Edward Alden blogs on border security, visa policy and immigration issues.
He is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness. The former Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times, his work focuses on immigration and visa policy, and on U.S. trade and international economic policy. He is currently directing the CFR Independent Task Force on U.S. Trade Policy.
Mr. Alden is the author of the recent book The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11 (HarperCollins), which was named a 2009 finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for nonfiction writing. The judges called it “a masterful job of comprehensive reporting, fair-minded analysis, and structurally sound argumentation.” He was the project director for the Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy, which was co-chaired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former White House chief of staff Mack McLarty. The report, which was released in July, 2009, received extensive press coverage, and has been called “a bipartisan blueprint for how to fix our broken immigration system.”
Mr. Alden was previously the Canadian bureau chief for the Financial Times based in Toronto, and before that was a reporter at the Vancouver Sun specializing in labor and employment issues. He also worked as the managing editor of the newsletter Inside U.S. Trade, widely recognized as the leading source of reporting on U.S. trade policies. He has won several national and international awards for his reporting. Mr. Alden has done numerous TV and radio appearances as an analyst on political and economic issues, including News Hour with Jim Lehrer, McLaughlin Group, NPR, the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC. His work has also appeared in Foreign Policy, the Japan Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. He is the coauthor, with Franz Schurmann, of Democratic Politics and World Order, a monograph published by Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies in 1990.
Mr. Alden holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued doctoral studies before returning to a journalism career. He also has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia. He was the winner of numerous academic awards, including a Mellon fellowship in the humanities and a MacArthur Foundation graduate fellowship.
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