Local flexibility required to ease border crossing, facilitate commerce
Canada and the United States are the world’s two biggest trading partners — with $596 billion in trade in 2008; new report says that tight U.S.-Canada border rules are bad for business
A report on problems at the U.S.-Canadian border released the other day calls for local flexibility to facilitate the easy flow of people and trade and the recognition that security at the northern border should be treated differently than at the one with Mexico.
Detroit and its busiest-in-the-nation border with Canada figures prominently in the report commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. The report notes the “considerable and frustrating” delays in adding new infrastructure — including a new span across the Detroit River. The private owner of the Ambassador Bridge has been battling to stop a rival span to be built downriver.
Detroit Free Press’s Todd Spangler writes that the report comes at a time when Buy American provisions in the U.S. stimulus legislation and newly implemented passport requirements at the border have some officials and businesses on both sides of the border concerned.
Michigan counts on the border for business: Canada and the United States are the world’s two biggest trading partners — with $596 billion in trade in 2008 — and Michigan does more trade with Canada than any other state. More than 200,000 jobs in Michigan are supported by trade, and the supply links in the auto industry run deep. The report notes, for instance, that “A vehicle produced by a U.S. automaker crosses the border seven times on average during its assembly.”
Author Chris Sands of the Hudson Institute, a global security research organization in Washington, D.C., says that despite strides made in handling border concerns since the attacks of 9/11, security is still dominated by “one-size-fits-all rules” that “at times have equated conditions at the U.S.-Canadian border with those at the more difficult U.S-Mexican border.”
That has led to long lines, delays in trade and hassles for those who decide to cross. “The unfortunate reality is that the border today remains a source of considerable user frustration and economic drag,” Sands wrote.
The report makes several broad recommendations, including empowering local federal officials to work toward solutions specific to their border crossings; enacting plans at the local level to address customs concerns, and adopting a policy approach in Washington that recognizes the differences between the issues facing the northern and southern borders.
-read more in Christopher Sands, “Toward a New Frontier Improving the U.S.-Canadian Border” (Brookings, 2009)
