(upbeat music) – Welcome to a Conversation with History. I’m Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Edward Alden who is the Bernard L.
Schwartz Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s a former Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Times. And his new book is The
Closing of the American Border Terrorism, Immigration
and Security Since 9/11. Ted, welcome to Berkeley. Welcome back to Berkeley. – Thank you for having
me on the show, Harry. I appreciate it. – Where were you born and raised? – I was born in Schenectady, New York. But my family moved to Vancouver
when I was quite young. My father got a job at the
university there in Vancouver. And so, my growing up years were all in Canada, in Vancouver. – And looking back, how do
you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world? – Well I think they shaped it in all sorts of different ways. But one of the
acknowledgements that I make in my book about the many
trips I took across the border with my father when I was young. Vancouver’s very close to
the U.S./Canadian border. And my dad had a hobby that took him down into Washington State a lot. So I have a lot of early
memories about travel across the border and dealing
with the border officials in Canada and the United States. The concern at that
time was primarily that you were gonna try to
bring back a bottle of wine or something you weren’t supposed
to bring back into Canada. (laughs) – Those were the days. – And could you hide it under the tire in the back seat without them finding it. – And was there much
discussion of politics and international affairs
around the dinner table? – Not a lot, though my
father over the years has gotten more and more
interested in politics. But we always sat down as a
family at the dinner table. And we discussed whatever
was on anybody’s mind. Since three of the four
children were boys, it was usually sports. But we did have good family
dinner table conversations. – And where did you do your undergraduate and then graduate work? – I did my undergraduate
all over the place in Canada actually: at
Carleton University in Ottawa, and at the University of Victoria. And then I went out to work as
a journalist for a few years. And then I went back and finished off at the University of British Columbia. And then, I came down here to Berkeley to do graduate work in political science. – And here at Berkeley,
who did you work with? – I worked with a number of people in the Political Science Department, primarily with Ernie Haas, and with Ken Waltz in
International Relations. And then, I became very
attracted to the work of a sociologist, Franz
Schurmann, and worked closely with him on a number
of different projects. I also did a couple of
courses with Todd Gitlin who was a strong influence on me during my time here at Berkeley. – And one of your first publications, I noticed, was with Franz Schurmann, and published by the Institute
of International Studies. – Yeah, he generously
agreed to work with me on a project and pushed it. And it was a tremendous
learning experience for me. He is such an impressive
intellect, a linguist, speaks in a dozen different
foreign languages, and of course, in the
early part of his career was an expert on China. I was attracted to his work
on American foreign policy, and in particular, a book
called The Logic of World Power which I still think is the
best single analysis out there of the origins of the Vietnam War, how and why it was the
U.S. got itself embroiled in that war. – And in both the case
of his China studies and his U.S. studies, he really focused on the power struggles
within the bureaucracy. – Very much, very much. It was, you know, his analytical framework was that there were power battles inside the administrations,
be it the Chinese Government or the United States Government. And that those affected
very profoundly the policy that ended up being presented
to the rest of the world. And the other thing about Franz that was very influential for me was that he was not just a
scholar but a journalist. And during the time I worked with him, he wrote a weekly column
for Pacific News Service in San Francisco. And really persuaded me, which
I think I wanted to believe since I had come with a
journalistic background, that scholarly work and
journalism were complementary, that they weren’t antagonistic. – And how has that worked for you? ‘Cause it’s an important synergy. One is not the other,
but they can actually learn a lot from each other. – I think in my case, it ended
up working out very well. I mean, I decided not to
continue on the academic path. I went back to journalism. But I ended up working
for the Financial Times which I think is probably
the most scholarly of the world’s daily newspapers. I mean, there are many
people who work for the FT who are, by any reasonable standard, experts in the issues they cover. They know as much or more about
what they’re writing about as the best academics, the best
practitioners in the world. So that was really a kind
of perfect home for me, a kind of halfway house between
scholarship and journalism. And now with the Council
on Foreign Relations, I think very similar in a lot of ways. You have people who are, you know, many people who are practitioners who’ve worked in government. There are former journalists there. But of course, there’s a scholarly bent to a lot of the work. So I’ve tried to blend
the two in what I’ve done in my career. – And when did you go
to the Financial Times? – I joined in 1998 as part. I became the Bureau Chief
in Toronto in Canada. And then, about two
and a half years later, at the tail end of the
Clinton administration, I came down to Washington to
work in the Washington Bureau. And then eventually
worked my way up the ranks of the Washington Bureau to become the Bureau Chief there in Washington. – How did Washington change
during this interval? I mean, was there really
a noticeable impact? – The noticeable impact for
me was not so much the change of administrations, but it was 9/11. I mean, I came in on the tail end of the Clinton administration
when, you know, possibly with the exception of the effort to broker an
Israeli/Palestinian peace deal, the agenda was really
dominated by nonsense. It was, you know, the
Monica Lewinsky scandal, the impeachment proceedings, the sort of cultural war that was going on between the Republicans and the Democrats. And then, of course, you had the drama of the Bush/Gore election. But it quickly went back to a kind of a business-as-usual sense. I mean, you may remember early
on in the Bush administration the controversy over stem-cell research. And that was the big issue. And so there wasn’t really
that much on the agenda. And then 9/11 hits. And it really was, for me and I think for everyone in Washington at the time, a transforming kind of experience. Washington acquired a
seriousness after 9/11 that it hadn’t had for a long time. – But before 9/11, you had as an interest the whole problem of competitiveness and how one addresses those problems. Talk a little about that interest. ‘Cause it seems that that interest, together with your crossing
the border with your father, seems to have helped
point you in the direction of the book we’re about to talk about. – No, I think that’s correct. As a journalist, beginning
