Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 40

Enemy at the Gates: The Consequential Effects of Securitizing Immigration
sanctity and integrity of geopolitical and physical borders. This has the effect, in
turn, of rendering immigration an existential threat to the identity of the People
as the State defines the term. The People are the repository of a formal identity.
The State acts in the name of the People it serves. Thus, securitizing immigration
reveals that part of the threat that immigrants pose is one to a stable identity. The
present Administration has employed fear and loathing to highlight the “threat”
that immigrants pose to American identity, which the Administration equivocates
with U.S. identity.
As individuals feel vulnerable and experience existential anxiety, it is
not uncommon for them to wish to reaffirm a threatened self-identity.
Any collective identity that can provide such security is a potential
pole of attraction. It is a war of emotions, where world leaders and
other paramount figures are seeking to rally people around simple
rather than complex causes. As rallying points, some of these causes
seem to have more powerful appeal than others. Nationalism and
religion are two such causes or “identity-signifiers” that are more
likely than other identity constructions to provide answers to those
in need ... nationalism ... [provides] particularly powerful stories and
beliefs because of [its] ability to convey a picture of security, stability,
and simple answers ... resting on solid ground, as being true.
(Kinnvall 2004, 742)
When taken as a self-evident concept or construct, the notion of “the American
people” functions as a relatively stable notion that expresses itself through
a “general will” (or even multifaceted will). In the realm of representation and
public policy, however, “the people” or “a people” are problematic. The concept of
the General Will cannot be comprehensibly summarized in the limited space of
this paper, but for the purpose of our discussion, it is problematic in the realms of
representation and public policy because
there is no people before the act by which a people becomes a people
in the first place; and, even afterward, the people are never one
or homogenous but many and internally divided. In sum, far from
constituting a stable identity derived from a preordained essence
that would have been racially, ethnically, linguistically, culturally, or
ontologically definable, “people” here serves as a name—one name
among others—for the political process that produces its own subject,
while reminding us that without an element of subjectivization
there can be no politics. (Bosteels 2016, 20)
The question then becomes essentially a political one, and thus, subject to critical
analysis on how a polity, or a subsection of it, is conceptualized in the context of
Security and immigration.
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