Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 39

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
enon that can be classified as protecting borders from immigrants by “policing
without borders” (Côté and Erickson 2009, 52; Derrida 2011, 14).
The notion of hospitality articulated by Jacques Derrida (2011, 1–24) is useful
in pointing out the deleterious effects that result from a securitized immigration
agenda, and how it skews the Law and Policy components of the SLPP. Hospitality can
be employed to temper security—hospitality is not absolute but conditional. Thus,
it provides an alternative conception of immigration. Security renders immigrants
parasitic (illegitimate and thus fodder for securitization). Hospitality provides an
alternative framework that allows competing values to emerge in discourse and policy
because immigrants are conceived as conditional guests (which allows for rules
regulations and processes not tinctured with immediate threat and criminality).
The complexity that gives rise to and permeates immigration, e.g., history, economy,
culture, sociality, politics, etc., is utterly lost in securitized immigration. Order,
safety, and threat reduce the immigrant to a caricature; the immigrant Other is
made to conform to the threat that securitized immigration posits as the singular
dimension of immigration.
Hospitality (conditional), at base, allows policymakers to take into account
the complex factors that inform immigration. For example, immigration from
Mexico and Central America to the United States, which is at the forefront of the
present Administration’s securitized immigration agenda, was employed by the
United States to wage a proxy war against the USSR (McPherson 2016; Pederson
2013). Hospitality may indeed have problems (Leung and Stone 2009, 193–206),
but it is multifaceted, thereby allowing the Law and Policy components of the
SLPP to retain an independent force. The motives and concerns of host and guest
at least have a better chance to manifest than in a securitized immigration framework.
With hospitality as an operative factor in the SLPP, it becomes less about
threat and combatting invasiveness. Rather, Law and Policy provide alternatives to
securitization. Immigration can perhaps be “a question of knowing how to transform
and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within
an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality,
offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and
the conditional laws of a right to hospitality” (Derrida 2011, 22–23).
America First: The Political Question of Who Are “We the People”
An essential question that arises when securitizing immigration is, who exactly
are or what constitutes the American People that are being put “first”
in the Administration’s immigration policy. To address this question, one
must examine the context in which the question is asked, and how context frames
and constrains the relationship between Security and immigration. In an increasingly
globalized world, wherein States are simply unable to function in isolation,
the mass movement of peoples across traditional borders seriously challenges the
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