DHS and the Challenges of 21st Century Border Management

• In Event: Homeland Security Politics and Policy

Abstract

Benjamin Rohrbaugh (Partner, Borderworks Advisors) focuses on border management in the context of economic globalization, drawing on the relevant chapters in his manuscript More or Less Afraid of Nearly Everything: Homeland Security, Borders, and Disasters in the 21st Century (under review, Cambridge University Press). His paper (“DHS and the Challenges of 21st Century Border Management”) discusses how effective border management involves processing vast numbers of people and goods, as well as combating transnational criminal organizations engaged in smuggling. However, the federal government has traditionally dealt with these challenges either through conventional criminal justice approaches (at the Department of Justice), through foreign policy (the State Department), or through enforcement actions at the physical border. A modern approach to these issues, by contrast, involves using expansive government search authorities at the border to secure flows of goods and people into the country. Achieving this goal has required a reorientation of policy perspectives and management structures, but success has not yet shown up in political discourse.

Author

• Ben Rohrbaugh