NOGALES, ARIZ. — Alan Bersin is back at the border and on the move.
On the third day of a sprint through Texas and Arizona, a law enforcement convoy zooms into Nogales. Riding in a sport utility vehicle, Bersin scans a dusty landscape that he knows well: this desert town of 20,000 with its fast-food joints and discount shops facing the pastel facades and helter-skelter skyline of Nogales, Mexico, a city of 300,000 just south of the fence.
Bersin, a compact 63-year-old with the stride of a former star football player at Harvard, arrives at the Nogales station, the U.S. Border Patrol's biggest. His entourage hurries into a roll call room crowded with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, many of them Latinos whose small talk is sprinkled with Spanish.
Bersin is the federal point man at the border for the second time in his career and the officers' likely new boss, having been nominated for commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. He gives a pep talk in crisp tones tinged with his native Brooklyn.
"We will make a huge change at this border," he says. "You are here at a moment of history being made. You will tell your grandchildren about it someday."
The border czar has come to Arizona to assess a smuggling onslaught that generates more arrests and marijuana seizures than anywhere else on the international line. Smugglers use cranes to lift drug-laden cars over the fence; unemployed Mexican miners dig tunnels; cartel pilots fly above the oxygen limit. In Sonora state this summer, police found a Chevy Suburban containing victims of Mexico's drug war: 11 corpses chopped into pieces.
The two nations must seize a rare opportunity for progress, Bersin tells the officers. Encouraging questions and trying to put the group at ease, he jokes that his wife describes him as "often wrong, but never uncertain." He paraphrases the French poet Paul Valery: "The main challenge of our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
It's classic Bersin. Cerebral, combative and politically connected, he's at ease in the trenches of law enforcement. A resident and scholar of the border, he knows its extremes of squalor and beauty, hope and despair. He thrives on the singular energy of a region that others tend to fear, ignore or misunderstand.
"There is such a difference from everywhere else," Bersin said. "It's a place where nations begin and end in a legal and jurisdictional sense. And yet border communities live without reference to that in many ways. It's the idea of 'El Tercer Pais' [the third country] that makes it enormously attractive."
