THE BORDER REPORT

Taking a drive down the dirt road by the Naco port of entry, the efforts to seal the border seem clear. A graded border road stretches for miles. Yards of steel vehicle barrier abut tall landing mats or barbwire fence as far as the eye can see. A U.S. Border Patrol agent nods grimly from behind his mirrored shades, his Chevy Tahoe powdered with red dust from patrolling the desert. The public information offices churn out stats; the numbers look good. Homeland Security boasts there's been no terror attack on U.S. soil for five years. Thousands of pounds of narcotics were seized and hundreds of thousand of illegal immigrants were captured in the Tucson sector alone by the end of the last fiscal year. You want to believe. The narcotics can be stopped; the wave of cheap labor can be controlled. Then you find the hobbyhorse and a creepier reality sets in. I didn't notice it at first; maybe because it was so out of place it didn't register. But there it sat, between a pile of vehicle barrier steel and a blue port-a-potty. Someone had fun building the thing; an old bicycle handlebar for your hands, horseshoes for your feet, all sitting on an immense metal spring; a white tire rim for the base. To give them credit, Tucson sector admitted readily enough it belongs to them. It was made a long time ago; somehow it turned up on the border road. "Obviously there's better uses of our time than building stuff like that," said Gustavo Soto from the sector's media office. Nobody's admitted to riding it, he says. One has to be careful not to make too much of these things. After all, U.S. Border Patrol agents account for the majority of our security along the Mexican border. They save lives, arrest gang members, nab smugglers, all for about $2 billion a year. We've spent 150 times that amount trying to secure Iraq. But it’s disturbing, in the midst of a national debate over what to do with 12, 20, 30 million illegal immigrants in the country, some federal agent is out riding a hobbyhorse. What do the illegal immigrants watching from Sonora think when they see La Migra playing games? Maybe, "Esta loco. Let's get across while he's busy." It's sad but indicative of a larger problem. We don't have it in us. We don't have a security culture; maybe we never did. We just don't take it seriously. The Sept. 11 attacks got us excited for controlling the border but even that is fading away. Throwing up its hands, Homeland Security is outsourcing the job. Last month it rewarded a $67 million contract to the Boeing Company in hopes they can develop sensors that do more than identify cows. A Southern Arizona drug agent laughed when I suggested we seize ten percent of all incoming narcotics. "Ten? In a good year, when we've identified warehouses and growing fields, maybe ten percent," he said. "At most." A million illegal entry attempts are stopped every year. But by Customs and Border Protection's own admission, half a million people successfully slip into the country every year and we have little idea who they are. President Bush recently approved a homeland security bill with $1.2 billion for border fencing - enough for about 150 miles. There's still little sanction for employers who profit from the Diaspora. Maybe Congress is waiting for us to forget. A federal agent in the Arizona desert believes it's too late, the American public won't forget. "I think that there is a growing number of people across the country who are sick of the invasion and want it stopped regardless of what it takes," he said. He may be right. But unless border security becomes a debate that lasts beyond the elections, we're stuck with what we have. A piece of political theatre, nothing more.