For Safer Borders: We Don't Need To Close 'Em
October 25, 2001

By Tamar Jacoby

In the wake of Sept. 11, America plainly needs to beef up its border security. But it would be a mistake to allow our understandable concern for safety to rush us headlong into a needless closing of the borders. Too much is at stake: too much of the way we live, but also too much of what makes America great - the very values of freedom and openness we have gone to war to defend.

Restrictionist fervor is in the air in Washington. Legislators have floated proposals for a moratorium on student visas. Still others have called for a draconian militarization of the border - or for shutting it down entirely for six months. Modest efforts to enhance security are already creating havoc along both the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. In the days after Sept. 11, customs agents went on "Level 1" alert, stopping every single vehicle to question drivers and inspect trucks.

The immediate result: many-mile-long backups and hours-long delays at checkpoints. In the weeks since, these snafus and associated costs have translated into a sharp drop in traffic - in some places, as much as 50 percent.

Businesses and entire towns are feeling the pain. Thanks to the tremendously profitable economic integration spurred by NAFTA, many firms on the Mexican border are entirely dependent on cross-border traffic, whether of customers, workers, parts or goods. In some cities, as much as half to two-thirds of all retail trade is with people from the other side. In Tijuana alone, some 80,000 people cross over just to get to work each day.

Legal or not, Mexican workers now make up 80 percent of our farmhands and are rapidly taking over a range of other industries, from meat-packing to carpet manufacture. And many who don't cross - including the million who man the maquila assembly plants just south side of the border - play a vital role in our economy.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-Canadian trade flow is the largest in the world, at $420 billion last year. So the sealing of either border would come at a huge economic cost - even as America is already fighting recession.

The U.S. can have security and globalization too. But we must distinguish sensible precautions from the restrictionist fervor threatening to run amok in Washington.

Many of the ideas floating around on Capitol Hill are worth pursuing.

Increased intelligence - including giving the Immigration and Naturalization Service access to FBI data bases - is a no-brainer. The technology used at the borders is woefully backward, and must be updated as rapidly as possible, whatever the cost.

Another no-brainer: Start enforcing existing laws for ensuring that foreign students actually enroll in classes.

Export-import businesses and frequent travelers should be given incentives to monitor themselves. Companies that can reliably guarantee the security of their cargo should have access to a fast track through customs, for example.

The international commuting so crucial to many border towns - but now moving at a snail's pace thanks to tightened security - could be greatly eased by a system not unlike EZ-Pass.

The toughest call may be whether to require foreigners to carry biometric identity-card visas or even check in regularly with authorities.

No one can quarrel with the goal: ensuring that visitors with expired visas go home. But a tracking system only makes sense if accompanied by far more political candor about who is in the country and why.

Most of the 8 to 9 million undocumented workers now in the U.S. pose no threat of terrorism; indeed, many are essential to our economy. But because there is no legal pipeline for them to enter the country, the nation effectively pretends they don't exist - and they are forced to live as if they were criminals.

As a result, the Border Patrol spends most of its resources chasing busboys and farmhands - rather than intercepting potential terrorists.

Back in July, President Bush proposed to bring immigration into line with market needs by creating a guest-worker program and regularizing the status of many undocumented workers. That package now appears dead in the water. But it would be an important step toward recognizing reality and - hard as it will be in the current political climate - Congress should return to it as soon as possible.

Cutting back the number of these crucial foreign workers will solve nothing; regularizing their transit and monitoring it in a streamlined, efficient way, perhaps with high-tech identity cards, would free thousands of border agents to do the job the nation really needs them to do - catching bona fide criminals.

We mustn't kid ourselves: No matter what we do, it will be extremely difficult to catch terrorists at the border. It's a matter of picking a few score of suspects out of the mind-boggling half billion entries processed every year.

But simply making the system work as it should - acknowledging our need for foreign labor, effectively computerizing the screening process, bringing staff levels in line with reality, streamlining the INS (one of the most cumbersome and inefficient federal bureaucracies) - would do more than all the radical proposals to secure the nation against terrorism.

©2001 New York Post

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