The post-Cold War momentum towards open societies, liberalized economies, and new technologies have accentuated an important new reality-that despite the prerogatives of sovereignty, the capacity of the United States and other nations to police the movement of people and goods across its national frontiers and through its ports of entry are frail and getting weaker.

The explosive growth in international trade and travel provides criminal and terrorists with ample opportunities to enter a nation undetected. In the United States, people and goods arrive daily at more than 3,700 terminals in 301 ports of entry. In 2000, 489 million people, 138.5 million trucks and vehicles, 5.8 million maritime containers, and 829,000 commercial planes passed through the U.S. cross-border inspection program. Not only is this volume projected to grow dramatically in the years ahead, but the economic pressures for greater openness are on the rise as well.

The logic of the global marketplace is to topple borders, not to fortify them. Modern businesses intent on outsourcing and adopting "just-in-time" delivery systems want unfettered access to international markets and they want to lower the national barriers to moving people and goods reliably and affordably around the planet. Nonetheless, as the prevalence of transnational threats such as WMD proliferation, terrorism, drug trafficking, illegal migration, biohazards and disease rise, so to do the pressures on border control agents to identify and intercept illegitimate activities within this tidal wave of commerce.

Accordingly, absent creative thinking security, law enforcement, and regulatory authorities will find themselves increasingly at odds with free trade protagonists who seek to accelerate the integration of the global economy by reducing or eliminating many of the border control processes that they perceive as creating costly commercial barriers to international trade, travel, and commerce.