Nina Shapiro
Canada is right over there.
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THE NEW HOMELAND
A guide to the alphabet soup of agencies watching the borders and scrutinizing visitors.
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ONE CHILLY DAY in late February, Costa Rican native Marvin Navarro-Ortiz set out to sneak into the United States. His attempted point of entry was the heavily wooded and treacherously rocky Vedder Mountain, which straddles the U.S.Canadian border among the quiet rural towns just north of Bellingham.
The 35-year-old had been living legally in Toronto for the past six months, working construction and odd jobs, according to his girlfriend, Rachel Gazzillo, an American who lives in Costa Rica. But Gazzillo says he knew he could make more money in the States, where he had lived for 12 years previously, much of it on the East Coast working in a satellite-dish factory. He had sent money home to support his impoverished mother. Having recently gone home to see his family, he looked for a way to get back to the U.S. In Canada, his girlfriend says, Navarro-Ortiz found coyotes who offered him a choice: a smuggling route across the eastern border for $3,000, or one across the western one for $1,500.
We were all very worried that something bad was going to happen, Gazzillo says, speaking by telephone from San Jose, Costa Rica. The borders are being guarded more closely now. We didnt want him to get caught or wind up in prisonor worse.
Their fears were well founded. Navarro-Ortiz and a compatriot apparently got lost on Vedder Mountain. Losing his footing, Navarro-Ortiz dropped some 100 feet to the rocky base of a waterfall. By the time a search-and-rescue team made it up there on Feb. 27, responding to a residents call about persistent yelling on the mountain, Navarro-Ortiz was dead.
The case was unusual only in that it had turned fatal. Every year, thousands of people try to sneak into the U.S. from Canada. The latest prominent case was that of two Pakistani men arrested last month at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, one of whom was on a federal no-fly list for uncertain reasons, after they were smuggled across the border on foot.
The northern border has long been ignored as public attention has been riveted on the southern border, a place of mythological stature in the American psyche, where our expansionist history confronts the economic desperation of our neighbors and the seemingly unstoppable flood of illicit migration. Attention began turning to the Canadian border, however, in the winter of 1999, when authorities caught would-be Islamic terrorist Ahmed Ressam entering at Port Angeles with a trunkload of explosives. At a congressional hearing shortly after, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, warned that terrorists, and also illegal aliens, alien smugglers, and drug smugglers, are increasingly using Canada as a transit country en route to the United States.
In the post9/11 era of homeland security, there have been more congressional hearings on the subject, which has become enough a part of the public consciousness that the TV show West Wing had an episode based on terrorists arriving from Canada. Suddenly, the nation has become acutely aware of its vulnerability from the worlds longest undefended border5,200 miles of mountains, wilderness, waterways, and mostly unfenced land, with law-enforcement officers few and far between. Until recently, only some 300 Border Patrol agents were assigned to the northern border, in contrast to the approximately 9,000 guarding the 2,000 miles on the southern border with Mexico.
The Canadian border was more than undefended it was wide open, says Tom Hardy, head of the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
In response, Congress voted to triple the previously paltry number of agents on the northern border. By the end of the year, the northern border is supposed to be guarded by 375 more agentsthe largest northern deployment in the Border Patrols history and one that will achieve its goal of having 1,000 officers from Blaine to Maine.
Its almost like weve been Mexicanizing the Canadian border, says Deborah Meyers, a prominent policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. That doesnt trouble Meyers, who, like many, believes that weve never funded the Canadian border in the way in which it needs to be funded. But Bellingham immigration attorney Greg Boos detects a note of aggression in the growing rhetoric over the Canadian border that has him wondering whether the government might move toward the kind of paramilitary presence on the northern border that it has on the southern. Such a strategy would not go over well in his parts, he says. We consider ourselves to be friends of Canada up here.
Nor, Boos argues, would it be effective. The Mexican model doesnt work on the Mexican border, so why would it work on the Canadian border? Its a question you hear again and again from a wide array of people concerned, including other immigration attorneys, policy analysts, and law-enforcement officers in both the U.S. and Canada. It arises not only because the U.S. is beefing up its law-enforcement presence along the Canadian border but because it is doing so in a way that accords with a strategy developed on the Mexican border. Called forward deployment, it stresses having agents in highly visible positions right on the border, a policy aimed at deterring illegal entry but one that critics feel neglects important investigative work and enforcement efforts inside the country.
