Outside view: Bordering impossible
The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the Bellingham Herald.
Have sympathy for those who work at our border crossings.
They are forced to know, and understand, thousands of kinds of documents presented to them by people trying to cross the border.
The system is so complicated that it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that occasionally people get through with fake documents. If federal officials want better safety and more safeguards, they need to simplify the system for hard-working border agents.
The Government Accountability Office announced last week that between February and June, 18 GAO investigators got past border agents at checkpoints in Washington, California, Texas, Michigan, Idaho, Arizona and New York. Agents in those cases “never questioned the authenticity of the counterfeit documents,” according to GAO testimony.
It’s important to note Homeland Security agents at the border catch thousands and thousands of people trying to cross with fake documents every year. Last year they intercepted 75,000, according to department officials.
Still, it’s understandable if some people are concerned. If 18 GAO investigators got through in five months, how many other people came across using fake documents? Were some of them gang leaders, drug dealers or even terrorists?
We will never know.
The federal government could go a long way toward closing the gap by not forcing agents to know and identify so many kinds of documents. More than 8,000 different kinds of ID are acceptable when crossing the border. Agents are trained to identify false birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other documents. But no person could memorize 8,000 different documents in such detail as to easily spot a well-constructed forgery.
There is a plan in place to force everyone who crosses the border to show a passport. We have consistently called for changes to that proposal because it is obvious that many of our Canadian friends would not get a passport and instead stop coming through the border to visit Whatcom County.
But there is an intermediate solution. Groups such as the Bellingham/Whatcom Chamber of Commerce & Industry are pushing for a new system that would allow state driver’s licenses to work as national IDs.
The so-called “Real ID” plan would call for some adjustments to state licenses to include more information, such as nationality, that might help border agents while not requiring people to go through the expensive, time-consuming passport plan.
At this point, every idea should be considered. Stories like the one of the GAO agents getting across the border raise concerns.
It’s obvious that the federal government and our elected representatives think more should be done. But we hope that those officials do all they can to make the entering the United States as easy on lawful citizens of every country as possible and make the process of determining who is lawful, and who is forging documents to try to sneak in, as easy as possible for border agents.