By Mark Potter, Correspondent, NBC News

TUCSON, ARIZ. – On a helicopter inspection tour above the rugged mountains and vast desert in southern Arizona, Commander Jeffrey Self of U.S. Customs and Border Protection reflected on how much security has improved along the U.S.-Mexican border during his long career.

"After the vehicle barriers were built, and with the checkpoints going up, we're experiencing zero [undocumented immigrant] drive-throughs in an area where we were having 30, 40, 50 in a 24-hour period," he said, pointing to miles of vehicle barriers placed in the desert along the frontier.

U.S. Border Patrol has greatly reduced the number of cars and trucks loaded with people and drugs driving across the desert from Mexico into the United States. That, Self explained, has freed agents to focus their attention on immigrant and drug smugglers who walk across the border.  In the meantime, he added, authorities have also greatly reduced the number of hiking trails used by smugglers.

"In Arizona we have been very successful in increasing border security," Self said. "Over the course of many years now we've been resourced with tactical infrastructure, technology and personnel and they've been employed in a fashion that's gotten us greater results."

While conceding there are still many areas where drug and immigrant smugglers cross illegally into the U.S. -- often on private ranch land -- Self argued the threat has decreased dramatically and will continue to do so.

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As the national debate over comprehensive immigration reform plays out, the question looms: just how secure is the U.S. border with Mexico? The answer appears to be mixed, with definite improvements nationwide and a downward trend in illegal immigration in most places – especially in the cities. But there are some areas, in rural Arizona and Texas, where residents insist the border is neither secure nor safe.

Gary Thrasher, a veterinarian and rancher in southern Arizona near Bisbee, says the rural border area where he works is actually less safe now than it was years ago, because of an increase in the number of armed drug and immigrant smugglers.

When the federal government increased security in the border cities, he said, it had the negative effect of forcing the smugglers to move to the large rural areas.

"The border statistically is securer than ever.  That means nothing,” he said.  “That's like saying we fixed this whole bucket, except for this hole down here.  You know it's still not going to hold water."

U.S. officials: look to the numbers 

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano frequently travels to the Southwest border and has made appearances before Congress where she has touted the recent improvements in border security and argued for passage of a comprehensive immigration bill.

"Fewer people are trying to emigrate illegally into this country than in four decades,” she testified before a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year. “What I know is that apprehensions are low, because attempts are low. Drug seizures, contraband seizures, all the numbers that need to be up are up."

In the year 2000, agents along the length of the Southwest border reported detaining 1,643,679 immigrants for allegedly entering the country without proper documentation.  Twelve years later, in 2012, that number had plummeted to 356,873, a decrease of 78 percent.

"San Diego and the Mexican border used to be the most lawless, violent places across the face of the earth with thousands of cross-border migrants on a given day,” said retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “We put in triple fencing and adequate Border Patrol and Coast Guard and it stopped."

Ranchers: rural border areas not secure

Critics of the administration's position on border security, however, say that while the overall apprehension numbers are down, they don't fully reflect the reality in areas where smugglers and immigrants still routinely make the illegal crossing into the United States from Mexico.

On a small ranch near the border in southwestern Arizona, a mother of several children spoke under the condition of anonymity.  She fears what she described as an increase in drug and immigrant smugglers crossing her land by day and night.

"You're still having to pack a gun everywhere with you and make sure your kids can't go outside to play unless you are watching them." she said.  "The border is not secure. The Border Patrol doesn't have a very strong presence out here."

Texas police: a rise in immigrant smuggling

In the small town of San Juan, Texas, a few miles north of the Mexican border, Police Chief Juan Gonzalez toured some of the human stash houses his officers recently uncovered. They had been used to hide immigrants from all over the world who were smuggled across the border into the United States.

Gonzalez says his department has never dealt with as many undocumented immigrants as it encounters now. 

