Order on the border?

By San Diego Union-Tribune
Sunday, January 30, 2011 at midnight

Alan Bersin, former superintendent of San Diego Unified School District and before that the local U.S. attorney, is now commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He met recently with the Union-Tribune editorial board to discuss data showing the agency’s increasing effectiveness.

Q: What is the state of the border?

A: In 1993, when I started here in San Diego as the U.S. attorney, the Border Patrol was under resourced, under-respected, underperforming. Now, on the number of agents, the number of apprehensions, marijuana seizures, the right numbers are going up and the right numbers are coming down. People often say that what we’re seeing in San Diego and elsewhere along the border is a function of the economy. And while that is undoubtedly true to some degree, if you look at the long-term secular decline with apprehensions, it really starts in 2000 when the economy was quite robust. The movement downward is one that is actually rooted in enforcement as much as it is in labor conditions and the economy. This is true for the entire Southwest. Here in San Diego, in 1992, 565,000 illegal aliens were arrested as contrasted with 68,000 in fiscal year 2010. But there’s a more significant feature than simply the decrease by a factor of 90 percent or 85 percent. In 1992, 1993, when we were apprehending more than a half a million a year, probably twice that number were moving undetected up the freeway to Los Angeles. What’s significant about the 68,000 is that it probably represents 90-plus percent of the people who were trying to enter the sector illegally.

Q: How do you know that?

A: The bugaboo of law enforcement metrics is you never know how many trees are falling in the forest when you’re not there. But the infrastructure, the fencing and the technology that we now have actually can detect entries, and it’s a critical part of our enforcement. Ninety percent is I think actually a conservative estimate for San Diego apprehensions. There’s only one place on the U.S.-Mexican border that has more than 100,000 annual apprehensions and that’s Tucson. Border enforcement pushed smugglers and their infrastructure east from San Diego and west from El Paso. And that now accounts for the fact that Tucson is where the smugglers are making their last stand. Last year, there were 212,000 apprehensions, three and a half times the next highest, which is San Diego. So it was no accident that this leads to political wildfire of the kind that took place in Arizona last year in [approval of Assembly Bill 1070] in which you get a political momentum behind the notion that the border’s out of control. A top priority is to bring down the flows in Arizona to the point where it is not the dominant political issue.

Q: When Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with us, she acknowledged that there is a disconnect between the reality on the ground and the political rhetoric in Washington. How do you account for this?

A: One reason is that since 2006 Mexico has engaged in a dramatic challenge to its organized crime. The violence in northern Mexico creates this perception that it could spill over into the United States. Because of actions that have been taken and because of restraint on the part of organized crime in Mexico itself, we have not seen that kind of spillover. It’s an exploitable concern. But the difference between the reality and the perception there is very dramatic. Four of the 10 safest cities in the United States are in border states: San Diego, El Paso, Austin, and Phoenix.



Q: Is smuggling of immigrants more controlled these days by the cartels?

A: That’s an accurate conclusion and inference from the change in the way smuggling is taking place across the border. Even five years ago, it was not necessarily required to have a smuggler, a coyote or pollero to come across illegally. There are very few places now in which you can cross illegally into this country without a coyote. What you see are groups being smuggled in. What that has done has raised the price of smuggling, now reported at $3,000 a person, far increased from where it was. And you’d very rarely see people unaccompanied by smugglers. So what that has done is put a premium on organized criminal activity and exploitation by organized crime. The control of the so-called plaza for both drugs and aliens is held by people affiliated with organized crime. And they do, at a minimum, collect toll on passage through that plaza. How far the actual coyote groups are controlled or part of the cartel activity is less clear.



Q: Talk a little bit about stepped-up enforcement on this side of the border of traffic going south, particularly for guns and ammunition.

A: President Obama and President Calderón have actually changed the way in which the countries thought about the border. There was a separation and a finger-pointing on the various problems of drugs and immigration. They created the conditions for joint approaches to solutions. In the past, people would talk about drug smuggling and Americans tended to point at the Mexicans and say, “Well, you can’t control organized crime in your country.â€