after I left Berkeley and throughout the 1990’s,
the major issue I wrote about was international trade. I covered the NAFTA negotiations, the Uruguay Round negotiations, the fights with Japan in the early part of the Clinton administration. So I became something of an
expert on international trade. And then when I joined
the Financial Times, wrote more broadly about
international economic issues. The Financial Times is really the newspaper of globalization. That was and is still for the
Financial Times the big story. And then so after 9/11,
in a way what I needed to figure out as a reporter was, you know, what are the implications
of this new order thrown up by 9/11 for globalization, for the linking of global economies that we had seen grow so
dramatically in the 1990s. So that was the way in which
really my economic interests led into the topic of this book. – Now interestingly enough, as a prelude to 9/11 there was a document: namely the Rudman-Hart
Commission Report on Terrorism. And really it pointed
out the contradictions within globalization. Tell us about that. – Well, it was interesting
because literally the first story I wrote
as a result of 9/11 was about the Hart-Rudman Commission. On the morning of the attacks, I was supposed to have a day off. And I was at home and
turned on the television just in time to see the
second plane hit the Towers. And after determining
have we got our kids home, and after determining my wife was fine, I got on the train going
into Washington D.C. ’cause I had to get to work. And it was the strangest experience. There were packed trains
coming out of Washington D.C. I was literally, other than the driver, the only one on the train
going into Washington D.C. And I got to the office. And by the time there, of course, our whole office had mobilized and there were people
working on the big story. You know, what happened? What’s been hit? What are the consequences? And I thought well what can I usefully do. And I thought well, I’ll try to do some kind of forward-looking piece on what are the policy
implications of this gonna be. And I immediately stumbled onto
the Hart-Rudman Commission. Because of course, they had anticipated precisely what had happened. They had said, “We’re likely to experience “a major terrorist attack.” They’d reported in 1999. And so for the paper of September 12th, I wrote about that report and said this is going to open a
debate in the United States about whether we need a
Homeland Security apparatus. And it really went from there. And as you suggest, the
Hart-Rudman Commission understood the dilemma which is how do you improve security
against a terrorist attack without putting sand into
the gears of globalization, without throwing away the free mobility both in terms of goods
and in terms of people. That was and is one of the primary
features of globalization. – And then let’s bore into
that problem a little. Amy Chua has been a guest on our program. And in a recent book,
she really points out on the one hand how power of empires over the years has been highly dependent on the influx, or use of talented people from all parts of the world. So in a way, one component
of globalization is if you’re gonna stay ahead competitively, you’ve really got to
attract the best people, the best students, and
essentially have open borders. – Yeah, I was influenced by Amy’s book, and also by a kind of more
contemporary version of it. Contemporary in the sense that she’s written a history of empires. Contemporary version by Richard Florida who wrote a book called The
Rise of the Creative Class. And it was the same argument. The argument is that the
economies that flourish are the ones that are best at attracting, integrating, making maximum use of the world’s most talented people. And Amy argues it in that
book that this was true, even though you might not have thought it, for the Roman Empire and for
other great empires in history. It’s certainly been the
case for the United States. The danger she points out is that openness sometimes creates the seeds
of its own destruction. That there can be negative consequences from openness that cause countries to turn their back, to close down. And one of my motivations
for writing the book was the fear that after
9/11, the United States had begun to implement
measures that in a way were going to kill the goose
that laid the golden egg: this openness, this magnet for talent that the U.S. has been for so many years. – And you, you actually
in your own research cite a lot of examples of how, in a way, interdependent we are. To read you back some of them, as early as 1990, a
third of Silicon Valley scientific and engineering workforce was made up of immigrants,
primarily from China and India. By 1998, there were nearly
3,000 firms in the region led by Chinese or Indian chief executives accounting for more than
6.8 billion in sales and 58,000 in jobs. And more than half of
the PhDs in engineering and science are from foreign countries. So it’s a real connection, a flow of human resources that
really makes our vitality as the leading global power real. – Yeah, I think there’s
absolutely no question about it. And there’s been recent
research looking at patents as an indicator of innovation. And immigrants file
for and receive patents at a much higher rate
than American citizens. And the reason is not that they’re smarter or more entrepreneurial necessarily, but that we are attracting
a lot of foreign scientists, engineers, the sort of
people who are likely to file patents. They come; they study
at U.S. universities. They remain here. They become part of companies. They start their own companies. And it’s absolutely been an
engine of American innovation. And innovation has
really been at the heart of American economic leadership. I mean, getting back to
the competitiveness themes. If you had to point to a
single factor that accounts for the American ability
to stay at the top decade after decade after decade, it’s our capacity for innovation. – Now, you touched on
the other side of this which in talking about
Amy, namely the whole well, it’s a historical experience but it’s very much an American experience where you close down the borders. In other words, you
have periods of openness followed by clamps downs
because of security, because of nativism,
because of nationalism. Talk a little about that
in the history of the U.S. Because even before 9/11,
that has been our story. – Yeah, there have been periods. And my analysis of it is
a little bit different than a lot of the histories. I mean, a lot of the
histories look at economics as driving this, that the United States opens in times of economic prosperity and closes at times of economic recession. And if that’s correct, we
may well be on the cusp of an even more serious closure. But when I went back and
I looked at that history, it seemed to me that the missing component in a lot of the analysis was that there was a security fear as well. I mean, the big closing
that we’re all familiar with took place after the First World War and really preceded the
depression of the 1930s that, of course, became worse at that time because there weren’t jobs
here for people to come to. And all countries in
the world closed down. But really, a lot of the
post World War I closing resulted from the fear of
