Immigrant Tool."

It's a cheap Motorola cell phone retrofitted with GPS technology. Dominguez, an associate professor of new media arts at the University of California, San Diego, hopes to get the tool into the hands of people making the treacherous crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border on the so-called Devil's Highway.

"It's designed to save lives. It's not going to promote the crossing or stop the crossing," says Dominguez, 50, who developed the technology with other researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

"In terms of the civil disobedience we follow, we consider the right of safe passage to be a trans-global right," he adds. "What happens once an immigrant gets here, that's a national discussion."

The Transborder Immigrant Tool was inspired by a university colleague of Dominguez's who developed a Virtual Hiker Tool to help him keep his bearings during desert hikes. The Transborder Immigrant Tool will give the user basic orientation, distance from destination, and the location of water. (It will also be loaded with short, haiku-like poems written by poet Amy Carroll. "We wanted to have a hospitality tool," Dominguez says of the poems. "At the core of the poems is a rethinking of the idea that good fences make good neighbors. Borders do not make good neighbors. We should be welcoming.")

The tool, which will cost less than $30 per unit, is undergoing field testing and tweaking. Dominguez has so far collected $15,000 in grants to fund its development and rollout, and by next summer, his plan is to have churches and groups like Border Angels and No Mas Muertes distribute the phones and train users on their features.

The information in the phone will be good for only four days, and instead of a traditional triangulated GPS technology, they will use a "single-bounce" system. They will be encrypted to avoid detection by the Border Patrol and other authorities.

Predictably, Dominguez's invention has stoked some fiery reactions.

"He's aiding and abetting criminals," said Barbara Coe, co-founder and chairwoman of California Coalition for Immigration Reform. "But the government will do nothing to stop him because the more immigrants who come, the happier they are."

Mark Cromer, a fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization, wrote: "Dominguez and his fellow travelers at UCSD -- well-meaning as they may indeed be -- are deploying technology that could have come right off the Christmas wish list of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big agribusiness hungry for cheap labor." Cromer went on to ask: "I wonder how it will play with the American workers who now fill the unemployment lines?"

Dominguez, though, is unfazed. "Anything that destabilizes the border," he says, "is going to create critiques."