All for One

he men and women standing guard at the U.S.-Canada border in Detroit are tired.

They are the inspectors who check travelers' identification, ask Americans to declare purchases made in Canada and check any agricultural products coming into the country. The inspectors have been working six days a week, eight to 12 hours a day, including Sundays, since October. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, they logged 16 hours a day. Their schedules are lighter now, but month after month of long days and long weeks have taken their toll on the inspectors' health. Absenteeism is up and morale is down.

No one in Detroit has been hurt yet-unlike in San Diego, where Customs inspector Joe Scardino fell asleep and crashed his motorcycle after a 16-hour shift four years ago. Scardino's leg was amputated.

But with Washington officials continuing to issue regular terrorism warnings, border inspectors at the tunnel and bridge connecting Canada to Detroit are likely to keep working long hours with few breaks. "We are burned out," says Frank Stanczak, an immigration inspector. "What's killing us is working six days a week, week after week. You're fatigued and you're ready to drop."

Watching the border crossings, it's easy to see why inspectors have to put in so much time keeping illegal immigrants and goods out of the country.

Cars and trucks never stop coming over the Ambassador Bridge and through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. Both crossings operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Together, the bridge and tunnel form the busiest crossing on the 5,525-mile border between the United States and Canada, with 16.5 million vehicles a year going back and forth-even after a 20 percent drop in traffic after Sept. 11. Lines of cars and trucks spill out into the streets of Detroit on the U.S. side and the streets of Windsor, Ontario, on the Canadian side. In early March, the wait sometimes reached an hour and a half. (In the days after Sept. 11, the wait was more than 10 hours.)

Before Sept. 11, cars and trucks lined up on the bridge and in the tunnel, waiting to clear customs and immigration on either side. Now, with worries that either structure could be a target for a terrorist bomb, vehicles are held at opposite ends of the bridge and tunnel until traffic clears at the government inspection stations.

Truckers idle their engines waiting for commercial inspections, while commuters and travelers tap their steering wheels or smoke cigarettes in the passenger vehicle lines. Cars move up every few minutes, the amount of time it takes a U.S. inspector to review a traveler's identification and ask a few questions about goods to declare. Trucks, meanwhile, move at various rates, depending on whether their loads are preregistered with the Customs Service.

There is always another car. There is always another truck. For the U.S. inspectors at the border, the work never stops.

PEOPLE, GOODS AND PLANTS

While the border inspectors in Detroit and around the country try to balance long work hours with family and sleep time, executives several layers up the chain of command in the new Homeland Security Department are crafting a plan to reshape the inspection workforce.

Historically, the 16,700 inspectors who stand guard at the nation's land borders, seaports and international airports have worked for three separate agencies. Their work has been divided up based on what they look at. The 5,500 inspectors wearing the green jackets of the Immigration and Naturalization Service look at people. The 8,900 inspectors wearing the dark blue shirts of the Customs Service look at goods. The 2,300 inspectors wearing the white shirts of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service look at animals and plants, which could be carrying destructive foreign pests.

For decades, reformers have wondered why travelers entering the country need to check in at the border with three different agencies, each with its own management structure, computer systems, procedures, lingo and culture. Couldn't one agency inspect people, goods and plants? Couldn't inspectors be trained to review all three?

The three different groups of inspectors "all do the same mission," says Peter Nunez, assistant secretary of Treasury for enforcement under the first President Bush. "They stand at the border and inspect people coming in. The least efficient way to do the mission is to have three of them standing there and each asking you a different question."

"If all of these inspectors become part of one inspection force, that should allow them to operate more efficiently," Nunez adds.

Nunez's idea is on its way to becoming reality. On March 1, on paper, the INS inspectors left the Justice Department, the Customs Service inspectors left the Treasury Department and the APHIS inspectors left the Agriculture Department. They became employees of the new Bureau of Customs and Border Protection in the Homeland Security Department.

