Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 35

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
social and political fabric of ... society. More specifically they revive the view that
under certain circumstances security policies can become explicitly paradoxical.
The paradox arises when security knowledge and technology that is meant to
protect liberal democracy against violence [or threat] seriously risks to undermine
it. In these situations the technologies and strategies for containing a threat
challenge key techniques for restraining arbitrary exercise of political power that
define liberal democratic politics” (Huysmans 2004, 321–41). The protective motive
that underlies Security and securitization has the effect of undermining the
overarching democratic values that inform the political system and political culture.
Immigration law and policy reflect an ethos wherein the United States will
“not put superficial concerns above public safety’” (Goldman 2017). To suggest
that competing American values and norms, such as diversity and civil rights and
liberties, are “superficial” is to articulate a binary paradigm of Security/Insecurity
that places Security at the apex of public values. American identity, values, norms,
and identity are reduced to one-dimensional signifiers. A binary Security/Insecurity
public policy framework simplifies a complex state of affairs into Secure or
Insecure state of affairs, and has profound consequences for the polity’s identity, its
values, and the foundational bases of the People’s will expressed in public policy.
For instance, the existential “threat” that immigrants pose to U.S. national security,
as interpreted through the lens of a reductionist Security/Insecurity national
security framework, has explicit racial, ethnic, ideological, and religious overtones
that, in turn, deeply impact the character and content of public policy.
Framing and Critically Examining Securitized Immigration
Control of borders, and of peoples that reside within and without borders, is
a basic police function of States premised on public safety. This basic function,
however, is readily susceptible to securitization measures based on
xenophobia, ideological and religious virtue, and zealotry based on fear and loathing
of an immigrant Other, an outsider that threatens to contaminate the polity.
The Other, as the literal other, the immigrant, is employed to justify securitization.
Identity, as it is inscribed in Western Culture, revolves around resemblance. Resemblance
is opposed to “otherness” in the space of the image “of human identity
and, indeed, human identity as image—both familiar frames or mirrors of selfhood
that speak from deep within Western culture—are inscribed in the sign of
resemblance” (Bhabha 1994, 70). This resemblance, or lack of, is the foundation
of how otherness is structured for this analysis. The otherness recognized in the
immigrant Other, must remain fixed, in so much, from a post-colonial perspective
“[a]n important feature of colonial discourse is its dependency on the concept of
‘fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness” (Bhabha 1994, 94). This fixity
is most apparent in the Law, where the “legal definition of whiteness took shape
in the context of immigration law, as courts decided who was to have the privilege
of living in the United States. As many ordinary citizens did, judges defined the
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