"In the past three years we've seen an increase.  And it's not a steady increase, it's a massive increase," he said.  "Too many people are getting through.  We've got too many holes in the border and we don't have enough manpower to make sure we secure the border."

About 75 miles north of the border, in Falfurrias, Texas, Benny Martinez, the chief deputy of the Brooks County Sheriff's Office, says his area is also deeply affected by a recent rise in illegal immigration. 

“The trending is going up,” he said.  “It hasn’t gone down at all, not here.”

Last year, officials and ranchers there found the bodies of 129 immigrants who died in the harsh terrain, presumably after crossing the border illegally.  Dozens are still unidentified and are buried in a local cemetery.  Some of the metal markers on the graves read, "Unknown Female" and "Unknown Remains."  One says, simply, "Bones."

Martinez does not believe the U.S.-Mexican border is at all secure in South Texas, given the rise in illegal immigration in Brooks County. 

"It's steady and I don't think it's going to go down, it's not going to happen anytime soon," he said.

PHOTOS: Border patrol faces surge in rural Texas border crossings

Ranchers like Linda Vickers, who lives just north of a Border Patrol highway checkpoint near Falfurrias, said she regularly sees, and often photographs, illegal immigrants cutting across her land as they try to evade the agents. 

“I’m seeing groups of 10, groups of 20 and I’m seeing them more often,” she said.

When asked about Obama administration claims that the border is more secure now, Vickers said that while it appears to be true elsewhere in the country, it’s not the case where she lives. 

“In the state of Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the border is not secure and I don’t think you’ll find a person, a real person, to say it’s secure,” she said.

Border patrol: South Texas a problem area

In South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley sector, immigrant apprehensions rose 65 percent from the years 2011 to 2012 -- from 59,243 to 97,762, according to U.S. Border Patrol -- bucking the national trend of falling immigration numbers. 

This year, statistics reveal the Rio Grande Valley apprehension numbers have climbed even further, rising 55 percent compared to this time in 2012. 

Federal agents believe it reflects a recent increase in people fleeing the poverty, drug gangs and violence in Central America.

Privately, some agents say that, despite their great success in making more apprehensions, thousands of immigrants crossing the border illegally in South Texas still slip past them.

A majority of people involved in the security debate agree that most of the U.S. cities along the border are now much safer than they used to be and have much lower crime rates, thanks to high fences, increased monitoring technology and thousands of Border Patrol and other federal agents deployed there.  

But McCaffrey says U.S. officials need to do more for the rural areas.

“You have to give the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection the dollars and the technology to protect the American frontier,” he said.  “We’ve got to do it.  We owe it to the American people.”

This story was originally published on Thu May 2, 2013 11:29 AM EDT

The next time Orquesta Kef gets invited to play in the United States, it may actually be able to get into the country.

The band of young musicians from Buenos Aires, who blend Klezmer music – traditional instrumental music of Eastern European Jews – with Argentine tango and folk, were denied entry in November 2009 by U.S. immigration officials. A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director recommended against issuing the group a so-called P-3 a visa to perform at a “Fiesta Hanukkah” concert in Los Angeles, saying there was no proof the group’s act was “culturally unique.”

After public blowback, an appeals board re-examined the case and reversed the decision – but by then Hanukkah had passed and Orquesta Kef never got to play in L.A.

---

This week, Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it was officially clarifying its definition of “culturally unique” to specify that it “is not limited to traditional art forms, but may include artistic expression that is deemed to be a hybrid or fusion of more than one culture or region.”

The new definition will apply to reviews of future applications for P-3 visas from foreign performing artists and entertainers.

“It was something that needed to have a more fine-tuned definition,” said immigration services spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. “It’s going to make it easier for us to adjudicate cases like these in the future."

