Homeland Security Politics and Policy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Homeland security is a crucial but understudied subject. Issues like border control, domestic counterterrorism, and emergency management receive considerable attention in policy circles and the media but much less from academics. Both at APSA and in scholarly journals, political scientists pay far more attention to environmental, health, urban, and defense policy.

In particular, two sets of questions regarding homeland security remain unanswered. First, why does the U.S. homeland security enterprise look and operate the way it does? Put differently, what are the politics behind homeland security? Second, how can the homeland security enterprise be improved? This question concerns the policy of homeland security. The politics of homeland security obviously set parameters for policy.

Our panel consists of five speakers.

The chair and discussant will be Chappell Lawson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-editor of Beyond 9/11: Building a Homeland Security Enterprise for the 21st Century (forthcoming MIT Press). He will make brief prefatory remarks to put the papers in the context of the U.S. homeland security enterprise.

Magdalena Krajewska, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wingate University, will address the issue of identity verification. Her paper (“The REAL ID Act of 2005: Policy Implementation Despite Obstacles”) represents an extension of her recent book from Cambridge University Press, Documenting Americans: A Political History of National ID Card Proposals in the United States. Specifically, the paper examines the implementation of the REAL ID Act of 2005, an anti-terrorism measure passed after 9/11 that aimed to make drivers’ licenses more secure documents. Although many governors and state legislators opposed it, it entered its final implementation stage in 2016. One contributor to the success was the decision by the small REAL ID Program Office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work directly with state DMVs to implement federal standards. REAL ID thus underscores the importance of intergovernmental partnerships in U.S. homeland security.

Patrick Roberts, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech, will present “Institutional Crisis in FEMA and Emergency Management After 2006.” This paper represents an extension of his book, Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Specifically, Roberts discusses what is necessary to effect major bureaucratic reform after a crisis, given that these events can instead produce protracted failure or cycles of reform, churn, and disequilibria. Although Congress passed the Post-Katrina Reform Act, this legislation did not address the fact that FEMA operated in a weakly institutionalized environment, leaving it subject to encroachment by people and organizations with different agendas. For instance, FEMA’s placement within DHS made it subject to DHS’s security and immigration priorities. FEMA’s trajectory after Katrina was thus determined more by its bureaucratic environment than by the nature of reform efforts or by its mission.

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.

Andrew Selee (President, Migration Policy Institute) focuses on the evolution of America’s immigration regime in response to changing political pressures. Despite sweeping reform in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and considerable political attention to immigration, U.S. immigration agencies do not provide the security that the reformed system was designed to deliver. This paper is based on his book chapter (with Doris Meissner and Amy Pope) in a forthcoming volume on homeland security (Chappell Lawson, Alan Bersin, and Juliette Kayyem, eds. Beyond 9/11).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 25: Public Policy

Individual Presentations

• The REAL ID Act of 2005: Policy Implementation Despite Obstacles - Magdalena Krajewska, Wingate University

• DHS and the Challenges of 21st Century Border Management - Ben Rohrbaugh

• The Evolution of Homeland Security Law and Policy - Patrick S. Roberts, RAND Corporation

• Evolution of America’s Immigration Regime - Andew Dan Selee, Migration Policy Institute

Chair

• Chappell Lawson Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discussant

• Chappell Lawson Massachusetts Institute of Technology