importing European conflicts. You know, we had watched
the conflagration. We had participated in it in Europe. And many people thought well
we don’t want to import that into the United States. And that was a lot of the
impetus for that closure. And I think what we
saw post 9/11 was again a similar sort of thing. And the closing we’ve seen is nothing compared to what we saw
after the First World War. But it was the same fear. And the fear is that while
openness brings many benefits: it attracts talented people; it allows you to bring in imports of goods at higher quality, lower price. Openness also allows things
that we don’t want to come in. I mean drug smuggling,
international criminals, and as we found out with 9/11, terrorists. And so, I think it has been true at a number of points in American history that security fears have
really driven this closing down as much or more than economic concerns. – In the period before 9/11, you do an interesting account of the differences in California toward immigration policy now versus the policies of Texas. And I think it’s worth talking about this because President Bush, President George W. Bush, had been governor of Texas. And so he had a very interesting take pre 9/11 to the border. So compare that, his position, with that say of Governor Wilson here in California and what explains the differences. – Well, one of the events
that I recount in my book was a clash between Governor Bush, who was then governor of
Texas, and Governor Wilson at the 1996 Republican Governors
Association Convention, the first one that Bush had attended. And at the time, Wilson was really a star in Republican ranks,
was seen as a potential presidential contender. And his star was rising largely
on the immigration issue, Prop 187, English-only initiatives. And California, of course more
than really any other state, had experienced some of the
economic, cultural conflicts that come with high levels of immigration, particularly high levels
of illegal immigration. Texas, intriguingly, had always had a slightly different take on it. I think partly because
Texas has very low levels of social services. You know, one of the arguments
about illegal immigration is people come in and you have
to provide schools for them. You have to provide
hospital medical services. This is a huge cost for states. In Texas, the level of social
services are fairly low and have always been fairly low. And so in Texas, you
had a business community which was very supportive of immigration from Mexico in whatever capacity, be it legal temporary worker programs or be it unauthorized immigration. And really, Bush had a
different take on this issue when he became president. He didn’t like illegal immigration. But he thought that finding a path to regularize immigration
flows from Mexico needed to be a crucial priority
for his administration. So he really saw the Wilson
elements of the Party as destructive for the Republican Party. He thought the future
of the Republican Party required bringing Hispanics
and Hispanic voters into the Republican
Party, and thought Wilson and the policies Wilson was advocating were working against
that long-term interest. – It’s this very intriguing point because the evolution of the Republican Party is conflicted on the one hand
tapping American nationalism, American exceptionalism,
nativism on the one hand, keeping the other out, so to speak. And on the other hand, powerful elements of the business community,
both in agriculture, and well especially in agriculture, that want open borders so that
the immigrants can come in. So there’s a history of a
legislative struggle here that’s really fascinating. And in fact, what had happened was that in making it impossible, you described, for Mexicans to go back to Mexico after working here for intervals during a year, there was a clamp down which essentially froze
that cross-border migration which increased the
population in the country. – Yeah, I think you’ve
described it very well. There’s an internal struggle
that’s long been there in the Republican Party
that pits essentially the business elements of the Party: agriculture, multinational business, you know, hotels,
restaurants, other places that employ a lot of lower skilled labor, versus the more kind of cultural, nativist elements of the Party. And Bush was firmly in
the pro-business wing of the Republican Party on that issue. And you know, as you describe in the 90s, we had seen the nativist
elements really acquire much more of a voice, not
only in the Republican Party but the Democrats really
had responded to that. The pressure coming from the
border states like California had already led to significant increases in enforcement at the southern
border during the 1990s. And one of the unfortunate
consequences of that was it exacerbated the
problem of illegal migrants settling in the United States. It used to be that there was a fairly easy cross-border flow. People would come and work for
part of the year and go back. Well as you begin to set
up barriers at the border, as you raise the cost, if
people have to hire smugglers to get them across, when they
come into the United States, they’re gonna stay. And if they decide to stay, they’re gonna bring their families over which means you have not just the men, but the women and the
children coming over. And then once they’ve decided to do that, they may well not stay in California or Arizona or Texas. They will fan out into the country to where the work opportunities exist. And so we’ve seen immigration pressures in parts of the country:
Iowa, North Carolina, Alabama, places where we’d never seen them before. – 9/11, the attack comes and you focus on many individuals, and we’ll talk about some. But the key figures here are Bush, and we’ve laid out a vision
that he had prior to 9/11. And then, but the other key players become Secretary Ridge who ultimately becomes Secretary of Homeland Security, but at first is an advisor
in the White House, and the Attorney General John Ashcroft. And before we get into
the specific battles, one has a sense that there’s
certain characteristics, that these people were
very vulnerable after 9/11 and were really looking for handles to deal with the problem,
and some might say to cover the embarrassment
of what they let happen. – Yeah, I would be a little
more charitable in the sense that I think everybody that I interviewed who was in the government
at that time believed that 9/11 was not gonna be a one-off, that there were going
to be follow-on attacks. And that in fact, there might
already be terrorist cells in place in the United States with plans to carry out follow-on attacks. So I think there was
a kind of desperation. There was a feeling that we’d been hit. We’d missed the signals
that we were gonna be hit. The damage was catastrophic. And we had no idea of knowing
whether we might be hit again and no sense of how to go
about looking for the people who we were worried might hit us again. So I think the motivation
wasn’t so much embarrassment. It was desperation. It was this feeling that the threat was real and imminent and we had no idea what to do about it. – So help us understand
what the response was and how particular sets of problems were dealt with. And I think one has to to start with the Justice
