Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11, which was named a finalist for the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for non-fiction. He was the project director for the Council’s Independent Task Force on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy (2011) and for the Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy (2009). He is also the director of CFR’s Renewing America Publication Series. Prior to joining the Council in 2007, Mr Alden was the Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times. He has written extensively about the U.S. response to globalization, focusing particularly on international trade, immigration, and homeland security. He has won several national and international awards for his reporting, and has written commentary for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and two children.