Conventional wisdom holds that merging and consolidating workforces is wrenchingly difficult, because people cling to their old identities and cultures and struggle to adapt to the new. So it would seem that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Bureau of Customs and Border Protection chief Robert Bonner face a daunting challenge in merging the three border inspection groups into one.

But a closer look at operations on the border, the duties of inspectors, the demographics of the workforce and the attitudes of inspectors themselves suggest that creating a unified border inspection force may not be all that difficult. In fact, the process has been under way for some time. The bigger challenge may turn out to be finding a way to relieve overworked and exhausted inspectors at the borders.

TAKING TURNS

The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge are similar in several ways. They are just a mile apart on the Detroit River. The bridge opened in 1929, the tunnel in 1930. Both were considered engineering marvels when they were built. And the operators of both are trying to make a buck.

The Ambassador Bridge is run by a private corporation, CenTra Inc. of Warren, Mich. The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel is operated by the Detroit & Canada Tunnel Corp., a company overseen by Australian investors. To make money, the companies charge tolls to passengers and truckers. Passenger vehicles pay $2.75 to cross either the bridge or tunnel from Detroit to Windsor. Truck tolls run about three cents per 100 pounds of cargo, with minimum tolls ranging from $3 to $18.

Tunnel Corp. President Gordon Jarvis and Mickey Blashfield, CenTra's governmental affairs director, say their firms have a profit motive to move people through the border crossings as quickly as possible. Travelers stay away if they think they'll have to wait too long to get across.

A key bottleneck at both crossings is the U.S. inspection plaza. Vehicles have to stop at a primary inspection booth before being cleared into Detroit or being sent to a secondary inspection area for closer review. When traffic starts backing up, the tunnel and bridge operators ask the Customs Service or INS to open up more of the seven inspection lanes at the tunnel or 18 inspection lanes at the bridge. The tunnel and bridge operators have run into a similar problem: "Customs and Immigration point the finger at each other," says Blashfield.

"If you ask Customs to open another lane, they say we have three open and Immigration only has two," says Ambassador Bridge President Dan Stamper. "If you ask Immigration, they tell you to ask Customs. It's an ongoing issue."

But while customs and immigration officials aren't above finger-pointing, they're also learning to work together. In fact, at Detroit's border crossings, immigration and customs inspectors already are performing the same function-primary inspections. The inspectors are cross-trained in the basic rules of immigration and customs law. Though they still wear different uniforms, the inspectors are essentially providing a single face at the border. The vast majority of travelers talk to only one inspector before heading into Detroit. "We are doing the same type of job," says Gerald Little, a senior customs inspector at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

If the primary inspector sends a vehicle to secondary inspection, then the traveler may encounter several uniforms. At secondary inspection areas, customs, immigration or agriculture inspectors handle the more in-depth examinations in their specialties.

Under the new organizational structure, primary inspectors still will be jacks-of-all-trades, but secondary inspectors will continue to need specialized training. "I don't believe there will be any reduction in expertise," says Kevin Weeks, a former regional director with the Customs Service who now oversees all customs, immigration and agriculture inspectors in Michigan.

In fact, the primary-secondary inspection process at the U.S.-Canada border is likely to remain largely unchanged. Where travelers will see a bigger difference is at airports, which follow a more stovepiped process. At airports, travelers first see an immigration inspector, then a customs inspector and finally, if necessary, an agriculture inspector. Homeland Security officials say the airports are likely to switch to the primary-secondary process followed at the border. That will mean cross-training for employees. "The biggest challenge will be learning all of the Customs rules and regulations," says Terry Pasha, a senior immigration inspector at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. "But I don't think it will be that bad."

LOOK-ALIKES

Customs, immigration and agriculture inspector groups already have one thing in common: They're understaffed. Low staffing is the reason customs and immigration managers say they have turned the bridge and tunnel operators away when they have asked for more inspection lanes to open. The bridge and tunnel operators agree that staffing has been a major problem. Traffic at the Detroit border mushroomed after several free trade laws took effect in the 1990s, but the workforce did not grow.

