More or Less Afraid of Nearly Everything: Homeland Security, Borders, and Disasters in the Twenty-First Century

Ben Rohrbaugh

ago 2020 · University of Michigan Press

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Migration, borders, cybersecurity, natural disasters, and terrorism: Homeland security is constantly in the news. Despite ongoing attention, these problems seem to be getting bigger even as the political discussion grows more overheated and misleading. Ben Rohrbaugh, a former border security director at the White House’s National Security Council, cuts through the noise to provide an accessible and novel framework to understand both homeland security and the thinking around how to keep civilians safe.

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States did not experience national security domestically; it defended its borders by conducting military, foreign policy, and intelligence operations internationally, and then separated these activities from domestic law enforcement with bright legal lines. In the twenty-first century, U.S. national security no longer occurs exclusively outside of the nation. The U.S. government is beginning to respond to this change, and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security is merely the first step in an organizational and strategic realignment that will be a long, difficult, and mistake-filled process. More or Less Afraid of Nearly Everything is an accessible and engaging guide to homeland security, particularly migration and border security, that makes innovative arguments about the American government and keeping citizens safe, and provides practical solutions to real-world problems.

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Ben Rohrbaugh is a Fellow in the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. He is the co-founder of Lantern UAS, which develops systems to scan cargo containers using aerial drones, and a partner at the consulting and training firm BorderWorks Advisors, LLC.