BUFFALO, New York — At first glance, the arithmetic looks alarming. The U.S.- Canada border runs for 4,000 miles across some of the most remote and rugged territory on the planet. Some 1,000 border patrol agents must secure it.
They work in shifts, around-the-clock. That means that at any one time, on an average day, fewer than 300 agents are on duty on the world's longest border between two neighboring countries. If they were spaced out evenly, there would be one agent every 13 miles.
In contrast, the border with Mexico, less than half as long as the frontier with Canada , is guarded by more than 10,000 agents. They are being reinforced by National Guard troops, 6,000 of whom are scheduled to be deployed by August.
In the south, the effort is to keep out illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico. In the north, the main challenge is to intercept terrorists and high-grade Canadian marijuana. The only high-profile arrest of a would-be terrorist on a U.S. border was in the north, of Ahmed Ressam, the "millennium bomber" who wanted to blow up Los Angeles airport.
But U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials shrug off suggestions the Canadian border is an open door for terrorists and poses a greater security risk than the southern border.
"If you just look at the numbers, you compare apples and oranges," said Michael Przybyl, assistant chief patrol agent for the Buffalo sector, the busiest on the northern border. The sector includes Niagara Falls and last year handled six million cars, 13 million people, 1.1 million trucks and 2,550 trains.
Przybyl, who worked for 19 years on the border with Mexico, says the biggest difference is in cross-border intelligence sharing and cooperation. "It works really well with Canada , on all levels, one reason why we can do with fewer agents here."
On a formal level, Americans and Canadians are working together in Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs) composed of agents of the U.S. border patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Canadian Border Services Agency and Canadian Mounted Police.
Informally, there is a network of friendly ties between law enforcement agents that has no match on the southern border. "We (Americans and Canadians) have similar training and similar working methods. It's a different relationship," said Przybyl.
The northern border rarely makes national headlines but the June 3 Toronto arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on terrorism charges rekindled fears that extremists could sneak south and wreak havoc in the U.S. Such fears prompted U.S. lawmakers last December to request a study on the feasibility of a security fence along the entire length of the U.S.- Canada border.
Border Fence Unlikely
But a border fence longer than the Great Wall of China is an unlikely prospect, experts say.
Instead, the Department of Homeland Security plans to spend almost $20 billion on a three-year program, the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), to achieve "operational control" of the northern and southern borders through a mix of more boots on the ground and high-tech monitoring.
Four of the biggest U.S. military contractors and a Swedish company submitted bids on May 30. The advanced technology they offer include a huge unmanned aerial vehicle that scans the ground from 65,000 feet up, a blimp-like tethered airship and civilian versions of sensors and video cameras already in use in Iraq.
By the Border Patrol's own definition of "operational control," the U.S. has a long way to go. In a 108-page Performance and Accountability report last November, it said just 288 miles of the border were under operational control.
The report did not elaborate on which 228 miles met that stringent definition of operational control—less than 4 percent of the total—but part of the Buffalo sector is thought to meet the standard.
According to the report, operational control is the "employment of the appropriate mix of personnel, technology and tactical infrastructure ... to reasonably ensure illegal entrants are deterred from entering the U.S. or are detected and subsequently apprehended at or as close to the border as possible."
In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Washington more than tripled the number of border patrol agents on the frontier with Canada and installed more sensors and cameras.
The Buffalo sector grew from 35 to 140 and received additional equipment, from ground-based radar to scan boat traffic on Lake Ontario to hand-held, BlackBerry-sized scanners for radioactive material.
"We closed the traditional smuggling routes across the (Ontario and Erie) lakes, the Niagara River and we are confident that the three railway bridges into Canada are fully under control," said Przybyl.
According to experts, even a greatly fortified border force could do no more than limit risk, not eliminate it.
Said Deborah Meyers, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank: "One hundred percent security is simply not possible. Nobody should expect it and no politician should promise it."
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