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.
ALAN BERSINWe need to realize that the economic situation between Mexico and the United States is not just one in which we trade with one another.
More Alan Bersin Quotes
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And they seek out Border Patrol agents or Customs and Border Protection officials to surrender to them and request political asylum.
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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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The idea was to restore the rule of law, to bring order to a chaotic situation.
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In the course of 25 years, we have developed a constructive relationship with Mexico that was nonexistent before.
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The air passenger screening system Mexico has in place involves these checks against US national security and criminal data bases.
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The Mexican people are increasingly middle class, and Mexico has substantially become a middle-class society.
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For the first time since the second World War, we are not the sole dominant economy in the world.
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We have a combined population of half a billion people; peaceful trade-friendly borders that are the envy of the world.
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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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This is true despite the significant poverty, and the class and geographic inequality that have deep historical roots.
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The potential of Mexico, Canada and the United States is enormous.
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The cry of “Make America Great Again” reflects accurately that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the sole superpower status of the United States is coming to an end.
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There have been enormous advances since 9/11 to build a very robust set of targeting procedures and watch lists to screen travelers coming to the United States.
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People in our so-called Rust Belt have lost out, and politics and society have not been responsive either in providing the kind of additional support they need or to retrain them for jobs that are being created in the new economy.
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And there are places on the border, such as the Arizona desert or the open terrain around the Big Bend in South Texas, where Mother Nature has created her own barrier that is not easily passable. Or if you do pass through it, you are easily detected.
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