Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 37

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
rapid removal of all illegal immigrants, and including a citizenship status question
on the upcoming census (The White House 2017d, Policy Priorities). A consequence
that ensues from excessively emphasizing Security within the SLPP is
that law and policy grounded in Security reflects a myopic focus on public safety
that discards the negative effects of securitized immigration, to include prejudicial
and discriminatory racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological effects that such
policy has on the character and content of what constitutes an American, the
American polity, what is great (or not so great) about America, and categorical
demonization of an immigrant Other. “Security knowledge is always knowledge
about dangers, about what and how we should fear” (Wæver 1995, 56). Security
professionals steeped in the classical political realism and realpolitik do not give
due weight to intangible factors such as culture and emotions such as fear in a
security calculus—all of which have an impact on the character and content of security
and securitization measures (See Vaughan-Williams 2010, 1071–83; Waever
1995, 46–86). Whether it is combatting the “Evil Empire” of the communists or
the generic fanatical Arab terrorist, caricatures of peoples as the basis of security
policy is at odds with sundry legal, social, and political developments in the US
since the late 1960s onwards at the structural level seeking to make the notion
of American and America more inclusive. For example, the Warren Court put
forth important constitutional interpretations in line with changes transpiring
at the national level, such as: finding formal racial segregation policies in public
schools unconstitutional (Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954));
finding anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S.
1 (1967)); substantially increasing the scope of the doctrine of incorporation
against the States (Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961); Miranda v. Arizona, 384
U.S. 436 (1966)); and holding that the Constitution requires active compliance
by the States in the realm of federal protections of criminal defendants (Gideon
v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)). An emphasis on Security and unmitigated
securitization in the SLPP severely minimizes or ablates competing notions of
what constitutes the Good in the ordering of a society.
Security in an immigration context becomes tinged with race and ethnicity,
and any liberty interests that attach to those enmeshed within suspect racial
or ethnic classifications deemed a threat to public safety become attenuated. The
sentiment expressed by Senator Sterling in the 1920s toward Japanese immigrants
is reminiscent of the ethos that informs the Executive’s present immigration law
and policy toward the Global South and Middle East: “If we are going to exclude
Japanese immigrants, let us exclude them because it is a wholesome thing, the
right thing, the just thing to do for the United States and for the American people”
(Garis 1927, 328). Deportation, restriction of or privileging immigration based on
a particular religious persuasion, erecting a massive great wall along the U.S.–Mexico
border—all of these policies reflect and are in line with a desire to control the
racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological character and content of the nation’s pop-
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