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    Is border secure? Administration doesn't have a clue

    March 21, 2013 | 8:00 pm
    Byron York
    The Washington Examiner


    A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent and K-9 security dog keep watch at a checkpoint station, Friday, Feb. 22, 2013, in Falfurrias, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

    If Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform, it will depend on the Obama administration to enforce the law. How might that work?

    A glimpse of the future came Wednesday when the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security held a little-noticed hearing titled "Measuring Outcomes to Understand the State of Border Security."

    Immigration reform depends on a secure border. Nearly every lawmaker pushing reform, and certainly every Republican, stresses that the border must be proven secure before millions of currently illegal immigrants can be placed on a path to citizenship.

    But how do you measure border security? For years, the government estimated the number of miles of the border that were under "operational control" and came up with various ways to define what that meant.

    Then the Department of Homeland Security threw out the concept of operational control, which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called "archaic." The administration promised to create something called the Border Condition Index, or BCI, which would be a "holistic," and a far better measure of border security.

    Time passed, with no BCI. "Nearly three years later, the department has not produced this measure, so at this hearing, we will be asking for a status of the BCI, what measures it will take into account and when it might be ready," subcommittee Chairwoman Rep. Candice Miller, a Republican, said before Wednesday's testimony. Getting BCI up and running is particularly important now, Miller added, because comprehensive immigration reform cannot happen without a reliable way to assess border security.

    So imagine everyone's surprise when Mark Borkowski, a top Homeland Security technology official, told Miller that not only was BCI not ready, but that it won't measure border security and was never meant to.

    "I don't believe that we intend, at least at this point, that the BCI would be a tool for the measurement that you're suggesting," Borkowski told Miller. "The BCI is part of a set of information that advises us on where we are and, most importantly, what the trends are ... It is not our intent, at least not immediately, that it would be the measure you are talking about."

    Miller appeared stunned and practically begged Borkowski, along with two other Homeland Security officials who were testifying, to tell her what she wanted to hear. "I'm just trying to let this all digest," she said. "We're sort of sitting here, as a Congress ... At what point will you be able to give us something?"

    She never got an answer.

    Even Democrats who oppose tying immigration reform to border security realized they were being played. "I would say to the department, you've got to get in the game," said a frustrated-sounding Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. "At some point, we're going to have to have DHS work with us more concretely about the confidence of the security of the border."

    Rep. Ron Barber, the Democrat who replaced Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, noted, "The Border Patrol rolled out last May a new strategy that didn't have goals, didn't have metrics, didn't have a process for evaluation. That's not really a plan, is it?"

    Miller, the chairwoman, reminded the officials that the Department of Homeland Security could end up being the "stumbling block" to immigration reform. But the hearing ended with no hint that any answers might come soon.

    A related issue: As reform supporters often point out, a large number of illegal immigrants -- more than 40 percent -- did not cross the border illegally. Rather, they came legally, with a visa, and then never left. Members of the Senate "Gang of Eight" are promising tough new measures to deal with so-called visa overstays.

    But like the case of border security, Congress has passed law after law, going back to 1996, requiring the executive branch to crack down on overstays. The promised enforcement has never happened.

    Among the measures: The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996; the Immigration and Naturalization Service Data Management Improvement Act of 2000; the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001; the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002; and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. All directed the executive branch to stop visa overstays, but the problem remains.

    A look at Wednesday's House hearing, as well as at the long-standing overstay problem, highlights a major obstacle to comprehensive immigration reform. The executive branch has the authority to enforce border and visa security. But these days, it appears the executive branch, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, doesn't want to do the job.

    Why would passing a new comprehensive immigration reform measure change that?

    One Old Vet - Veterans, Guns, Illegal Immigration, Border Security

    Byron York: Is border secure? Administration doesn't have a clue | WashingtonExaminer.com
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    Buying Immigration Reform With Bogus Border Data

    By the Editors Mar 24, 2013 3:30 PM PT
    bloomberg.com

    At a hearing last week in the U.S. House of Representatives, lawmakers expressed dismay that Homeland Security officials had yet to devise a simple metric to measure border security. Indeed, the officials did their best to avoid being pinned down by a Homeland Security subcommittee, which met more than two years after their department promised to produce a metric.

    “While enforcement statistics and economic indicators point to increased security and improved quality of life,” their joint testimony states, “no single metric can conclusively define the state of border security.”

    It’s not clear what exactly Border and Maritime Subcommittee chairwoman Candice Miller of Michigan and ranking member Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas were expecting. Maybe the crime rate in San Diego multiplied by the gross domestic product in El Paso, divided by the number of apprehensions in Nogales, Arizona? Good luck. Any “measurement” of border security would be a bogus trick.

    The danger is that a metric might have to be conjured to win passage of comprehensive immigration reform. Many members of Congress insist that any path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. be predicated on quantifying the security of the nation’s 7,000 miles of land borders and 95,000 miles of coastline.

    “We need to have a measurement,” Senator John McCain said in a hearing this month. Well, here are some numbers: The Border Patrol has more than doubled in size since 2004, to more than 21,000 agents. Electronic surveillance has expanded exponentially. In 2012, the Border Patrol recorded 364,768 apprehensions, down 50 percent from four years earlier -- a sign of success because fewer apprehensions with beefed up security are a result of fewer attempts. All signs point to a significantly more secure border than the U.S. has ever had.

    But the nature of covert activity, including human beings darting through the night, is that it’s hard to read exactly what’s going on. Because the goal itself is impossible, the means of measuring its achievement will have to be very flexible indeed. The question then, is whether immigration hardliners will be willing to accept a series of facts -- apprehensions, border control staffing and the like -- that paint an impressionistic picture of border security. Or whether they will insist on a form of metric flimflam that promises a degree of specificity about illegal border crossings that no data can accurately deliver.

    It’s no surprise that the Department of Homeland Security isn’t eager to lend its databases and analytics to a border security charade. Pity then, that for the nation to get a sensible immigration reform, it just might have to.

    Buying Immigration Reform With Bogus Border Data - Bloomberg
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