Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 33

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
ders. The State’s monopoly over defining threat, and addressing threat, has played
a key role in its capacity to legitimately speak before all others when it comes to
articulating Security discourse in the realms of law and public policy. The problem
that emerges in securitization, and securitization of immigration in particular, is
that borders are not only geopolitical and physical, but are social. That is, a more
critical approach reveals that borders can also be viewed as a sociocultural “set of
practices” (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 4). Seeing borders as a sociocultural
set of practices broadens and deepens the ability to explain and understand
the relationship between Security, immigration, and borders, “which encompasses
an array of technologies of governance designed to control the mobility of people,
services and goods. In this context, the concept of ‘the border’ is no longer understood
narrowly in terms of the sharp lines on Mercator’s map, but a much ‘thicker’
sociological entity” (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 4).
Security discourse is comprised of interactive material, e.g., police, and intangible,
e.g., an ideology that casts the immigrant as miasmic, components that
inform, complement, and produce securitization measures. A systematic set of
concepts and practices, empirical and intangible, thus function in tandem within
an interdependent set of organizational relationships to articulate and implement
Security (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 6–7). Threats to public safety legitimate
securitization, which, in turn profoundly impacts the character and content
of public policy. Criminal offenses that undermine national security, for instance,
are fodder for expansive securitization measures. Order through public safety is
at the apex of a State’s raison d'état. “Order is what remains when everything that
is prohibited has in fact been prevented” (Foucault 2007, 46). In the process of
securitizing immigration, the immigrant becomes an existential threat to U.S. national
security virtue of being an immigrant. If a securitized war-response to immigration
is pursued in public policy, a result is that the (non-White racial, ethnic,
religious) immigrant is reduced to a one-dimensional caricature—a mere threat to
good Order and public safety. Thus, the “notion that security needs may be better
addressed through more localized, non-violent and social means [can be] readily
dismissed as idealistic, as ‘softheaded, wishful, naïve’, even dangerous” (Basham
and Vaughn-Williams 2012, 8; Peterson 1998, 581–89; Razack 2004, 129–74;
Vaughn-Williams 2007, 107–24).
In tandem with Security, Law, as a meta-signifier, in the form of rules,
applies to all forms of order, society, sociopolitical, and economic organization
embodied in formal and informal political units. Law assumes an indispensable
role in expanding, e.g., the USA Patriot Act, and restricting, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2340
(Prohibition Against Torture), securitization’s limits. Law is a primary medium by
which Security finds expression in the realm of public policy (Astrada 2010, 5–6,
57–73). In a system of law “what is undetermined is what is permitted ... the law
prohibits ... and the essential function of security ... is to respond to a reality in
such a way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds—nullifies
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