19 Items

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Analysis & Opinions - The Hill

Global challenges, North American solutions

| Nov. 29, 2022

Initially planned for November 2022, the North American Leaders Summit (NALS), appears set to return on Jan. 9-10, 2023, in Mexico City. As is often the case, U.S. attention is elsewhere — Ukraine, the midterm elections, and runaway inflation — and our own neighborhood has been accorded a lower priority than it deserves. But for many of these same reasons, the meeting is an opportunity for the United States and its region that should not be missed.

Book - North American Institutes at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

North America 2.0: Forging a Continental Future

| November 2022

North America has survived a tumultuous three decades since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. What characterizes our shared region today? What sort of region can advance our shared interests and well-being over the next generation? This volume from the Wilson Center and Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center offers an agenda for how the region’s leaders can forge inclusive and effective strategies that ensure North America’s next decades build upon past successes—while addressing serious shortcomings.

AP Photo

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - San Diego Union-Tribune

Opinion: Outlawing forced labor in China will be felt by all

| Aug. 29, 2022

Twenty-one years ago, 9/11 upended the world community. That event compelled a massive paradigm shift in border management and international finance to counter terrorism. A similar moment is again at hand. We should bear the 9/11 experience in mind as the ramifications of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act make themselves felt.

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Policy Brief - Migration Policy Institute

Migration Management and Border Security: Lessons Learned

| September 2021

Two decades into the 21st century, both the European Union and the United States have faced considerable challenges in managing migration and borders. Globally, the number of international migrants has grown considerably, reaching 281 million as of 2020. And large-scale irregular migration has strained the infrastructure, legal systems, and often the social and political fabric of the nations encountering it. This personal reflection, written by a former high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, examines the strategic lessons that can be learned from recent migration events that have severely stressed border authorities in North America and Europe.

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Paper

Disrupting Transnational Criminal Activity: A Law Enforcement Strategy for Homeland Security

| May 21, 2021

Transnational criminal activity, organized or not, presents a substantial internal security threat to the United States as it does to other nation-states across the world. Combating it remains a critical mission in the homeland security enterprise. Federal efforts across that enterprise, however, remain scattered and largely ineffectual, and many types of transnational crime are resistant to the law enforcement tactics used domestically.

This paper proposes that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) take the lead in supplementing the traditional “criminal justice” approach to countering transnational crime with strategies that aim to disrupt it and insulate Americans from its harmful effects. We contend the “Disruption Model” outlined here,* if broadly implemented, could significantly complement the current conventional approach, and produce materially improved results in managing the challenges of transnational crime and protecting the homeland from its ravages.

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Journal Article

Lines, Flows and Transnational Crime: Toward a Revised Approach to Countering the Underworld of Globalization

| Dec. 16, 2019

In this article, we develop a new framework for combating transnational criminal activity. We argue that global illicit flows, perpetrated by organized crime, in the interstices of lawful trade and travel, embody a critical and debilitating non-state security threat in today’s world, one that the Westphalian international system of sovereign states remains ill-equipped to confront. Accordingly, we seek to generate a wider discussion in the field regarding a revised approach to this threat that is situated within a global framework of collaborative law enforcement which incorporates, in appropriate fashion, certain military and counter-terrorist strategies.

The propositions we advance in support of a revised approach to countering transnational crime and its globalized web-enabled criminals include: (a) terrorism is one species of transnational crime; (b) the criminal justice model of arrest, prosecution, conviction and incarceration is a partial and insufficient response to transnational crime; (c) national security and law enforcement functions should be viewed analytically as a “public security” continuum rather than disciplines separated by bright lines; (d) countering transnational criminal organizations effectively may require development of a hybrid law enforcement/military capacity and new strategic and tactical doctrines, including safeguards against abuse, to govern its deployment; (e) joint border management within nations and between them, coordinated with the private sector, is required and inter-agency cooperation and multilateral institutions must be strengthened in accordance with new international norms and (f) North America, a region construed as extending from Colombia to the Arctic and from Bermuda to Hawaii, could develop in the future, together with the European Union, as an initial site for a model pilot of the new approach.

The US/Mexico Border

WikiImages/Pixabay

Paper

The New Reality of Migrant Flows at the U.S. Southwest Border

| June 26, 2019

In this first publication of the Belfer Center Homeland Security Project Paper Series, Alan Bersin and Nate Bruggerman write about the dramatic changes in numbers of migrants crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico and the urgent need for attention and response from the U.S. Congress and executive branch of the government.