there's been a bit of discussion about the bush administration's decision to contract out port security to a company owned by the united arab emirates. i've been discussing it in the comments to this post and this post*
as i said in my comments there, i'm of two minds about this. on the one hand, there is a real issue of which types of jobs it is appropriate to award to foreign companies. there is a legitimate argument one could make that contracts related to "homeland security" (i still hate that term) should be restricted to american-owned businesses.
i'm not sure if i ultimately agree with the argument, but i at least can see how we would want border security people who are in for it for more than just the money; people who actually have some loyalty to this country. citizenship isn't a perfect proxy for that, but at least one could argue there is some kind of rough correlation between the two.
on the other hand, it's pretty clear to me that some people are concern about this because of the "A" in UAE. apparently, the contract used to be held by a british company and no one raised a fuss. if the british company didn't bother you, but this company does, then i think, there is an element of racism involved.
when i brought this up in the comments over at atrios' place, atrios' response raised another issue. as he said: "But it isn't simply a company based in UAE, it's actually owned by the UAE. That's sort of what tipped it for me as being an issue of legitimate concern."
that raises a completely different issue: the whole reason our country hires contractors to be in charge of port security is because the administration believes that the private sector does a better job at doing stuff like this than the government does. if they thought government could do it well, they wouldn't contract the job out, the DHS would just do it itself.
so if that's the philosophy that underlies this entire program, why does it make any sense to outsource the job to a government-owned company? it's not really the private-sector. and if a government's going to do the job, why not just have our own government do it?
some might argue that Dubai World Ports, the UAE company that was awarded the contract, is not the same as the UAE government. maybe we can still call it "private" even if it is government-owned. maybe publicly owned private businesses are still just as efficient as fully private companies are.
but that doesn't resolve the issue. if a government-owned "private" company is good enough, why doesn't the u.s. government create and fund its own company? the u.s. has done that before; amtrak and the u.s. postal service are both "private" companies that were incorporated by the u.s. government and receive federal funds to perform services dictated by congress.
i think in the end, DWP will ultimately lose its contract because of this hubbub. senator schumer has already called for an investigation. and i think if i am right and DWP does lose its contract it will be driven, in part, by people who are afraid of scary arabs guarding our port. but this controversy also raises the issue why we're outsourcing these jobs to anyone. if the UAE's pseudo-private company is good enough, why can't our own government do it?
UPDATE: i just noticed comments at some of those other posts that point out that the u.s. government did not award the contract to a UAE company. the contracts were awarded to a british company that was later bought out by DWP. i don't know if that makes any difference to my point here, but that's what some are saying is what really happened.
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*if the link doesn't jump you down to the right post scroll down until you see the title "wingnut news-a summary" for the former, and "UAE" for the latter