People who want to perform in the U.S. typically need one of the following: a P-1 visa, issued to internationally recognized athletes, artists and entertainers; a P-2, for artists or entertainers in a reciprocal exchange program; a P-3 visa, issued to entertainers participating in a culturally unique program; or an O-1, known as the “genius” visa, for individuals with extraordinary ability in the arts, athletics, education or sciences (NBA star Dirk Nowitski of Germany, for example, has an O-1).

In its original P-3 denial, an immigration official concluded of Orquesta Kef:

“The evidence repeatedly suggests that the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music, incorporating musical styles from other cultures and regions. A hybrid or fusion style of music cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe, or other group of persons.”

The band had been booked by the Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish cultural institution in Los Angeles, to perform at its annual Hanukkah holiday concert. In the visa application, Skirball included a short biography of the band, describing the ensemble’s  “unique musical style” as “based on the millenary force of tradition and the powerful emotion of the Jewish culture, mixed in with Latin American sounds.”

Skirball also provided letters from music experts who testified to the group’s unique sound.

 “How more culturally specific can you get than Jewish music of Latin America?" Jordan Peimer, Skirball’s vice president and director of programs, thought at the time.

The visa denial was the topic of several scathing columns, including a blog post on Foreign Policy magazine’s website sarcastically titled “Keeping America safe from Latin Klezmer bands.”

Watch the most-viewed videos on msnbc.com

Peimer, who said the initial denial was “a huge missed opportunity,” called the latest decision “a vindication for the band … and also a vindication for the American people.” 

“It says our government works,” he told msnbc.com on Wednesday.

Alejandro Filippa, a New York immigration attorney who specializes in artist visa applications, said the immigration agency’s clarification of the definition of “culturally unique” was a positive step in a world of increasingly diverse and interdependent cultures.

“The door is now more open for an entire new wave of artists to perform in the United States,” Filippa said in an email to msnbc.com. “Unfortunately, the fact this application was initially denied is indicative of the cultural ignorance of some USCIS officers in adjudicating cases that are more reflective of the modern, diverse international community we now live in.”

As for when Orquesta Kef might finally play in the U.S., Peimer says he hopes to book the band for a future Hanukkah concert.

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CACERES, Brazil - For the first 500 years of Brazil's history, pretty much anything that wanted to cross its borders could do so in relative peace, whether cattle, Indians or intrepid explorers.

That era is now drawing to a close. Brazil's economic rise is forcing it to deal with a problem it long regarded as the sole concern of rich countries such as the United States: the need to secure its borders and slow down a flood of drugs, illegal immigrants and other contraband.

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President Dilma Rousseff, under political pressure from a crack epidemic in Brazilian cities, is spending more than $8 billion and overhauling Brazil's defense strategy to tackle an issue that has implications for trade, agriculture and the overall economy.

Brazil's prosperity has created a new consumer class of tens of millions of people who happen to live right next to the world's three biggest producers of cocaine: Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Brazil is now the world's No. 2 cocaine consumer, behind only the United States, according to U.S. government data. It is also a booming consumer of marijuana, ecstasy, and other narcotics.

Rousseff's attempt to choke the flow of narcotics could mean big money for companies from Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer, which plans to make a new line of unmanned drones to patrol the border. Foreign firms such as Boeing, Siemens and others stand to gain.

Securing an area that is five times longer than the U.S.-Mexico border, winding through more than 10,000 miles of Amazon jungle and 10 different countries, is proving to be a huge challenge. It is also sparking debate about whether it's really worth the money and effort.

For Rafael Godoy de Campos Marconi, a police lieutenant at a lonely border checkpoint in the snake-infested Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil, the task can seem hopeless.

Marconi's unit is responsible for patrolling a 125-mile stretch of border with Bolivia, the source of about 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in Brazil. On any given day, Marconi believes there are dozens of smugglers sloshing their way through his turf, with drugs stuffed into their shoes, pants and underwear.

The problem? Marconi usually only has 10 to 12 men to cover all that territory. Two weeks had passed since their last bust.

