Ex–San Diego schools chief and border business investor Alan Bersin, still awaiting senate confirmation of his appointment by President Barack Obama to become head of Customs and Border Protection, has hit the lecture circuit. On January 13, he told an audience at Houston’s Rice University that “it is time for us to view borders not as lines that divide us but rather as flows of people and goods and ideas and capital.” Bersin — who as of last October held promissory notes valued between $600,000 and $1.25 million as proceeds from the sale of previous interests in a Mexicali industrial development and a San Ysidro–based Mexican travel insurance agency, according to a federal disclosure filing — added, “We must monitor together, we must assess the risks…together, and we must start to create the institutional relationships and mechanisms that will permit us to manage these flows in a productive way.” A future stop: April’s fourth annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix, which Bersin is set to co-keynote with GOP senator John McCain.