International Security & Defense

The Homeland Security Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is pleased to announce the creation of a paper series examining current and critical issues in homeland security. The Homeland Security Project seeks a variety of viewpoints, and the paper series is non-partisan. The intended audience for the paper series is broad, including policymakers in Congress and the Executive Branch, the homeland security community, and the general public. This call for papers is open to policy practitioners, scholars, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations.

Juliette Kayyem explains why America would be safer if the Department of Homeland Security focused on the country's most probable vulnerabilities.

By and large, only immigrants can deliver true native language ability and deep cultural understanding. Those with such skills have been in high demand in recent decades. Many have left normal American lives to answer the call. They often have deployed to the world’s most dangerous war zones to serve as contractors alongside U.S. troops and intelligence officers. And a number of them have been killed or wounded.

While veteran diplomat Nick Burns calls the president's order an 'overreach,' Republican consultant Scott Jennings says he's making strides internationally.

Juliette Kayyem suggested that freshman Texas GOP Representative Dan Crenshaw support his argument on border security with facts — "not with mocking a woman."  This article covers the Twitter exchange.

Federal guidelines require federal involvement—with good reason—but why should taxpayers foot the bill?

As so often, “South Park” saw it coming. In “The Last of the Meheecans”— which first aired back in October 2011 — the obnoxious Cartman joins the US Border Patrol, only to find himself facing the wrong way as hordes of disillusioned Mexican workers seek to flee the economically depressed United States back to Mexico.

Undaunted, Cartman makes it his business to stop them leaving. After all, without Mexican labor, the US economy would grind to a halt.

Very often the Trump presidency feels as if it’s being written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the comic geniuses who created “South Park” more than 20 years ago. In this week’s episode, Trump/Cartman shuts down the federal government in retaliation for the Democratic Party’s leaders’ refusal to approve the border wall he campaigned for in 2016.

The net result is that the government employees responsible for controlling the vastly larger flow of people into the United States through airports don’t get paid. Desperate to end the shutdown, for which he is being blamed, Trumpman declares a national emergency under legislation that permits redirection of Department of Defense construction funds, provided it’s for purpose of military defense.

Trumpman’s attempt to use Defense money to build his wall is challenged and struck down in the courts, but he goes ahead anyway, only to run into a shortage of construction workers. The episode ends with the arrival of the “caravan” of Central American asylum-seekers (last seen in the November midterms episode), who gratefully accept jobs to build Trumpman’s wall.

During his oval office address, President Trump painted a dire picture of the southwest border, which has left him no choice but to shut down the government. The president’s speech was, however, a sleight of hand that obscures the real dispute and misrepresents the issues at the border.

Over the past generation, migrant smugglers — at the outset known as "polleros" (or chicken herders) — have been viewed as a necessary evil by migrant advocacy groups. Smugglers acted illegally, to be sure, but for a worthy cause: To assist migrants to arrive at their destination and achieve a better life. Migrant activists, including church groups and human rights organizations, not only turned a blind eye to the law-breaking but affirmatively extended their support networks (and credibility) both to the smuggled migrants and to the (perceived) Robin Hoods who were smuggling them.

In what might have once seemed a marriage of convenience for a noble purpose, smugglers operated hand-in-hand with human rights advocacy groups along Mexico’s migration corridors. All of them viewed their activities as akin to the pre-United States civil war Underground Railroad: A network of safehouses, finances and routes through which slaves could be smuggled out of the South and brought to freedom.

Though it may have started out innocently enough, over the past ten years, the smuggling enterprise has changed dramatically and become thoroughly criminalized.

As security conditions improved steadily on the Southwest border and irregular entrance into the United States was further restricted, the price charged by smugglers rose disproportionately. In turn, as the amount of money generated by human smuggling grew, criminal groups operating along the migration routes — including drug cartels and corrupt law enforcement authorities — became major participants, and human smuggling became a central feature of their criminal businesses.

Belfer Center Senior Fellow Susan E. Rice, an ambassador and former National Security advisor to President Barack Obama, reflects on President Trump's latest mishandling of American foreign policy.