In the last generation we’ve moved past a U.S.-Mexico relationship that while friendly on the surface, and demilitarized for the most part, really was not a genuinely cooperative relationship.
ALAN BERSINMost people who live at the border or are familiar with the border know that a Berlin-like wall stretching from San Diego to Brownsville is not necessary. And the costs would be prohibitive.
More Alan Bersin Quotes
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We have to secure the flow of goods and people by engaging with foreign entities.
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In today’s digital online world, those who don’t share information will be isolated and left behind. We need the data of other countries to connect the dots.
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We assure our security by securing the flows as early as we can before they arrive and as far away from our borders as we can.
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Mexico now has the 13th largest economy in the world.
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Homeland security is inherently transnational today. There’s hardly anything adverse that happens in our homeland that doesn’t have a cause or effect that’s generated abroad. Increasingly.
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There are plainclothes US officers stationed at airports in Mexico working with Mexican immigration officials to protect the United States.
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Six million jobs in the US depend on trade with Mexico. Ten border states – six in Mexico and four in the United States – combined have the third or fourth largest economy in the world.
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The work the Mexicans are doing in terms of migration control on Mexico’s southern border is crucial to our own border security.
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But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.
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Today, the number of migrants crossing is at a 30-year low. That’s because of years of bipartisan work on this issue.
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Cross-border trade is part of a single production process, and while apparently the Trump administration will seek to re-examine elements of that production platform, it is what it is and won’t be easily dismantled.
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And the smuggling of cash and the money laundering that transnational criminal organizations have instituted in North America, including in the United States.
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This is true despite the significant poverty, and the class and geographic inequality that have deep historical roots.
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The prospect of energy independence is within reach and will change the geopolitical situation of United States.
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The Mexicans return the detained Central American migrants by bus or by air to the countries they come from.
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