Bob Barr

We Can't Secure Our Borders, but Iraq's Borders Get Priority
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 30, 2007

Unlike most other countries, the United States is fortunate to have only two international borders; and one of those—the 5,522-mile border with Canada—is friendly. That's the good news. The bad news is that our southern border with Mexico, at 1,951 miles, is the most traversed border in the world; much of it illegal. This border witnesses more human traffic (legal and illegal) than any other in the entire world.

Keeping track of this migration would be a Herculean job in the best of times. In the post-Sept. 11 world, with concern over potential or actual terrorists coming into our country, trying to keep tabs on who is crossing into the United States from Mexico has become a virtually impossible task. The primary responsibility for this job falls on the U.S. Border Patrol, a component of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (which is itself a part of the mammoth Department of Homeland Security).

Some 11,000 officers of the Border Patrol currently are tasked with securing our borders, and nearly 90 percent of them are assigned to the border with Mexico. Recently, Congress mandated a 50 percent increase in the number of border agents to be in place by the end of next year. To meet that goal, Customs and Border Protection is straining to recruit and train new agents, even as it copes with the pressures of retaining veteran agents. In the interim, and reflecting the true crisis situation we face in securing our southern border, President Bush last year directed that 6,000 National Guard troops be assigned to assist CBP in securing the southern border.

The Border Patrol's task is made worse by virtue of other federal agencies stealing its best agents. For example, a private company, Virginia-based DynCorp International, to which numerous federal agencies outsource security and other services, is actively recruiting veteran Border Patrol agents in order to meet its contractual obligations to the U.S. State Department to supply Americans to train Iraqis in immigration and border security. DynCorp reportedly entices senior border agents with salaries more than double what CBP pays them, and then tacks on huge signing bonuses to improve its chances of luring them. Ultimately, of course, the federal government is paying for all this—robbing Peter to pay Paul—and making the job of W. Ralph Basham, commissioner of CBP, that much harder.

The agency also is suffering a morale problem as a result of recent highly publicized prosecutions of its agents by the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged overzealous apprehension of illegal aliens.

All this makes it difficult to understand a recent memo circulated by Basham to all Customs and Border Protection officers and Border Patrol agents. In the memo, which has sparked criticism from Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and some members of Congress, Basham solicits agents to volunteer for service in ... Iraq.

The commissioner apparently has concluded it is more critical to help train members of the Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement than to do everything possible to stem the tide of illegals entering the United States from Mexico.

Money appears to be no problem for this latest project of our already stretched-thin Border Patrol. Those volunteering to leave the hot U.S.-Mexico border for the far hotter borders that Iraq shares with Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Iran will earn nearly twice what their stateside colleagues earn protecting our homeland.

The policy of sending U.S. Border Patrol agents to Iraq did not begin with the current commissioner, but rather with his predecessor, Robert Bonner, in 2004. The program was initially envisioned only as a temporary measure. Now, more than three years later, with cross-border threats to Iraq and our own troops greatly complicated since the initial invasion, and with Iraq's own border security capability far below the minimum necessary for its own survival, the Bush administration is reducing our own capacity to secure our borders in order to try and strengthen Iraq's.

The administration, of course, is supporting comprehensive legislation to implement immigration and border security reform, but is meeting stiff resistance on Capitol Hill. With one of the administration's top border security officials offering taxpayer-funded incentives to send Border Patrol agents about as far from our border with Mexico as you can get, to assist in the quagmire that is Iraq, is it any wonder its immigration plan is meeting opposition?

Bob Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.