Securing Borders, Securing Power, by Mike Slaven (introduction)

INTRODUCTION Arizona and the Rise of Populist Border-Security Politics

There is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona. We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life. We cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north. We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act. But decades of federal inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation.

— GOVERNOR JAN BREWER, APRIL 23, 2010

O

n April 23, 2010, warning of a violent emergency creeping north from the Mexican border, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed into law Senate Bill (SB) 1070. The event convulsed Arizona politics. Mandating, among other measures, that Arizona law enforcement officers inquire during lawful stops about the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspected to be in the United States unlawfully, the bill shot the state to international headlines and fierce criticism. Within Arizona, incendiary debate seemed to expose deepening tension between Arizona’s growing Hispanic minority and its politically dominant Anglo majority. Strident objections that the bill licensed racial profiling, compromised civil rights, and violated important constitutional

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principles had come to nothing. There was a crisis, it was argued—a gaping border-security hole, scandalously ignored for too long. “I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion,” Russell Pearce, the state senator who authored SB 1070, had vowed a couple of years earlier. “Invaders, that’s what they are. Invaders of American sovereignty, and it can’t be tolerated.”1 The stroke of Brewer’s pen was the kind of moment that seems to characterize much of early twenty-first-century politics, an event prefiguring the rise of Donald Trump.2 Declaring a new kind of emergency and citing the fears of an ignored and betrayed people, a leader had enforced exclusion in the name of security, sweeping away constraints. It was an exceptional turn of events. But the paths that led to it and those that were paved afterward were full of unexpected turns: it was neither the beginning nor the end of the story.

A HA RDENING L I N E

Immigration is interpreted and represented in many ways in politics.

Activists, citizens, experts, and officials portray migration variously as an economic phenomenon, a humanitarian concern, a matter of rights, and a natural part of an interconnected world. So why is it that governments so often come to treat immigration as a security issue? Immigration politics is hotly contested by both those who paint immigration as a threat and those who emphatically reject this claim. Public opinion on immigration in many Western democracies, not least the United States, is complex.3 There are some areas of broad agreement as well as overlapping interpretations, sympathies, and concerns.4 Yet in many democracies, security has seemed to exert an unusually strong pull over the politics of immigration, despite these muddled conditions.5 Although it may not seem so in the context of world politics today, this development is not inevitable or obvious. Why, then, do policy makers choose to treat immigration as a matter of security when other interpretations are available?

Understanding this choice can perhaps help us imagine or pursue different possibilities for immigration politics or for other issues that are treated as security concerns. The task of this book is to address this

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question—to grasp why, given the circumstances of politics and the seeming workings of the immigration issue, it makes sense to policy makers to treat immigration in a “securitized” way. This book holds, in essence, that to trace the reasons for this development in our politics, we must understand how the purported presence of security in an issue shapes political competition. Rather than understanding security as a separate or exceptional species of social relations, as has been common, seeing the distinctive meanings that security brings to political life—while understanding how these meanings inflect the larger, competitive political game in twenty-first-century democratic processes—can give us crucial insight into why our politics treats issues such as immigration as matters of security.

Such a process unfolded gradually in the first decade of this century in Arizona, the frequent epicenter of the fractious immigration politics of the United States. In the early 2000s, Arizona’s 389-mile-long border with Mexico had become the main site of unauthorized border crossing into the United States, the principal corridor for one of the world’s most voluminous migrations. In the U.S. federal system, it had been settled that state governments such as Arizona’s bore little responsibility related to the issue: the border and immigration had long been treated as federal domains.6 Around 2004, however, immigration rose to become the dominant issue in Arizona state politics. The previous consensus—that there was no relevant action at the state level to take on these issues—was quickly abandoned. The policy-making system in Arizona began to yield immigration- and border-related policy proposals by the score. This policy outflow was remarkable in another key way. Nearly all of the proposed measures had a clear security orientation, despite the fact that Arizona’s government was not dominated by “border hawks” who agitated for immigration enforcement as a matter of ideological priority. On the contrary, for much of this period, nonhawkish figures in both the Democratic and Republican Parties—including many who had previously tried to downplay the need for state action or had said they lacked proper authority to take it—held key positions.

