U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief: Sealing Our Borders is Unrealistic

The commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Alan Bersin said that sealing the border between the United States and Mexico is unrealistic. 

Brady McCombs of the Arizona Daily Star has the full story in his article entitled CBP Chief: Sealed Border is Unrealistic.

Chairmen Bersin noted that sealing the border was unrealistic before the United States and Mexico came to some sort of agreement on labor:

The commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agrees that Arizona's border needs to be better controlled, but he said completely sealing the international line is unrealistic.

"This is not about sealing the border," Commissioner Alan Bersin said Friday in Tucson. "Until we have a legitimate labor market between Mexico and the United States, people will attempt to come here to work."

Chairmen Bersin contends that reaching an agreement between the two countries on labor cannot be achieved by sealing the border, but rather by legislative action in congress:

To get that legitimate labor market, though, will take immigration-law change, he said. To get backing for it will require reducing the flow of illegal immigration in the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector - the busiest for apprehensions, drug seizures and border deaths for a decade - to levels similar to those of other sectors

He does note that there have been great accomplishments along the border, but more can still be done:

A steady decline in apprehensions in the Tucson Sector over the past six years is a good trend, but it's still unacceptable that the sector has more than three times as many as the next-busiest sector. However, with more agents, fencing and technology than ever before, the agency is ready, he said.

"We are also better prepared, better resourced, here and elsewhere, to accomplish the completion of this task, which is to achieve a secure border and one that is perceived as secure." But there is no numerical goal for apprehensions that would constitute a "secure border," he said. "Our job is to detect and apprehend the large majority of them."