Department, in a way. Because you’re really saying that Ashcroft suddenly realized that
the only tools he had to deal with the problem
came out of the Immigration and Customs side. – Well, I mean, you look at
this from their perspective. Okay, they in the Justice
Department believed that another attack was almost
certainly going to come. And there were two ways it might happen. Either there were terrorist
cells that were already in the United States. They’d come here as did the 19 hijackers and they were waiting. Or else there were people who
were gonna come from abroad. I mean, all 19 of the
hijackers came from abroad, came to the United States on visas. They weren’t people who
had been living here for long periods of time. And so, how do you try to deal with this? I mean, if you had an FBI
that had strong connections in the Arab and Muslim
communities around the country, maybe you could find informers. Maybe you’d have some way
of gathering information that was useful. But the FBI didn’t have those contacts. And so domestically, the only
tool they could think of was like the hijackers,
they’re likely to be here on temporary visas of
some sort or another. So we’re gonna go out
and we’re gonna start arresting people, asking questions. If people give any indication
that someone down the street might have some connection
to terrorist acts, we’re gonna hold these people. We’re gonna find immigration violations. And there often were. I mean, there were a lot
of people, there still are, a lot of people living in the
United States out of status. And that’s an extremely powerful tool. If you find someone with even
a minor immigration violation, you could hold them for
long periods of time. There are some due-process limitations. But as we discovered after 9/11, it was easy to steamroller over those. So they ended up
arresting a lot of people, holding them for long
periods of time after 9/11. And then at the borders,
they began to set up a series of new screening
mechanisms and other hurdles to try to keep out potential terrorists who might be trying to come
into the country after 9/11. So immigration law was central
to both of those responses, both as a way of holding people you had a concern about domestically and as a way of keeping people out that you had reason to be
concerned about internationally. – So at the Canadian border,
I mean, you cite the figures that the traffic, the
automobile industry and so on, the truck traffic is unbelievable. So in the first days, you
essentially get a clamp down in that traffic. – Yeah, the immediate
response right after 9/11 was really literally to close. Well not quite literally,
I’m going a little too far, but a virtual closure of the borders. What happened at the
Canadian and Mexican borders, which had never happened before, was they went to what was
called a Level One Alert which meant that every vehicle, every individual crossing the border was subject to maximum
detailed inspection. You know, you went through
every inch of their car to make sure there wasn’t
something in that car. And this was indiscriminate. You know, you could have a
trucker who was moving auto parts across the border and ran
that route two times a day every day for the last 10 years. He was subject to the
same level of scrutiny as someone you’d never seen before. And the result was really to shut down the economic system that
operated across that border. And this was most apparent
in the auto industry. Because the auto industry
on both sides of the border is fully integrated. You have cars that are
assembled in the United States with parts that come in
from Canada, and vice versa. And it’s a real-time system. You know, the parts leave the factory. They’ve got 10 hours to make
it into the United States to the assembly line. And if they don’t make it, then the assembly line shuts down. And that’s what we saw happen
in the aftermath of 9/11 because of the border closure and the delays that that caused. – Now, there’s throughout the
book a very interesting theme. And this takes us back to what
we were just talking about. There is a sense that America was into a mode of saying
globalization is great. And so you had in place pluses and minuses in the bureaucracy for
responding to this crisis. And let’s talk about that. Because I think it’s very important. So the hijackers on the
9/11 flight were identified first not by the FBI. But I guess it was the
Immigration and Naturalization. – It was Customs actually, Customs first. – It was Customs. And tell us how that came about. Because within two hours, they
knew who the hijackers were. – Yeah, this was a fascinating story and something that I
think should have been part of the 9/11 Commission
Report, but they overlooked. This was very interesting because Customs, of all the organizations in
the United States Government, had been the most sophisticated
at trying to deal with the negative consequences
of globalization. And this was particularly
the case for drug smuggling. You know, open borders make
it easy for drug smugglers. And so, Customs had
tried to develop systems to help it identify drug smugglers: people coming in on airplanes
who would be carrying drugs on their person, may have
in fact swallowed drugs. And how do you identify those people? Well, one possibility is
everybody coming off the plane from Colombia or from Mexico or from countries that
are sources of drugs, you’re just gonna inspect them all. You’ll put them all into
secondary inspection and you’ll do searches on everyone. Well if you do that,
you’re gonna slow down the traffic tremendously. People will complain to Congress. Congress will get upset. You can’t do that. It wasn’t possible to have
free movement and do that. So Customs had developed
specialized systems to try to say who is it that we need to be
worried about on these planes. They had received voluntary agreements from the U.S. airlines
in which the airlines would share data on incoming passengers so that Customs would know, you know, was this ticket purchased with cash which was always a red flag. Was there a credit card that we know might be connected to the drug cartels? Was it purchased in places that we know are used by the drug cartels? Does this passenger fit
profiles of drug smugglers? So they could try to narrow
the number of searches. And what happened was
it was quite effective. They actually reduced the number of people who were pulled into secondary inspection by about a quarter. But the drug seizures went up. So this is a long way of
answering your question and I apologize. But one of the interesting things about that passenger information data was that the airlines had
no way to segregate it. So information on domestic passengers, information on international passengers were part of the same database. Customs had access to both. This wasn’t known at the time. I think the ACLU and others
would have had things to say about it had they known it. But the result was that when 9/11 hit, Customs had immediate access
to the passenger lists and that same kind of data: you know, credit card purchases, where the ticket was purchased, for all of the passengers
on the four flights. There were two of the 19 hijackers, and we can get back to this if you want, but two of the 19 hijackers