As many of these proposals were enacted, immigration and the border in Arizona politics became markedly “securitized”: they were increasingly treated as or became security issues. In a basic sense, the term securitization—which has developed an extensive body of academic

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theory and critique around it—simply describes this empirical phenomenon wherein other possible understandings of an issue are de-emphasized, defeated, or forgotten and security understandings predominate. To securitize immigration is not merely to restrict it. There are many potential reasons to want to reduce immigration and many potential mechanisms to pursue that goal. The issue progression on immigration that seems familiar to us today, however, is one that advances on images of threat and urgency and that proposes to suffuse immigration governance with security practices,7 “integrating [the] issue into a security framework that emphasizes policing and defence.”8 In Arizona from 2003 to 2011, more than one hundred policies proposed or enacted clearly employed a security approach to these issues, seeking to integrate diverse areas of state policy into a burgeoning border-security governance. During this same time, only one politically viable proposal for a concrete state policy change saw immigration through a lens that was distinctly not one of security. SB 1070 was a remarkable development, recognized as a watershed moment in immigration politics in the United States.9 But it unfolded only within a longer process in Arizona,10 where security overwhelmed all alternatives when it came to addressing immigration and the border and where the state adopted a series of policies that had previously been broadly considered exclusionary, racist, or extreme.

In this way, Arizona presents a familiar story. At the time, SB 1070 was covered in the national media as a draconian and outlying measure. Today, it is perhaps more readily apparent that Arizona’s experience mirrors a global phenomenon. Security-heavy treatment of immigration and the more exclusionary politics that accompanies that treatment have emerged strongly across the West. Where this trend has taken hold, it has often appeared to have the acquiescence of political figures who at first resisted more radical calls but who have bent as the issue has developed. Europe’s response to movements of people from Africa and Asia across the Mediterranean Sea seemed to harden broadly according to such a pattern, and the Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” and family-separation policies were brought forward as major Republican Party figures euphemized these securitizing measures and buried their formerly more moderate immigration positions.11 Even as such a trajectory becomes familiar, though, it remains puzzling. These policies often do not seem to closely

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follow on-the-ground developments, as governments such as Italy’s grew more hard-line about Mediterranean crossings even after the number of crossings plummeted.12 Nor have these policies typically enjoyed an obvious consensus within the polities that adopt them; they have often unfolded amid passionate public dispute, even if many political elites are muted.

So it was in Arizona. The state’s amplification of border-security politics intensified even as the purported problem of unauthorized border crossing greatly declined. U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, the measure usually employed as a proxy for levels of unauthorized traffic, peaked in Arizona around 2000 and then again around 2005. But by the time of SB 1070 in 2010, this metric had been declining for years, reaching lows not seen in decades.13 Perhaps even more puzzling, the dominance of a security approach to immigration in Arizona also occurred when other possible interpretations of the problem found substantial support. In public-opinion polls at this time, around two-thirds of Arizonans typically supported state immigration-enforcement provisions, such as allowing state and local law enforcement to check immigration status, requiring businesses to verify the legal status of workers, and barring the issue of a driver’s license to those without legal status in the United States. However, similar majorities expressed support for expanding legal channels for work migration and for enacting a legalization program for millions of unauthorized immigrants.14 In Arizona, the birthplace of the U.S. sanctuary movement in the 1980s,15 activists and citizens continued to mobilize prominently for these kinds of policies and against a draconian, securitized view of immigration and the border.16 One would imagine that this multifaceted quality of public opinion would provide the political material for a varied policy-making effort, featuring both security and nonsecurity approaches. In Arizona, however, the security approach dominated—even though it did not flow clearly from the “objective” policy problem or from a single obvious reading of the issue’s politics.

Despite this securitization tendency deepening over the course of years, the Arizona case was to yield another striking development. Less than a year after Arizona’s border hard-liners had won passage of SB 1070, their most notable achievement to date, the securitization trend in

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Arizona state government came to a screeching halt. This process was therefore deflated in Arizona years before Donald Trump descended in his golden escalator to champion this kind of politics at a national level.

