6 October 2008

The Great Wall of the United States

The following article is excerpted from the 4 October 2008 edition of “globeandmail.com”. It was written by Edward Alden, currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and author of The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11.

Stephen Harper has said that, if he is re-elected, he wants a "fresh start" with the new U.S. administration on dealing with the border, to see if ways can be found to reassure the Americans on security while easing restrictions that are causing costly delays for Canada….

There is little reason, however, to think that dealing with border issues will be any easier after the elections in both countries; indeed, it is likely to become harder.

Canada and the United States long defined what it meant to have an open border. The orange cones that were placed at night across rural border crossings from Vermont to B.C. symbolized an extraordinary level of trust, rarely achieved by two neighbouring nations. That trust permitted ever deeper, and in some ways riskier, economic ties, from an automobile industry that grew up in virtual disregard of the border to a free-trade agreement that set rules since imitated on a global scale.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we no longer live in a high-trust world…. In seven years, the United States has doubled the number of its Border Patrol agents and tripled its enforcement expenditures and it is now deporting more than 250,000 illegal immigrants a year, all in the elusive quest for border security. On the Canadian border, it's known as "thickening"; on the Mexican border, it comes closer to warfare.

In the months after 9/11, some in the Bush administration turned to Canada in the hopes of building what they called "the border of the future" - one that would be open to trade and tourism but impervious to terrorists, drug smugglers and illegal immigrants. The virtual shutdown of the border after the terrorist attacks had been disastrous for the auto industry and the regions that relied on it, and both Ottawa and Washington were determined to prevent anything similar in the future…..

The result was the 2001 Smart Border accords, a laundry list of measures that was a remarkably cool-headed, sophisticated response to the trauma of 9/11. Its architects on both sides of the border believed two seemingly contradictory things: that the safeguards against terrorists crossing the border had to be maximized, but that barriers to legitimate cross-border traffic must be minimized for the prosperity of both countries….

SQUARING THE CIRCLE

That model was, and remains, the only way to square the circle of security and commerce, but the Smart Border Declaration has never quite delivered on its promise. There are many reasons why; most have to do with lack of trust. One promising idea, for instance, was to begin moving inspection facilities away from the bridges and other chokepoints. NEXUS and FAST lanes are a fine thing, but not if the backups are so long that preferred travellers must wait in line just to reach them. Ottawa had offered land inside Canada for U.S. "preclearance" facilities. But after more than two years, negotiations fell apart last year, although the Harper government was willing to take the politically risky step of allowing U.S. Customs inspectors to carry guns on Canadian soil….

The new U.S. identification requirements under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative make considerable sense from a security perspective. It's hard to manage risk if you're not sure that someone crossing the border is who he says he is. But Canada's concerns over the implementation of WHTI have largely been ignored. And more is coming; the Department of Homeland Security is moving ahead to implem