The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jan 11, 2013 8:16 AM


Homeland Security doesn't dispute the need for performance measures to assess border security. It's on the to-do-list.
Nick Oza/The Republic

A new government report on border security reinforces what we know: Arizona has the busiest illegal-drug and human-smuggling corridors along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The rest of the report, which focuses on what we don’t know, should be part of the debate on how we make decisions about border security.

The Government Accountability Office report says the Border Patrol’s new four-year strategy, kicked off last spring, still lacks key elements for measuring success.

This is particularly troubling because the need for a scorecard is not new.

In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security stopped using “operational control” as the measure of border security and adopted an interim measure that used the number of apprehensions to measure success. Homeland Security officials said at the time that more comprehensive performance goals were under development, but they have not been put in place.

That matters because the number of apprehensions — used by the Border Patrol as a gauge of how many people are attempting to cross the border illegally — is not a complete reflection of what’s going on.

Consider that apprehensions of illegal border crossers decreased 68 percent in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector from fiscal 2006 to 2011. But drug seizures were up 81 percent in that time. Who scares you more? A busboy or a drug smuggler?

The GAO interviewed 13 ranchers in Arizona’s borderlands: “Generally, these ranchers indicated that the level of illegal migrants coming across their properties had declined, but said the level of drug smuggling had remained constant. They were most concerned about safety but cited considerable property damage and concerns that illegal trafficking had affected land values and driven up costs in the ranching industry.”

Homeland Security does not dispute the need for performance goals and measures for assessing border security. It’s on the to-do list. But it has not yet “identified revised milestones and time frames for developing and implementing them,” according to the report, which was requested by Democratic Reps. Ron Barber of Arizona and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

An accurate measure of the effectiveness of policies on improving border security is essential to wisely deploying resources in an agency that has grown dramatically.

Homeland Security reports nearly doubling the size of the Border Patrol between 2004 and 2011 to 18,500 and spending $4.4 billion since 2006 on technology and infrastructure on the southwestern border.

The GAO report suggests that Homeland Security needs to do a far better job of tracking the effectiveness of what it is doing. That makes sense no matter which side of the immigration debate you happen to favor.

Barber’s office will hold two briefings on the report this month. The first is Monday, Jan. 28, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Douglas City Center, 345 16th St. The second is Tuesday, Jan. 29, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Pima College East Campus, 8181 E. Irvington Road, Tucson.

Border security is critically important to Arizona. The questions the GAO raises about the lack of good tools to evaluate border-security efforts are important to achieving effective security.

How secure is the border?