Border Crisis needs "Systems Thinking."

Vice President Harris and Secretary Mayorkas need to apply “Systems Thinking” to their Border Crisis Strategy.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) guidelines it is the Federal Government’s responsibility to protect the nation's borders—land, air, and sea—from the illegal entry of people, weapons, drugs, and contraband is vital to our homeland security, as well as economic prosperity. 

The USA Border Process continues to get worse, and everyone blames everyone else and like everything today it is mostly based on Partisan Political Agendas. Unfortunately, most people just want the problem solved and expect our political leaders to do their job. “The Border Process works within a System. The Federal Government owns the System.”

A system is a whole consisting of two or more parts, (1) each of which can affect the performance or properties of the whole, (2) none of which can have an independent effect on the whole, and (3) no subgroup of which can have independent effect on the whole. In short, then, a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts or subgroups of parts.

Basically, this means you must look at the Broder System from an end-to-end perspective and involve all participating people, places and processes in order to make lasting and change and improvement.

As I have said in many posts, without using “systems thinking” and involving all groups (interdependencies) from beginning to end you will only continue to band aid (tamper) the system.

Think of the 1 as one dollar, the 10 as ten dollars and the 100 as one hundred dollars. The concept is simple when you realize that most problems originate at the beginning of a process/system and grow much larger and complex as they move through the process.

Below is a graphic example. Please note the measures and feedback points that must be established along the system. Remember when Automobile companies checked for defects after the car was built? It took years to figure out that we need to build quality in at the design stage way up front as well as all throughout the selling and manufacture processes that made up the system. The key is “UPFRONT” so you won’t experience the “UNKOWN.”

Click on PIC to Enlarge

I use dollars (you can also use "Degrees of Complexity") because that is what gets everyone's attention (Plus, it's true). If we practice prevention and institute requirements or standards at the beginning of the process (Diplomatic Reasoning/Power with the sending countries and continue to set and monitor them as we progress through the Border System, we can save many dollars and pain upfront in the system the cost (1$) will be minimal as opposed to downstream (more importantly people). When the people are in Mexico and we discover problems, it will cost 10 times as much to solve and correct the problem. In the United States it will be 100 times more costly and complex to identify the problems and to solve them.

By far the biggest problem is the unknown, those illegals that go undetected and are never accounted for will costs an unknow amount of dollars that result in system failures that will have devastating effects to our society and economic well-being. I don't have a problem with legal immigration to the United States, but illegals are not vetted for health diseases or past criminal activities so instead of remaining the problem of the foreign country they become the problem of the U.S.