Drug Policy

In the fifth of a six-part Baker Institute Viewpoints series, experts respond to the question: What are the implications of expanding border security?

Investments in border security must be carefully calibrated in order to effectively regulate international flows of people and goods. An increase in spending alone will not necessarily improve control of the border. Rather, any increase in spending must prioritize effective security processes that facilitate legitimate flows and economic exchange across the border. To most people, the border is a frontier that must be hermetically sealed to ward off a range of threats: unauthorized migration, smuggling of contraband and drugs, and potential terrorists. Unfortunately, these individual threats are often conflated. Certainly, transnational criminal enterprises exploit weak and ineffective border security. And certainly, pathways for moving migrants can be used to traffic arms and drugs as well. Cartels and other illicit networks exploit seams in state capacity and often co-mingle in opportunistic ways. Yet dealing with these complex threats by simply building a wall and attempting to seal the border is counterproductive. Continue Reading →

In the fourth of a six-part Baker Institute Viewpoints series, experts respond to the question: What are the implications of expanding border security?

On June 27, the U.S. Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, a broad immigration reform bill that includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. One of the major provisions of this legislation is an increase in funding for border security. The bill establishes the goal of achieving a 90 percent success rate of intercepting and deporting undocumented immigrants who attempt to cross the border. To meet this goal, the bill would provide an additional 20,000 Border Patrol agents, new fencing, electronic surveillance and unmanned drones. What are the implications of this massive influx of funding and resources for securing the border? Continue Reading →

In the third of a six-part Baker Institute Viewpoints series, experts respond to the question: What are the implications of expanding border security?

Civil libertarians are already expressing alarm about increasing domestic surveillance capabilities at the border. This concern gestures toward a broader fear that contemporary threats to national security, particularly terror threats, have distorted the historical legal grounds that protect U.S. citizens from government surveillance and data collection. In actuality, if there is one area where the law provides well-recognized and expansive justification for domestic surveillance, it is at the border. Continue Reading →

In the second of a six-part Baker Institute Viewpoints series, experts respond to the question: What are the implications of expanding border security?

There is virtually no agreement between the major political parties, or even between the legislative and executive branch members of the same party, regarding the state of security on the border or such issues as spillover violence and corruption in Mexico. Furthermore, underlying philosophical and ideological divisions exist behind the various views on our border with Mexico, even extending to patterns of governance and life in America itself. In fact, the Senate bill now stalled by the House in many ways represents another flashpoint in the ongoing crisis of consensus in our nation. Continue Reading →