had been identified already by the CIA as al-Qaeda operatives. So those names flashed up immediately when Customs did the search. And they were able in various
ways to link those passengers, some by credit card and other information, some by the fact that they
just sat beside each other, to the others. And within two hours they
went to the FBI and they said, “We think there were 19 hijackers. “We think these are the guys.” And they were right. – And the other side of this, because there were mechanisms
in play to make it easier than one could believe
to get into the country. And here we have the case
of a different bureaucracy and a different part of the government, namely the Visa Service, having moved to the notion of well let’s make it easy
as possible for everybody. Let’s make it even more easy for Saudis coming into the country. And let’s make it so
that the travel agents issue the visas when Saudis buy tickets. Talk about that. Because that was the dark side. – Oh no question, no question. I mean, the attitude in the 1990s was people coming to the United
States is a good thing for the United States. We want them to come here. We want them to be tourists. We want them to spend money. We want them to go to
American universities. We want them to get treatment
in American hospitals. All of this is a good thing for us. And the restrictions were
really all economic ones. We want to know that
the people who come here have enough money to
come here, return home, and that they’re not
intending to come here and overstay their visas, and live and work in the United States. Though an awful lot did anyway. But the Saudis were
considered virtually no risk. I mean, their records were clear. Saudis came to the United States. They spent a lot of money. They went to the beaches. They partied. And they went home. And so, for the visa
officers in Saudi Arabia, the scrutiny of Saudi visa
applicants was extremely low. There were some who were
attuned to the concern over terrorism, but not very many. And so the result was we
did everything we could to expedite Saudis coming
to the United States including the scheme
involving travel agents which, you know, there’s been
a lot of confusion about it. The travel agents didn’t grant the visas. But it just was a way to expedite it. Saudis could give all their information to travel agents. The travel agents would pass
it over to the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. Embassy would
stamp the passports, get it back to the travel agents, and they’d be on their way. – And of course, a lot … How many were Saudis of the terrorists? I think it was seven. – 15, I think it was 15, yeah. – Now, let’s go back to Ashcroft. Because what Ashcroft discovers is that if he’s gonna be able to act, that Immigration has courts basically that had become routine. Namely, they’d find somebody
who had committed a violation. They’d bring him into
court and orders issued for him to leave. But often, they didn’t leave. – [Edward] Right, right. – And Ashcroft saw this as a tool where he could act very quickly. That’s very important. Talk about that. – They took a set of lessons away from a particular incident
that occurred prior to 9/11. On the night of September
10th, close to midnight, Zia Jara, who was the
pilot of the United flight that was crashed in
Pennsylvania when the passengers stormed the cockpit. – [Harry] The terrorist pilot? – The terrorist pilot,
yeah, the terrorist pilot. Zia Jara was pulled over
driving 95 miles an hour on Highway 95 which runs
up and down the East Coast. He was pulled over in Maryland, just south of the Delaware border, heading north for New York. And the policeman pulled him over, ran the usual Wants and Warrants. There was nothing in the database, so he wrote a ticket for
$270, gave it to Jara. Jara went on his way and
the next day, of course, he got on the plane and
was part of the hijacking of that flight. It turns out that at the
time, Zia Jara was living in the United States illegally. He had overstayed a visa
and actually violated the terms of his student visa. And it wasn’t just Jara. A number of the hijackers,
including all of the pilots, at some point in time
had been out of status in the United States. So Ashcroft and his people looked at this and they said if we could begin enforcing our immigration laws more aggressively. You know, say that local cop when he ran the Want and Warrant, the
information had flashed up, “Zia Jara has overstayed his visa. “He’s here illegally.” The whole point is he would
have pulled him into custody. And perhaps, 9/11 never
would have happened. So they saw immigration enforcement as being a vital counter-terrorism tool. That if we just enforce
our immigration laws aggressively across the board, perhaps we’ll catch the next 11 hijacker, or at least make it a lot harder for them to organize and
carry out another attack. – But these extreme
measures, at one level, there’s just a lot of
zero results basically. Because in terms of the
people they detained who they were looking for terrorists without any information,
they found nothing. And so it is often the case that you’re looking for
a needle in a haystack with the hope that that
one needle will then prick the bubble of the terrorist plan. – It’s a very good way to define it. The problem with immigration enforcement as a counter-terrorism tool is that immigration is a huge world. I mean, there are millions of people who come here every year on visas. By best counts, there’s
something like 12 million people living in the country without papers, illegal immigrants living in this country. The volume of travel is extraordinary. And the notion that somehow
just by being aggressive across the board in enforcement
of that set of laws, you’re gonna catch these handful of people that you’re worried about is a long shot. And in fact, that was what
the experience showed. That aggressive immigration enforcement identified a lot of illegal immigrants. There were a lot of people were, and still are, being deported. But it didn’t help to identify hijackers. And a lot of what I write about in my book is it wasn’t just illegal immigrants. Sadly, there were a lot of
people who were here legally, who were trying to come here legally, whose lives were really turned upside down by getting caught on the wrong side of this immigration enforcement campaign even though they had no
connection to terrorism at all. – You make a dichotomy between the cops and the technocrats. We’ll talk about the
technocrats in a minute. But give us a summary
statement of the cops. And Ashcroft is the key cop both in being head of the Justice
Department, but also in what he sought to do and what
he felt he had to do in this period of vulnerability. – Well, I mean, Ashcroft talk, the cops who’s interested
in how they call themselves. It was a self-definition. The technocrats, I made up myself. But Ashcroft described what he called a spit-on-the-sidewalk
strategy which he attributed to Robert Kennedy when Kennedy said, “We’re gonna go after organized crime. “And if they spit on the
sidewalk, we’re gonna pull ’em in “and charge ’em with that.” Well, he saw immigration
law as his equivalent of a spit-on-the-sidewalk strategy. There’s a DHS official who
put it to me very nicely. He said, “Immigration law is like tax law. “You’re guilty until proven innocent.” And so, it was a powerful
