The Microdynamics of Border Control

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As borders harden around the world, a growing literature has emerged around the politics of border security and border control. To date, research on border control has focused on the macro-level causes and consequences of state’s choices about how to secure their borders. Foundational macro-level work, however, confronts obvious inferential limitations given the strategic imperatives that drive state decision-making about border security. Carefully designed micro-level studies of border control, then, offer a promising path forward for the expanding border security literature. In this vein, it is imperative to understand both public opinion on border security and the subnational dynamics of border enforcement.
This panel brings together four papers studying attitudes about and subnational consequences of border control. Covering a range of regions from North and South America to the Middle East, and leveraging survey experiments and quasi-experiments, the papers in this panel bring tools of causal inference to important and hitherto understudied questions about border control. This panel will promote a fruitful discussion of the microdynamics of border control, with participants and discussants focusing on (1) public attitudes about border security, and (2) subnational enforcement of international borders.

The first two papers use experimental methods to study public attitudes on border security. Goemans, Weintraub, and Zhou use large-scale experiments in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia to understand how maps (and the boundaries depicted therein) affect individuals’ identities, conceptions of nationhood, and willingness to sacrifice. Simmons and Pinson conduct a meta-analysis of historical U.S. polls on border security, field an original survey experiment on attitudes about border security in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., and conduct a smaller survey of local officials in the U.S. Together, these papers offer substantial new evidence about public opinion on border control in North and South America.

The latter two papers use subnational microdata and quasi-experimental methods to study subnational border enforcement and the unintended consequences of local border interdiction. Blair leverages microdata from Operation Iraqi Freedom to estimate the effect of U.S. border fortification efforts in Iraq on insurgent tactics. His results suggest that insurgents adapt to the interdiction of their transnational havens by cultivating greater local support from the counterinsurgents’ population. Behlendorf uses granular data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to study local enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. Challenging the conventional view of a unitary border, Behlendorf shows that enforcement varies in important ways between CBP sectors, comprising a federated rather than unitary border.

In combination, these papers further our knowledge on the microdynamics of border security, addressing pressing real-world issues with creative approaches to data collection and analysis. The panel seeks to critically engage with the parallels between papers in order to move forward the broader discussion on border control.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security

Individual Presentations

• Maps to Die For? - Henk Erich Goemans, University of Rochester; Michael Lee Weintraub, Universidad de los Andes; Andi Cam Zhou, Harvard University

• Public Opinion on Border Security in North America - Lauren Pinson, University of Texas at Dallas; Beth A. Simmons, University of Pennsylvania

• Border Control and Insurgent Tactics - Christopher William Blair, University of Pennsylvania

• The International Implications of Border Security - Michael Kenwick, Rutgers University; Beth A. Simmons, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Beth A. Simmons University of Pennsylvania

Discussants

• David B. Carter Washington University in St. Louis

• Joshua D. Kertzer Harvard University