Beginning in 2006, it will be more difficult for U.S. citizens to travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. By 2008, Mainers hoping to drive across the border into Canada will need a passport to come home, even if they just make a quick trip across the border.

The passport requirement will do little to make the United States more secure, but will create a significant burden for those people who live near the border and frequently travel to Canada.

In a report about the new rules from the Orange County Register, which the Sun Journal published April 6, Elaine Dezenski, acting assistant secretary for border and transportation, showed a complete lack of understanding about border life.

“We want folks to think about their travel to and from Canada, Mexico, Caribbean and Bermuda as equivalent to taking a trip to Europe or Asia.”

To our knowledge, nobody in Calais loads up the family for a grocery shopping trip to Paris or hauls the dog to a veterinarian in Tokyo. Communities along the border are interconnected, with some people making several trips a day back and forth across the border.

As Sen. Olympia Snowe wrote in a letter to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, traveling across the border is a way of life for families with members living on both sides.

Currently, U.S. travelers can re-enter the country by showing a driver’s license or another photo ID and a birth certificate.

Requiring a passport for U.S.-Canadian travel could wreak havoc on border economies and communities. But little will be gained in added security. According to a Time magazine article from 2004, more than 4,000 illegal aliens will simply walk across the Mexican border. Time estimated that the number of illegal aliens coming into the U.S. in 2004 was 3 million, “enough to fill 22,000 Boeing 737-700 airliners, or 60 flights every day for a year.”

So while the Border Patrol is checking passports of U.S. citizens, creating long lines at crossings and disrupting countless lives with an onerous and unnecessary requirement, thousands of undocumented men and women are simply walking across the country’s Southern border.

Security can be improved along U.S.-Canadian border by working with Canada to make its entry requirements more stringent, keeping more bad guys out of North America to begin with.

Passport checks might create the impression that security is tighter and the country is safer, but it’s an illusion. Both the Northern and Southern borders are porous.

According to the Sept. 11 commission’s report on the suicide attacks in New York and on the Pentagon, all 19 hijackers had passports for entry into the country; at least eight of them were doctored in a detectable way or had problems with their visas. They were checked, and it didn’t do any good.

Until the Border Patrol can show evidence that checking U.S. passports will improve security, the measure is an unnecessary burden that will make it more difficult than it already is to cross the border.