The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11

I bought this book because I was impressed with an editorial Ted Alden wrote in the Washington Post. The book explains the post 9/11 immigration challenges in a way non-experts can understand. Some of our well intentioned policies have had an unintended negative impact that I was unaware of.

Ted Alden has written the best available book on the early history of DHS. I joined the department in 2005, toward the end of the period he covers, and I was interviewed for the book; even so, the book gave me new insight into the events that shaped the Department. It is superbly written, with a clear eye for anecdotes that crystallize the policy issues that Alden explores. I don't agree with the author about some of the policy issues, but I still recommended the book to all the officials who came after me at the Department. If you want to understand what DHS is doing today, this is the place to start. Stewart Baker, former Assistant Secretary for Policy, DHS

The Closing of the American Border is a superb book with an atrocious sense of timing: it appeared almost simultaneously with Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" and Barton Gellman's "Angler" and got lost in the shuffle (both of those books are excellent as well). That's a terrible shame, because Closing of the American Border is really a must-read if you are interested in homeland security issues. Alden posits a split in thinking about homeland security between the "technocrats," who wanted to use precisely-tailored measures based upon technology to control the border and enphasized intelligence gathering, and the "cops," who took a traditional law enforcement approach and particularly relied upon immigration enforcement, because they did not have to worry about constitutional due process and other Bill of Rights limitations. (According to rightfully-maligned Supreme Court precedent, Congress has "plenary power" over immigration, which means that the Constitution often just does not apply. The Court's recent decision in Boumedienne might signal a change in that approach, although I wouldn't hold my breath.). Alden's book is so good in no small part because he shows how neither approach is perfect: technology just can't do what we want it to do, and what its promoters (often the contractors who make it) claim it will do. But the costs of a pure law enforcement approach are even worse: there is precious little evidence that rounding up thousands of immigrant men of Middle Eastern background actually get us much intelligence or prevent crimes. Instead, they undermine intelligence by destroying the government's credibility in immigrant communities and are fabulously expensive. And there are two other terrible problems with the cops' approach: 1) It keeps people out whom we want and need to let in. Put another way, the law enforcement approach doesn't consider the costs of tightening the border: theoretically it could consider these costs, but its adherents are used to chasing bad guys, not thinking about broader policy goals. Alden begins his book with the tale of a world-class pediatric cardiology surgeon, who is from Pakistan, and couldn't get into the country for years because, well, he's from Pakistan. How many childrens' lives were lost because of this? America is in danger of losing is scientific and technical edge because we keep out thousands of talented students, who normally might have stayed in the US and helped build American companies. And US companies start moving production overseas, because they can't interact with foreigners for meetings and projects, because they can't get into the country. 2) The law enforcement approach likes the immigration power because it frees it from legal shackles. But the more that DHS guards the border through immigration enforcement, the more its mission begins to morph from a security agency to an immigration enforcement agency. Indeed, this is probably a major reason why Obama tapped Arizona Governor

Edward Alden's timely new book, The Closing of the American Border, is a must read for the incoming Obama administration and any American interested in homeland security (as well as foreigners wanting to better understand often contradictory US immigration policies). Exhaustively researched and brilliantly penned, this page-turner provides a thorough account of the country's border policies since 9/11. This important book is the unofficial history of how overnight border security transitioned from an almost afterthought to a bureaucratic tug of war, sometimes carried out in the oval office, between "the cops" and "the technocrats" struggling to balance protecting the country with civil liberties in a new age of counter-terrorism. Unlike many serious policy books, The Closing of the American Border is actually a terrific read, written with a combination of serious analysis and gut wrenching anecdotes of detained immigrants whose only crime was their place of birth, unlucky timing, and desire to invest their considerable talents in the United States. The book tells harrowing stories of lives destroyed after being snared in blunt security initiatives aimed at foiling the next major attack. Admittedly, while it is impossible to prove a counterfactual why there hasn't been another terrorist incident, the book details how the closing of the American border has come with considerable cost to America's image abroad and economic competitiveness at home. Immigrants, whose sweat literally and figuratively built America, have run up against an administrative buzz saw from a government still reeling from Al Queda's surprise attack. As the book chronicles, Bush administration officials in a politically charged and risk adverse environment have been at almost every corner willing to sacrifice efficiency and open borders for tighter, if imperfect, border security. The personal stories of individual disaster the book relays put human faces on what often just seem like steely, impersonal policy decisions. The book reads like a combination of the Warren Report and a reality TV series turned horror show. New DHS officials, incoming National Security Council staff, and citizens interested in the perennial tensions between freedom and security should carefully read The Closing of the American Border and keep it close to their desks. This book provides critical strategic lessons gleaned from seven years of hindsight for Americans and their leaders. The policy choices remain difficult ones, and as this book makes clear, there is still much work to be done. Dr. Scott Borgerson, a former US Coast Guard officer, is the visiting fellow for ocean governance at the Council on Foreign Relations.

I decided to pick up this book after reading very positive write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, and while I don't always agree with either paper on the books they recommend, I must say this one was even better than the printed reviews. The newspaper accounts give the impression that this is merely an important book about an important policy issue...which it is. But it's also an incredibly compelling narrative about infighting within the Bush administration over how to respond to 9/11...and make sure it doesn't happen again. Alden interviews almost all the major players -- Colin Powell, Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff -- and lots of less-senior officials who give a really insider account of the battles within the government in the months and years following the attack. Sort of like a classic Woodward book, except on homeland security rather than wars overseas. Can't recommend it more!