That's changing now. Thanks to Sept. 11, all three inspection organizations have launched extensive hiring efforts. From September 2001 to September 2002, Wayne County, Mich., which includes the bridge, the tunnel and Detroit's international airport, saw a 50 percent increase in Customs inspectors, a 33 percent jump in immigration inspectors and a 27 percent hike in agriculture inspectors. The total inspector workforce in 2001 was 335. At the end of 2002, it was 478.

Across the country, inspection workforces are growing to keep up with increased security demands. The INS hired 1,100 inspectors last year, while Customs added 1,586 and Agriculture hired 325. At each agency, hiring far exceeded what was needed to replace people who quit or retired.

Overall, about a quarter to a third of the inspectors at each agency have been in their jobs fewer than five years. Gerald Little, the customs inspector, says the fact that so many employees are still in training mode will make it easier to merge the workforces. "It definitely takes a few years to get up to speed," he says.

During their training period, the inspectors have been working side by side with their colleagues at other agencies. So even if they have not been formally cross-trained, they are familiar with one another's missions. They share office space at border crossings and in the airports.

If it weren't for their different uniforms, it would be hard to tell the inspectors apart. Demographically, they are nearly identical, with a roughly 7-to-3 ratio of male to female employees and similar tenure and age distributions. At all three agencies, for example, 12 percent of inspectors had been on the job for a year or less at the end of 2002.

Such statistics may explain why customs and immigration inspectors show little apprehension about merging their operations. Customs and immigration inspectors say there are several advantages to the consolidation, including better information sharing, more cross-training and a singular focus on the shared mission of protecting the homeland.

Agriculture inspectors are more apprehensive. They are the smallest and least cross-trained group, and they don't work at primary inspection booths at the border. Unlike immigration and customs inspectors, they aren't trained in law enforcement. They tend to come from college science programs, while immigration and customs inspectors tend to come from law enforcement or military backgrounds.

Customs and immigration inspectors and managers also know much less about agriculture inspection than they do about each other's missions. That worries agriculture inspectors. For example, agriculture inspectors are being referred to as "AQI" (Agricultural Quarantine and Inspection) employees in the new department, but agriculture inspectors are used to calling themselves "PPQ" (Plant Protection and Quarantine) officers. "They've glommed on to AQI for some reason," laments one agriculture inspector. Some agriculture employees are concerned that their mission will be given short shrift in the new department, since they will by and large be reporting to former customs and immigration managers. They worry that cross-training will dilute the workforce's expertise. "We're food people," says Michael Randall, president of the agriculture inspectors union. "We're not gun people."

FIRST THINGS FIRST

As of mid-March, few signs of the consolidation of inspection efforts were visible at the Detroit border. At the bridge, tunnel and international airport, customs, immigration and agriculture inspectors still report to managers from their former agencies. Employees are still wearing their old agencies' uniforms at primary and secondary inspection stations. On paper, the chain of command for immigration and agriculture inspectors has changed. They now report to Weeks, who was already the Michigan boss for the Customs Service. But they have yet to see any change in day-to-day operations.

In fact, the immigration inspectors, who are feeling particularly overworked, hope that the new boss will bring change. The previous immigration district director put the inspectors on six-day workweeks in October without consulting them. The inspectors want two days off a week. They're still willing to work just as many hours, but they'd like some input on their schedules. "That's what we're worried about, not what kind of emblem is on our uniform or what uniform we're wearing," says Stanczak, who is the local president of the immigration inspectors union.

Indeed, a common concern among inspectors is that they are not being consulted about the changes that are coming. Most are willing to give the new department's leaders the benefit of the doubt as they get the transition under way. But trust will erode if they aren't kept in the loop and aren't consulted, and if they're not given time to rest. "The inspectors rallied after Sept. 11. They went all out," says Stanczak. "But month after month, when the health problems and the family problems start showing, that's when morale goes down.

"We need to be sharp. We need to be on our toes to do our job."