By that time, Arizona had already seesawed from a relatively relaxed status quo ante to an extended period of intense border-security politics and then to the issue’s decline from the top of the state’s agenda—a progression that belies structural accounts of immigration policy, which indicate that vested interests work effectively against such wild swings in direction.17 To decipher this complex, dramatic issue trajectory in Arizona, this book makes several interrelated arguments from a starting point of analyzing how the association of security with immigration changes the political calculations surrounding immigration. At base, the book holds that we can illuminate these processes if we foreground this competitive political context around security—if we focus analysis on how politicians, by securing borders, are securing power. Explaining why political actors of many different ideologies may so quickly cluster around security approaches to immigration and seem loath to challenge them, this book traces how interactions between populist and security logics in political debate lead governing elites to adopt yielding strategies that “mainstream” more hard-line approaches. This book identifies how new party-competition dynamics, shaped by concepts of responsibility and accountability emerging from security meanings, can deepen the securitization process: where political actors trade on security politics toward differing political ends, their maneuvers against one another may entail assenting to security-heavy immigration policy as the price of power, thus deepening securitization even while relative moderates hold key offices. What is not necessary for this process to happen is any actual agreement on what, if any, threat the community faces. This book demonstrates how the formidable mobilizing power of securitizing immigration—starkly illustrated in the passage of SB 1070 and the subsequent consolidation of power by its champions—emerges not from a single coherent logic of security but from a combination of more contingent political circumstances, in this case rooted in Republican intraparty dynamics and polarized national politics in the United States. Finally, this book argues that the heat of

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security politics not only propels these securitizing trends but also can undo them. Backlash from those affected can activate a cosmopolitan countersecuritization logic among those in the Center Right, who are oriented toward being seen by important outsiders as reasonable and open rather than irrational and exclusionary. In Arizona, this logic emerged from the tempest of post–SB 1070 politics with enough force to halt a securitization juggernaut.

Other places that have witnessed similar immigration politics may not have experienced this kind of reversal, at least not yet. But the fact that a strong securitization trend in immigration politics can so quickly fall apart adds to both the puzzle and the urgency of understanding why.

Whatever political dynamics propelled Arizona’s securitization forward, they were not inexorable or even as strong as they seemed. To analyze securitizing trends as inherently fragile allows a better grasp of what sorts of politics can effectively counter them. We can understand how politicians typically read their political contexts and respond through securitization—and also how this could be otherwise.

First, however, we must think about why immigration is treated as security in some relatively new ways. In the following sections, this introduction makes some particular interventions in three areas of the scholarly literature to start decoding the Arizona puzzle and illuminate its larger significance. First, I establish why understanding these events requires challenging some typical ways of thinking about the politics of security and how this challenge can be achieved by more fully embracing a reading of securitization as “normal” politics. Second, I argue that there needs to be greater account of populism in securitization analyses and vice versa. Analyzing these two concepts’ relationship may allow us greater purchase in addressing key questions in both literatures—why securitization processes advance and why nonpopulist political actors so often “mainstream” securitized approaches to immigration that they previously regarded as extreme. Third, I identify the need for new perspectives on how securitization processes might end, which could promise key insights on the process of rolling back populist border-security politics. I conclude the introduction with a discussion of the book’s largely narrative form, its process-tracing approach, and its interview-based interpretive methods.

“Mike Slaven has produced a sophisticated and exquisitely crafted explanation of why policy makers and others decide to frame a public problem in security terms and how such choices shift domestic balances of power. The book features a painstaking investigation of Arizona border politics, which sets it well above the best empirically grounded approaches to securitization studies.”

—THIERRY BALZACQ, COEDITOR OF THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF GRAND STRATEGY

“Slaven provides a deeply researched and illuminating account of one of the most disturbing events in the recent history of nativist politics in the United States, which opened a new era of anti-immigrant policy making and political activism in states and cities across the country. His perspective is enriched by personal experience in the practical politics of immigration.”

—WAYNE A. CORNELIUS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

“A timely analysis that broadens our comprehension of how the politics of security works in tandem with ‘normal politics.’ Slaven provides a creative and nuanced understanding of populism, power, processes of securitization, and possibilities for desecuritization.”

—ROXANNE DOTY, AUTHOR OF THE LAW INTO THEIR OWN HANDS: IMMIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF EXCEPTIONALISM

“Securing Borders, Securing Power is an outstanding book. It is at once a detailed insider’s account of immigration policy in Arizona and a generalizable account of when securitization strategies succeed and when they fail. These strategies can deliver votes, but they are Faustian pacts that threaten not only immigrants but the republic itself.”

—RANDALL HANSEN, AUTHOR OF WAR, WORK, AND WANT: GLOBAL MIGRATION FROM OPEC TO COVID-19

“Slaven eloquently chronicles the turmoil of populist politics around the character of America and the rhetorical use and abuse of the roles that the border and immigration play in it.”

—TONY PAYAN, AUTHOR OF THE THREE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WARS: DRUGS, IMMIGRATION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY

MIKE SLAVEN is senior lecturer in international politics at the University of Lincoln.

He was previously a speechwriter for the U.S. secretary of homeland security and the governor of Arizona.

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover photo: IrinaK © Shutterstock Printed in the U.S.A.

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