tool for Ashcroft. If there were people out
there that they had any reason to be concerned about,
they could pull ’em in, charge ’em with some minor
immigration violation, and hold them for a long
time for questioning. And so they saw that as the most powerful law enforcement tool they had. And they used it to the hilt. – Now, tell us about the
technocrats and about Ridge. Because Ridge had been a
governor of a border state. And he was brought in
in the White House first for Homeland Security, and then the first head of the Department. – Yeah, Ridge really came at this problem from a different perspective. I mean for Ashcroft, there was one issue. The issue was how to prevent
another terrorist attack. And if there were unfortunate consequences of those enforcement efforts, he didn’t really care
about it all that much. That wasn’t his job. His job was to prevent
another terrorist attack and to use whatever tools he had. Ridge looked at the problem differently. Ridge had been governor of Pennsylvania, thought of himself as a
border-state governor. He grew up in Erie which
is right on the shores of Lake Ontario. Had a lot of interaction
with the Canadians. Thought very much about
economics, as all governors do. Governors spend a lot of
time trying to attract business to their state,
trying to attract investment. And so he came into the job
with a very similar perspective to that that was laid out in
the Hart-Rudman Commission which is the challenge here
was to tighten the borders, to secure ourselves against terrorists, but to do so in a way
that it didn’t interfere with the free flow of goods
and the free flow of people. So he always looked at his
job both at the White House and the Department of
Homeland Security as twofold: improve security, prevent
another terrorist attack, but do it in a way that
preserves an open economy. – Uh-hmm, and in this context, the central idea is what
you call risk management and Smart Borders. Tell us what those are. – Well, there’s sort
of two elements to it. Risk management means you have to think about the consequences of the measures you’re putting in place. There’s no perfect defense
against terrorism, right? I mean, there’s an unlimited
number of potential targets: every shopping mall, every subway. You can’t prevent them from
hitting you everywhere. And so you have to think
well what are the measures that we can put in place
that give us the biggest bang for the buck, that
provide increased security but with minimal disruption
to our daily lives. And so that’s the basic
concept of risk management. The idea of Smart Borders
was to sort of extend that concept to the borders. So what you wanna do is
you want, at the borders, to be as targeted as you possibly can, to spend your time
inspecting and scrutinizing those people and those shipments of goods that you have some reason
to be worried about, much along the model of
what Customs had done with drug smuggling. To use just one example,
what they’ve tried to do at the northern border,
and it hasn’t happened as rapidly as it should,
but is create what they call these NEXUS lanes which are special lanes where if you’re a commercial driver, or you’re a frequent crosser, you can go to the U.S. government and
say, “This is who I am. “This is all my information. “Run background checks on me. “And when you’re satisfied
that I’m a good person, “then I get to drive
through this special lane “where I don’t have to
wait in the long lines “at the border.” That’s Smart Borders. That’s separating out
the people you don’t need to be concerned about so that the people and shipments of goods
that you need to focus on are much smaller. And your likelihood of identifying things of concern goes up. – In this story of these struggles, who prevailed, I guess is the question? But also, why didn’t Ridge? Did Ridge succeed or did he not? And why do you think? – I think early on,
Ashcroft clearly prevailed and over some very strong opposition. Not only from Ridge and
the people around Ridge, but from people within
the Justice Department including the Head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
at the time, Jim Ziglar, who objected vociferously
to the way in which Ashcroft wanted to use immigration
law for these broad roundups and for restricting people
coming into the country. But Ashcroft prevailed because nobody else had an immediate solution. The Smart Borders idea was a good idea. But the tools weren’t immediately there. I mean, it required creating databases, gathering information
that really didn’t exist immediately after 9/11. Some of the mechanisms had
been put in place previously, but they’d never really come to fruition. Whereas Ashcroft had an immediate answer. “I’ve got a set of tools. “I can use them aggressively.” And so really for the
first two years after 9/11, Ashcroft won almost every battle: with the White House,
with the State Department, and with detractors within
his own Justice Department. – In a way, you can say that the national agenda became fear. And that in turn was linked with the politics of the Republican Party in looking forward to the next election. Did that national vision and agenda make Ridge’s efforts more difficult even to
the point of losing out? – Yeah, I think over time
it became a bigger issue. I think immediately, sort of 2001, 2002, I don’t think politics was
uppermost on anybody’s mind, even within the White House. But as the midterm election approached, it became clear to people
in the White House, to political operatives,
that the war on terrorism was a very good issue for the president. And I talked to a lot of
people in Homeland Security who say they were
constantly under pressure from the White House
to do dramatic things, to run exercises, to make announcements that constantly emphasized to the public the threat of another terrorist attack. This was something that
was good politically for the president. And so in a way, this issue
began to spin out of control. And we talked earlier about
the president’s desire to maintain open borders,
to do agreements with Mexico to regularize the flow. Over time, this began
to spin out of control because his party, partly
for political reasons, began to emphasize more
and more the threat that oh my God, terrorists
are gonna cross the borders, come into the United States
and carry out another attack. – And this political agenda,
which is emerging over time, was reflected in the fact that
even after Homeland Security was established as a
cabinet-level department, there remained an Office
of Homeland Security in the White House that
Ridge had to deal with. – Yeah, I don’t think that was
entirely a political thing. I mean, the people that staffed the Office of Homeland
Security were by and large professionals of one sort or another. It was headed for a time
by Richard Falkenrath who now runs Homeland Security for the New York City Police Department. But it created a struggle. DHS was kind of ill-formulated
from the outset. I mean, Ridge’s original idea, which I report on in the book, was that actually there should just be a merger of the border agencies. I mean, he originally was not a supporter of creating a big Department
of Homeland Security. That came as a result of
pressure from Congress and the feeling in the White House that they’d better get with the program or it was gonna be
