Back at the podium, Owens explained how hard it is to control the border. He calculated 7,500 miles just counting the Mexican and Canadian borders. Imagine, he asked the audience, how many agents you would need, how much assistance you would need to cover all these miles. “We need more people. We need more stuff,” he said repeatedly to a sea of nodding heads. It wasn’t just protecting the green family that needed protections; we need, he said, to protect “our way of life.” While Owens was stressing how overwhelming, if not impossible, the border enforcement mission is, I wondered if what he described was also tantalizing to industry, showing all the areas of potential market growth.
But without press, there was no way to ask. You couldn’t ask about the budgets, the profit, the record contracts. You couldn’t even ask about the tequila scandal. All you had was the expo narrative of security, innovations, and adversaries. Eventually, I needed to walk out into the fresh air.