Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 34

Enemy at the Gates: The Consequential Effects of Securitizing Immigration
it, or limits, checks, or regulates it ... this regulation within the element of reality is
fundamental in ... security” (Foucault 2007, 47). “Legal practice consists in applying
a normative idea to a factual situation. The idea cannot realize itself. Therefore,
it requires a decision (for example, a humanitarian intervention) that crosses the
distance between the idea (for example, law of war) and the facts (for example,
the violent break-up of a state). The guarantee that a decision is made, ultimately
irrespective of its substantive content, is the essential characteristic of the legal
form” (Huysmans 2004, 168). In democratic political societies premised on the
rule of Law, Law has played a particularly important role in both procuring and
restricting Security, attempting to reconcile the competing political values, such
as liberty v. Order, against the hyper-expansive nature of securitization measures.
The federal judiciary has played a key role in checking and balancing Executive
and Congressional interpretations of Security. This can be observed in the present
struggle by the Executive to securitize immigration versus those on the Bench
and in the Congress to push back against securitized immigration. Recently, for
instance, President Trump’s Executive Order (The White House 2017b, Enhancing
Public Safety) aimed at stripping “sanctuary cities” of federal funding was blocked
by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The court issued
a permanent injunction prohibiting the Executive from unilaterally imposing its
view of the primary role that Security should assume in positing and enforcing
immigration law and policy (Diamond and McKirdy 2017).
In the present SLPP nexus, the Executive is promoting Security as the goal
of public policy regarding immigration. Militarization of local police (Goldman
2017), erecting a massive wall along the U.S.–Mexico border (Jacobs 2017), mass
deportation of immigrants within the United States (Aizeki 2017), and the restriction
of certain groups of people from immigrating to the United States (BBC
News 2017) can be interpreted as the Executive explicitly privileging Security over
competing interests and values. Jef Huysmans’ critical examination of the state
of exception can be applied to the fallout that results from the securitization of
immigration. That is, securitized immigration “tends to politically neutralize the
societal as a realm of multifaceted, historically structured political mediations and
mobilizations. Or, in other words, deploying the exception as a diagram of the political
marginalizes the societal as a political realm. In doing so, it eliminates one of
the constituting categories of modern politics, hence producing an impoverished
and ultimately illusionary understanding of the processes of political contestation
and domination” (Huysmans 2008, 165–83; Neocleous 2006, 191–213).
Casting immigrants and the notion of immigration as an existential threat
to U.S. national security creates a justification for hyper-expansive securitization
measures in which competing and equally important values and historical facts,
such liberty and the U.S. political unit being a product of immigration, drop out.
“The political contest of the meaning of and counter-measures to insecurity raises
questions about the way in which security responses to violence impact on the
31