forced down their throat. But nobody ever figured out
what DHS was supposed to do. Some people thought it
was supposed to coordinate government-wide efforts
on homeland security. But the fact that an
Office of Homeland Security remained in the White
House meant that you had a White House agency that also saw itself as the coordinator. So there was a structural
conflict built into the creation of Department of Homeland Security which meant that DHS was not only fighting with Justice and fighting with State, but it was often fighting
with the White House. – And you point out that Homeland Security never had a planning office under Ridge. And that that may have
been a great mistake. – Yeah, as it was put in an
article I quoted actually, “A planning office is Bureaucracy 101.” You need some place where
you’re thinking about the department’s long term
goals, its strategic vision. And that was never part of
the initial formulation. There is one now in DHS. It was implemented under Chertoff. The only thing that kind of
looked like a planning office was in the portion of
DHS dealing with border and transportation security. And I think it’s not a
surprise that that part of the operation actually
was much more effective say than the disaster recovery part, as we saw the disaster
and the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and
the collapse of FEMA. I think you can attribute some of that to the lack of any sort of policy vision within the department as a whole. – Going back to what you
learned from Franz Schurmann, it would seem that the
fragmentation of the government, the separation of powers, the whole thing that at one level has made America a very vital place and a great democracy, in a situation like this
becomes a monster basically. You point out that once Homeland
Security was established and all these agencies were
put under its umbrella, that it had an amazing
reporting responsibility to the Congress. Tell us about that. – Oh, it was absurd. There were more than 80 committees that the Department of Homeland Security had to report to in Congress. They spent most of their
first year writing reports to Congress about what they hadn’t done since they hadn’t had
enough time to do anything. But the larger issue of
bureaucratic politics, the problem was that even
though the White House was putting out papers talking
about a national strategy, talking about the border of the future, and the Smart Border, what
was happening was incoherent. You had some of these
Smart Border measures being developed, but alongside
it you had this whole aggressive immigration
enforcement campaign. You had parts of the
government working very much at cross-purposes. And what we saw as a result
was in 2002, 2003, 2004, there were tremendous restrictions on people trying to come
to the United States. I mean, the number of
visas granted for people to travel here fell from
close to eight million to fewer than five million in two years. And so you had different
parts of the government all kind of falling over each
other to try to put in place new border security measures
without thinking about well, what are the consequences of this going to be in the real world. What is the effect gonna
be on all the people we wanna come to this country
and that we have relied on? And so the result was really
a kind of traffic wreck that we saw take place in 2003, 2004. One, as I write, an awful lot
of people, people we wanted, couldn’t get into this country. – And in a way, there were
really very great costs to our soft power. Because in addition to
this inflow of people at all levels: students, prominent businessmen, whoever, that the economic consequences of that, there is also a consequence in the way we’re perceived in the world. – Yeah, I think there were economic and diplomatic consequences. The economic consequences you refer to, I mean, for the first time since the end of the Second World War,
we actually saw a decline in the number of foreign graduate students coming to the United States. They began to go elsewhere. And the figures are very clear even though we’ve, fortunately,
seen a bit of a recovery in the last year or so. I talked to an endless
number of business leaders who said, you know, “We
can’t get visas for people “who wanna come in and buy our products. “We can’t get visas for employees.” A lot of companies began
to set up operations abroad because they couldn’t get the
people that they wanted here. So we paid an economic price there. In a way, the diplomatic price
I think was almost bigger. One of the easiest
interviews for me to arrange and the most interesting was with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Because he said he dealt
with this constantly. Every meeting he had with foreign leaders, he would get complaints about the way their people were being
treated when they tried to come to the United States. I mean, both, you know,
senior diplomatic officials, even told me this story about the daughter of a member of the Thai royal family who came here on a student visa. Arrived three days before
she was supposed to under the terms of the visa,
got slapped in handcuffs, sent on a plane back to
Thailand, told she couldn’t come, would have to reapply for a student visa. There was huge diplomatic
fallout from this. And I think it was broader
than just the leadership. You know, we hear a lot
about the consequences of Iraq, and the torture
policy in Guantanamo all of which I think was very real. But most people, of course,
didn’t experience that directly. But almost everybody, at
least in the upper levels of a lot of countries around the world, tried to come to the United States. They have family members
who have tried to come to the United States. They have friends who have tried to come to the United States. But to the extent that
they were mistreated at our borders, those are
stories that have reverberated across the world. And the message went out: the United States doesn’t
want you any more. And that was a very very
costly message for us. – You’re touching on an
important point which is the link between political leadership, lack of vision and so on, and then the actual
implementation by bureaucracy. So that you can have a
sense that our security requires we do certain things. But at the border, it is implemented by somebody who may be having a bad day and who may not like important people, who may be doing the right
things in the right way, but there’s always a rotten apple. That’s very important. – Well, I think that’s part of it. But I also think you have
to, you have to think when you’re talking about bureaucracies, what is the core mission. Every bureaucracy, to some extent, is defined by its core mission. And if you think about
the border functions, be they the consular officers abroad, or the customs and immigration officials who meet you at the airport
or at the land borders, throughout the 1990s,
the core mission had been facilitate travel. We want people to come here. And in fact, if you do
too much to make it hard for people to come here,
you may hear about it. You know, somebody might
call their congressman. And their congressman
might call your boss. And you might get a call, “Why are you making it so difficult “for people to come here?” After 9/11, that mission