"Oh, they're out there," he sighed, scanning the horizon, sweating in the 100-degree heat and humidity. "But there are so few of us that they know exactly where we are." Even with double his current resources, he said, it would be "very difficult" to control a region so deep in Brazil's interior. With a wry smile, he mentioned a solution that was on the lips of a number of Brazilians here.

"Maybe if we built a wall, like the United States has (with Mexico)," he said. "Maybe then we can slow these people down."

Brazil won't be building any walls. But it is trying to absorb other lessons from the United States, and leaning on Washington for resources and technical advice. The head of Brazil's armed forces traveled last year to El Paso, Texas, along the Mexican border, to meet with U.S. military and Department of Homeland Security officials.

Brazil's new emphasis on its borders, and the obvious subtext - that it regards its neighbors with a growing wariness - is starting to prompt the kind of resentment around South America that used to be reserved for a certain large, English-speaking country to the north.

"It pains me to say it, but I've heard people say we're the new gringos," said Pedro Taques, a senator from Mato Grosso state, which borders Bolivia. "Controlling the border is a problem that Brazil never thought it would have to face ... and it's forcing us to do some uncomfortable things."

Nonetheless, Taques said that improved border protection was "critical" to the health of Brazil's economy and society, and he expressed frustration that results have not come faster more than a year into Rousseff's presidency.

"Until now, we've seen lots of speeches," he said. "But people who live on the border aren't seeing enough results."

Brazil is ramping up its efforts just as the countries around the region who have fought drug gangs the hardest in recent years, at enormous financial and human cost, seem to be starting to explore other alternatives.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said last year that he would "welcome" legalization if it took the profits out of smuggling. His Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, hinted in a September 2011 speech that he might be open to a similar move.

Colonel João Henrique Marinho, who commands the Brazilian army's Second Border Battalion in Caceres, observed that, at present, Brazilian smugglers in the border region lack anything resembling the sophistication or firepower of cartels in Mexico or Colombia. Instead, they run what Marinho described as an "artisanal" operation based on smugglers and light aircraft.

Asked why local smugglers haven't organized themselves into Mexican-style cartels, Marinho raised his eyebrows and replied: "Could it be because we're not resisting them yet?"

The full version of this news feature by Reuters reporter Brian Winter can be seen here.

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HAVANA - Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived a perilous raft journey that killed his mother and became a symbol of troubled relations between the United States and Cuba, is now an adult.

Gonzalez currently studies at a military academy on the island and took part in an 18th birthday celebration Tuesday in his native city of Cardenas alongside his father, according to images broadcast on state TV.

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Gonzalez was shy of his sixth birthday on Thanksgiving Day 1999 when a fisherman found him off the coast of Florida, clinging to an inner tube after his mother and others fleeing Cuba drowned trying to reach American soil.

He was taken to live with relatives in Miami but his father, who was separated from his mother and had remained on the island, demanded that the boy be sent back, saying Elian was taken without his consent. The dispute turned into a headline-grabbing international custody battle that weighed heavy on the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

• Slideshow: Elian Gonzalez, 10 years later

Fidel Castro threw the weight of the Cuban government behind the case, mobilizing seven months of massive demonstrations calling for Gonzalez's repatriation.

It was one of the few moments since 1959 when the Cold War rivals agreed on something: The U.S. legal system ruled that Gonzalez should be returned to his father.

But Gonzalez's Miami relatives refused to relinquish him, and on April 22, 2000, federal agents raided Elian's uncle's home in Little Havana and seized the boy from a closet at gunpoint. He returned to Cuba two months later.

• Story: Elian Gonzalez is not angry at Miami relatives

On Tuesday, Elian spoke by phone with Rene Gonzalez, a Cuban intelligence agent who was released from prison in the U.S. in October but was ordered to serve three years' parole in the country. Cuba is demanding his return and has made his case and that of the other "Cuban Five" a cause celebre.

"He wished me a happy birthday," said Elian.

The two are not related.

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