Unenthusiastic

Via Mexfiles, The News is raising questions about Alan Bersin's designation as the new border czar. The link probably won't be good for more than a day, so I'll reprint the whole thing here: 

Perhaps people have been blinded by all the recent gestures of bilateral cooperation, but hardly a note of protest was raised this week when the White House made a very questionable choice in naming its new border czar.

New czar Alan Bersin essentially held the position before when he served as the U.S. Department of Justice's special representative for the southwest border from 1995 to 1998 during the Clinton administration. During that period, he oversaw the implementation of Clinton's new Operation Gatekeeper, an effort that sealed off the border at San Diego and El Paso and pushed migrant flow into the southwestern desert.

écording to the University of California at San Diego, migrant deaths at the border rose from 87 in 1995 to 499 in 2000, an increase of 474 percent. Nearly 3,000 deaths were reported during the first 10 years of the program.

In an interview this week with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Bersin said the deaths "were largely a function of the migrants being taken [to the desert] by smugglers." But that's a cop-out. The government's intention was to push the migrant flow into less-populated areas so that they'd be easier to spot and catch.

In a story by the Arizona Daily Star, Andrés Rozental, Mexico's deputy foreign relations secretary from 1988 to 1994, defended Bersin's role in Operation Gatekeeper, saying: "I think he was acting under instructions of his government."

Sorry, but we're not buying the "just following orders" excuse. We'd like to see Bersin own up to the failures of Operation Gatekeeper, and we'd like to hear someone, especially on this side of the border, make a bigger stink about his appointment.