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NY Times article: "Vast U.S.-Canada Border Suddenly Poses a Problem"
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Vast U.S.-Canada Border Suddenly Poses a Problem
October 4, 2001
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
SWEETGRASS, Mont., Oct. 3 - Raise the issue of illegal
immigrants sneaking across the border, and images come to
mind of people wading across the Rio Grande or hiking
across a scorching desert.
But for United States Border Patrol officials like Robert
Finley, chief agent for a nearly 500-mile stretch of the
United States- Canadian border here in the Great Plains,
there are other situations to worry about now as he faces
new mandates to secure the border against terrorists.
"There are all kinds of means to get across the prairie
illegally," said Mr. Finley, whose district runs from the
Continental Divide in Montana well into North Dakota.
"People use bicycles here, they drive in on snowmobiles.
They come over by horseback."
Mr. Finley's concerns highlight the difficulties officials
face as they race to tighten this country's 5,000-mile
northern border.
While Congress is set to triple the number of agents along
the world's longest nonmilitarized boundary, those agents
will have to accomplish very different missions in very
different places. In the vast stretches of Rocky Mountain
and Plains states, a more secure border would mean trying
to close an open prairie. At the major urban crossings, it
would mean stepping up security at the risk of creating the
gargantuan backups that have occurred in the last three
weeks.
And while calls for a crackdown on the border here are
understandable, they run counter to what had been the
primary mission for customs, immigration and Border Patrol
agents before the Sept. 11 attacks: to fulfill the promise
of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to make the
border as unobtrusive as possible and to build on the
world's largest bilateral trade flow, now $420 billion a
year.
But that is no longer true, as Attorney General John
Ashcroft and others vow to make border crossings more
rigorous. While about 8,000 patrol agents are along the
United States-Mexico border, just 300 are on the much
longer Canadian front, which includes Alaska's boundary
with western Canada.
"It'd be nice to be able to go 24/7 in some places," said
Mr. Finley, noting that most of the 13 ports of entry in
Montana were not staffed from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. During those
hours, some crossings are blocked with a locked gate;
others have only an orange cone to show that they are
officially "closed." Patrol chiefs like Mr. Finley consider
themselves lucky to have one agent on duty for every 50
miles or more of boundary.
The call for a crackdown is posing equally vexing problems
at the border's busiest crossings.
Four such spots - Blaine, Wash., near Vancouver; Port
Huron, Mich.; Detroit; and Buffalo, N.Y. - together account
for nearly three-quarters of all crossings between the
United States and Canada. Since Sept. 11, each has been the
site of enormous delays, some stretching more than four
hours, as customs and immigration agents have intensified
searches. In Detroit, the busiest commercial entry point
from Canada into the United States, the wait at the
Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario, was about 45
minutes this afternoon.
These delays have disrupted daily routines, because many
people near these crossings live in one country and commute
to the other. But their greatest impact has been economic.
Commercial truckers, whose vehicles require intensive
searches, have been slowed considerably. Tourism has been
hurt, too. At the giant Casino Windsor, which draws 80
percent of its clientele from the United States, business
has plummeted since Sept. 11.
"We are now running about 55 percent of normal," said Jim
Mundy, a spokesman for the casino, which has laid off 87
employees. Casino Windsor, just across the Detroit River,
is Windsor's third-largest employer, behind Ford and
Daimler- Chrysler and ahead of General Motors.
Meanwhile, in Niagara Falls, N.Y., several stores at the
usually bustling Prime Outlets Mall, a popular destination
for shoppers, say business has been down 50 percent or more
in the last three weeks.
Here in Sweetgrass and in nearby del Bonita, where small
crossing outposts are dwarfed by prairie, long lines are
not the problem.
At del Bonita, an American visitor was subjected to a
20-minute search of his vehicle and luggage by a Canadian
immigration inspector, as well as a computer check of his
driver's license. The procedure caused a delay for exactly
one car.
The challenge here is the vast geography that needs to be
covered. "There's going to be some cracks," Mr. Finley
said. "Everybody knows that. We do the best we can with the
manpower we have." Even a tripling of the forces, would
still leave large areas unmonitored.
Given that many more illegal immigrants try to come across
the Mexican border, according to federal estimates, such
disparities are understandable.
Still, the Canadian border is not unknown to terrorists.
Participants in the World Trade Center bombing eight years
ago appeared to have used Canadian immigration papers to
gain access to the United States. Ahmed Ressam, who was
arrested by United States customs officials in December
1999 with a carload of explosives, and convicted, had tried
to enter Washington State by a ferry from Victoria, British
Columbia.
In the nation's capital today, the chiefs of the Customs
Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service told
a Senate subcommittee that they needed more agents and
better technology to guard the border. But some experts are
skeptical about how much of a difference additional agents
would make.
"It will have a placebo effect more than anything else,"
said Demetrios Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration
Policy Institute, a Washington nonprofit group that studies
immigration and border issues. "It may make us feel a
little better. There is no way you can truly secure that
border."
One proposal, advanced by Paul Cellucci, the United States
ambassador to Canada, would require the two countries to so
enmesh their immigration laws and monitoring procedures
that the border itself would be all but invisible.
After Sept. 11, such concepts are even more firmly rooted
in the realm of fantasy. Even the more realistic goal
outlined in 1996 by Canada's then-minister of national
revenue, David Anderson - "a hassle-free border for honest
travelers and businesses, and a brick wall for those who
try to smuggle or break other laws at this border" - seems
far off.
Congressional negotiators have agreed on the outlines of a
plan for increasing border agents and providing the patrol,
customs and immigration agencies with better technology.
Some of the technology exists, such as remote-controlled
video cameras, motion sensors and voice-recognition systems
that could allow local residents to cross at all hours,
even while detecting potential intruders.
For now, though, the focus is on agents to police the
border. "All the technology in the world doesn't do me any
good," said Mr. Finley of the Border Patrol, "if I don't
have an agent to respond to it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/04/national/04BORD.html?ex=1003217437&ei=1&en=bb1288bfd5cdaf3d
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