Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 32

Enemy at the Gates: The Consequential Effects of Securitizing Immigration
‘war on terror’ unleashed by the US and its allies in the aftermath of the attacks of
11 September 2001, the differential effects of border security practices according
to racial and gender characteristics have been particularly visible” (Basham and
Vaughan-Williams 2012, 1). Racial, ethnic, and religious markers have become securitized.
Privileging Security in the development of policy has the effect of potentially
substantially enlarging the scope of securitization (De Genova and Peutz
2010; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009, 582–87; Rumford 2006, 155–69). In
light of this potential, it is necessary to critically examine policy that is explicitly
securitized within democratic society due to its commodious character because
“sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised
on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population”
(Creegan 2012; Foucault 2007, 10–11). Security can be broadly defined as a state of
affairs wherein individuals are emplaced within an overarching Order that exists
to ensure the sustainability and wellbeing of the polity, with public safety as a cardinal
value legitimizing public authority. Security mechanisms and frameworks
are, at the most basic level, designed to establish secure spaces. A secure state of
affairs is one in which sovereign authority governs to establish and fix borders,
locations, and, above all, make possible and ensure the protection of the People
that reside within the geopolitical and physical borders of the State (Foucault 2007,
29). Security, from a State perspective, constitutes an “organic bond uniting hierarchized
individuals” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, xiv) within geo-spatial and
political borders.
The State, therefore, provides a space and place wherein it is the ultimate
provider of public safety to protect the population through the provision, preservation,
and fortification of geopolitical and physical borders. The traditional notion
of borders based on geopolitical and physical demarcations have provided the
purlieus of sovereign space wherein the Sovereign has effectuated a secure place to
govern all within its jurisdiction, to include territory and peoples. To be secure in
the world, therefore, involves public authority creating mechanisms of identifying
and addressing internal and external “threats” to the integrity, sanctity of borders.
Threats to the wellbeing of the State are construed as being a threat to the People.
Quelling and managing threats and disturbances to Order, to the peace, are part of
a process whereby a State proactively structures, controls, and reifies its sovereign
territory. The problem with threat, conceptually, as a means of legitimating Security,
broadly conceived, is that it has “the constant tendency to expand” (Foucault
2007, 45). Security is a very broad concept (Opello 2016; Yeatman and Zolkos
2009): Throughout history, political organization—whether primitive, dictatorship,
city–state, republic, feudal, monarchical, industrial, mercantilist, capitalist,
socialist, or communist—Security has played an incalculable role in the structuration
of a polity’s affairs (Astrada 2010, 5–6).
Security, expansively conceived, has grounded existential notions of interests,
meaning, purpose, identity, and survival of the People within the State’s bor-
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