changed completely. The mission became keeping terrorists out of the United States. And so nobody: no consular
officer, no border official, was gonna get slapped on
the wrist for saying no. But if they said yes to the wrong guy, it might cost them their career. So the bureaucratic mission
really changed overnight. And that had a profound effect on all of the frontline people who are the face, in a sense, the face of the
United States Government to much of the world. – Let’s talk now about your conclusions. Because you identify three. Walk us through them. – There are both sort
of specific conclusions and broader ones. I think the most important
broad conclusion I draw is that we have to think
about immigration policy and counter-terrorism separately. I mean, there are times
when immigration law can be quite useful. You know, if you identify
somebody who you think has terrorist connections, you
don’t have a criminal case, you wanna deport them. Maybe you can find an immigration
law violation and do that. But the notion that simply
by tough enforcement of immigration law, you’re
gonna find and deter terrorists, I think has just been
proven not to be the case. What you find are you
find illegal migrants. And there may be good reasons to do that. But I really think we need to separate the discussion of these two issues. And I hope we do that going forward. And I see them conflated all the time. I mean, Secretary Chertoff
talks about the construction of the fence on the border with Mexico as a counter-terrorism
national security measure. And that’s just ridiculous. We can’t point to a
single case of terrorists using the southern
border as an entry point. And if so, the fence
probably wouldn’t deter them. So that would be my biggest conclusion. Secondly, I just think we
need to be far more proactive about attracting the people
here we want to attract. There are still measures in
place, post 9/11 measures, that really humiliate a
lot of people who come, particularly from Arab
and Muslim countries. And those numbers have not recovered. The number of visas from
places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and
others are still way down from the pre-9/11 levels. We need to think about how
we can attract the people we want from those countries
and elsewhere back. Not just worry about
the enforcement problem, but worry about the
attraction problem as well. So those are really the
heart of my conclusions. – A name, as I think back about the book that I’m not sure occurred in your book, was Vice President Cheney. And what is interesting
is he’s been identified with the One Percent
Solution by Ron Suskind. Meaning that if there was a 1% chance of something happening,
then you came down hard to prevent it from happening. This, I think, non mention of Cheney and then the whole failure
to adopt risk management is something that’s important. Because even though he
doesn’t seem to be hovering all over this, there is an inability to understand that concept. – I mean, to be fair, I do think actually that the department has
over time begun to implement a number of these risk
management measures. I think we’re much better
off now than we were in the immediate aftermath. So I think there has
been some real progress. Cheney, right, is not a
leading character in my book. I think from everyone I talked to, his staff just wasn’t
that actively involved on this set of issues. But the philosophy that he brought, this notion that the
mission was to do everything in our power to prevent
another terrorist attack and consequences be damned, was absolutely the philosophy that we saw in this whole set of issues as well. So I think in a way, he
hovers over everything that the Bush administration
did, this issue included, even though his staff
wasn’t as actively involved day to day as say they were on Guantanamo or on interrogation policy
or some of the other issues we’ve heard about. – And I think we wanna
emphasize the point that what you’re really saying is that the immigration debate, ’cause
there was a debate going on and hopefully there was gonna
be reform, bipartisan reform, of all the problems
related to immigration, that terrorism, the
counter-terrorism fight became a tool in that debate which corrupted both. – Yeah, and I think it
hijacked the possibility of doing immigration reform. I think the specter hanging
over all of the discussions in 2006, 2007 was, you
know, we have to have perfect border security. And it was used, I mean
terrorism was used, by those who really wanted to crack down on the illegal immigrants. It was used by those people as a tool. It was a powerful argument. You know, it’s one thing to say well they’re overcrowding the
schools and the hospitals. It’s another to say well you know, an illegal migrant might
carry out a terrorist attack. So there were people who had an interest in conflating the two. – What now are we left with with regard to your understanding and interest in this whole competitive challenge? Because your book was written, I believe, before the research financial
crisis that we’re still in. So the question become
how does this play out and what will be its impact
on the relative decline in the world of the United States which may be occurring for other reasons? – I mean, this is very much
a kind of long-term issue as opposed to a short-term issue. I don’t think immigration
or immigration policy is gonna be the way we get out of the current economic recession. In fact, I think we’ll see
the immigrant numbers drop because the jobs just
aren’t gonna be here. But longer term, the United
States has put itself in a difficult position. For many many years, we
had this game to ourself. I mean, if you were a
talented ambitious person who wanted to travel
abroad to further yourself, you were gonna come to the United States. You know, we have the
world’s best universities, best research facilities,
most dynamic companies, and a very open policy
that was very friendly and attractive to these people. And they came to the United
States in great numbers. What happened after 9/11 is a lot of the rest of the
world’s caught onto this. I mean, the British, the
Canadians, the Australians, the Germans, even the
Japanese are implementing many measures to try to
attract foreign students. They’re making immigration
procedures easier for these people. They’re making it easier for
them to find work afterwards. We are now in an … And countries like China
and India, of course, are trying to keep these people. They’re implementing policies domestically to attract them back home. So we are now in a competition
for the world’s talent such as we haven’t faced
in the post war period. And I think that’s
gonna be a difficult one for the United States. We have many advantages. People still wanna come here. We still have the world’s
best universities. There are a lot of ways in which we can win this competition. But we’re in a fight on
the competitiveness front that didn’t exist before 9/11. – Ted, on that note which
I guess there’s an element of hope in it, but also a discouragement, let me show your book again, The Closing of the American Border. And I wanna thank you very
much for coming on our program and coming back to Berkeley. – Thank you for your time, Harry. I enjoyed it very much. – And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History. (upbeat music)