Need to cross the border, but don't know where to start? New cellphone app may help...

A new cellphone application created by three professors from UC San Diego, and one from University of Michigan, will help illegal immigrants to cross the border, providing information on key landmarks and where to find water in their trek across the desert to the land of the American Dream. 

Some applaud it, some call it an "inappropriate use of taxpayer funds and an irresponsible use of technology," according to Fox News story "Critics Blast Transborder Immigrant Tool as 'Irresponsible." here's the link to read more: http://topstories.foxnews.mobi/quickPage.html?page=17224&content=34865719&pageNum=-1

It's true that by providing useful information on crossing the desert this new application could save peoples' lives, such as the 111 whose deaths were attributed to border-crossings last year. But the app also tells people when and where border patrols are expected to hit. That doesn't really sound like a safety thing to me. 

But anyways, it got me thinking...

We're narrowing in on all the wrong things here. Let's take a minute to sit back and breathe this one in.

First, are there really multiple university professors out there, right now, getting paid their respective state's hard earned cash to design an application to assist people in technically breaking the law? Funds that could be going to let's say, classes that are getting canceled & causing riots and such in UCs; funds that could be going to my sister's paycheck so that she doesn't get cut from the budget every year because she's not yet tenured, and at this rate, won't ever be; funds that could be going continuing benefits and retirement that were promised to  - but now ripped away from - daycare workers and other non-teaching employees; funds going to improved salaries, new equipment, medical supplies, books, etc. 

It warms my heart to think that some so called "professorial staff" out there, probably getting high, are planning out really important experiments with their research money, not like medical phone apps, or GPS locating apps that could save lives like in Haiti - no let's help people cross the border. 

And why are we making it so easy for people to enter the country all of the sudden? ;) Gone are the days when illegal immigrants had to just run balls out and hope not to get picked up by a floodlight while scaling an enormous wall topped with barbed wire. 

I mean really, marinate on this one a moment. I see a whole new slew of "when I was your age stories from parents." 

I can just see it now, the whole family sitting around the three-foot, plastic Christmas tree. Uncle Reggie, first time in America, joining the fam, gets lauded by gramps because, "When I was your age...

"We didn't have no cellphone gizmos to get us cross the border. In my day, you had the clothes on your back and some tortillas. Son, I dodged minutemen, border cops and la policia, uphill, both ways, with no shoes, and your sister under my arm. That's how we did. You kids don't even know how easy you have it these days."

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the best part: read this quick description from Fox: 

"The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT)... a software application that can be installed into a GPS-enabled cell phone. In addition to helping immigrants locate water and landmarks, it also could alert them to Border Patrol checkpoints. And to make the trek a little less arduous, it also plays recorded poetry."

It's the little extras that really make a product sparkle.

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Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.