ABSTRACT
It has been a staple of a certain species of critical discourse following September 11, 2001 to recognize that ‘terrorism’ has now come to ubiquitously serve the same ideological role of pervasive and imminent external threat to the stability and security of the United States that ‘communism’ previously did during the ColdWar. ‘In terms of public rhetoric, domestic security policies, militarization of foreign policy and culture, curtailment of civil liberties, a pervasive sense of fear and threat,’ notes Marilyn Young, ‘the war on terrorism is the Cold War redux. It takes little historical imagination to see in the permanent war on terrorism a continuation of what was initially imagined as a permanent war on communism’ (2004, p. 271). Some conservative commentators can even be found to sanctimoniously endorse precisely such a conceptual framework in normative terms (e.g. Diamond, 2002), whereas more historically grounded scholarship has amply verified the meaningful continuities and material connections, both from the left (e.g. Harvey, 2003; Johnson, 2004a, b, 2006; Mamdani, 2002, 2004; Smith, 2005) and even from the unorthodox right (Ferguson, 2004). During the decade intervening between the demise of the Soviet Union and the events of September 11, 2001, moreover, there was a tellingly symptomatic disaffection among some of the most prominent ideological proponents of the political and military order long premised upon ‘national security’ with the apparent absence of any adequate external menace against which U.S. global power – now awkwardly exposed in its ‘unipolar’ singularity – could project its mission (cf. Robin, 2004). A rag-tag collection of transnational phenomena, including drug smuggling, undocumented migration, arms dealing, sex trafficking, and other sorts of ‘organized crime,’ including international terrorism (albeit in its more mundane vernacular manifestations) were increasingly pressed to serve as one or another improbable surrogate (cf. Andreas and Price, 2001). The post-World War II, Cold War-era National Security State entailed the
discursive and institutional hegemony of a notion of U.S. national ‘defense’ as never-again even plausibly restricted to safeguarding the physical security of nation-state borders and the sovereignty of domestic institutions, but rather as infinitely flexible and effectively global, and above all aggressively pro-active,
subordinating all imperatives to the putative ‘containment’ of Communism and the external geopolitical ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union. While the top-secret programmatic National Security Council policy paper known as NSC-68 famously decried the Soviet Union as an ‘[aspirant] to hegemony . . . animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own’ with repercussions that would entail ‘the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself ’ (USNSC, 1950, p. i), U.S. President Harry Truman could nonetheless be found to casually declare that the salvation of the human race from ‘totalitarianism’ required that ‘the whole world adopt the American system’ (cited in Ferguson, 2004, p. 80). In short, within the National Security State framework, there was a tenacious blurriness sustained between national ‘defense’ and imperialist aggrandizement. This strategic reorientation palpably implied and often unabashedly avowed the militarization of every dimension of the United States’ relation to the rest of the world, a permanent war preparedness and quest for military dominance during peacetime, including the coordination of foreign policy and military strategy with the economic interests, influence, and resources of ‘the nation,’ as well as the comprehensive ideological integration of foreign and domestic policy values and mandates. There is of course much of this overall framework that predictably remains durably intact and has been extravagantly reaffirmed in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, albeit with the convenient substitution of ‘terrorism’ as the specter of choice, rather routinely acknowledged by persistently affiliating it rhetorically with the ever-elusive figure of ‘totalitarianism’ as a unifying frame of antagonistic reference. What I am calling the Homeland Security State indubitably involves an ideo-
logical re-tooling operation that has refashioned the National Security State for an imperial era in which U.S. global military power is plainly unchallenged by any other state, and must instead conjure elusive transnational networks of nonstate enemies in order to justify what Young has incisively depicted as ‘permanent war in a unipolar world’ (2004, p. 273). Thus, it is not that the National Security State has been supplanted so much as radically renovated. The ascendancy of the Homeland Security State nonetheless signals a momentous and qualitative improvisation, the historical specificity of which therefore commands intense critical scrutiny. This essay seeks to modestly elucidate something of this new and ongoing process of state formation in the United States with regard to only one of its crucial dimensions and distinguishing features – a specific and extraordinary instance of what Didier Bigo (2002) has more generally identified as ‘the securitization of immigration’ (cf. Huysmans, 2006), which Benjamin Muller (2004) has analogously examined in terms of the securitization of citizenship itself. That the Homeland Security State entails ‘the most extensive reorganization of the federal government in the past fifty years,’ in the words of The National Strategy for Homeland Security (USOHS, 2002, p. vii), is merely the material and practical verification of the more decisive strategic reconfiguration which proclaims: ‘The U.S. government has no greater mission’ than ‘securing the American homeland . . . from terrorist attacks’ (p. 1), a new mandate that is confirmed to be ‘a permanent mission’ (p. 4). Thus, alongside The National Security Strategy of
the United States of America (USNSC, 2002), which predictably conjoins the metaphysical discourse of antiterrorism with a more prosaic prolegomena for reinvigorated global military dominance, the Homeland Security State emphatically addresses ‘a very specific and uniquely challenging threat – terrorism in the United States’ and seeks ‘to provide a secure foundation for America’s ongoing global engagement’ by circumventing ‘our enemies’ from ‘secretly inserting terrorists into our country to attack our homeland’ (USOHS, 2002, p. 5). The metaphysics of antiterrorism is replete with an acute and beleaguered sen-
sibility about the instability and permeability of nation-state space and borders. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the very recourse, unprecedented in dominant U.S. political discourse, to the rhetoric of ‘homeland,’ which has long been a hallmark of diasporic nostalgia and desire, and in effect, discursively re-figures U.S. citizens as ineffably alienated from their own ‘native’ entitlement to the comfort of unproblematic belonging. ‘Although homeland security may strive to cordon off the nation as a domestic space from external foreign threats,’ Amy Kaplan persuasively contends, ‘it is actually about breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, about seeing the homeland in a state of constant emergency from threats within and without . . . to generate forms of radical insecurity’ (2003, p. 90; cf. 2004). The homey domesticity of the Homeland Security State, however, ought not to obfuscate its implications for the wider conduct of U.S. imperial power in the relentless quest to consolidate and sustain global hegemony (cf. Bigo, 2006; Jabri, 2006). Indeed, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (White House, February 2003) responds to ‘a new global environment’ chiefly distinguished by ‘unprecedented mobility and migration’ (p. 7) by endorsing the ideal of ‘a seamless web of defense across the spectrum of engagement to protect our citizens and interests both at home and abroad’ and asserting the consequent necessity of ‘providing our operating forces . . . foreign and domestic – with a single integrated operating matrix’ (p. 25).1 The invocation of the distinction between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ serves here only to underscore their material, practical, and discursive elision.2 In contrast, if the Cold War’s defining immigration legislation – the (McCarran-Walter) Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 – did indeed include new anti-communist ideological requirements for immigration as a matter of ‘internal security’ and notoriously provided for not only the exclusion or deportation of communists but also even the denaturalization of naturalized-citizen ‘subversives,’ it fundamentally served to refortify the epistemic divide between the putative ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the national space. Thus, the Cold War’s specter of foreign infiltration never afforded migrants as such a prominence in the nationalist imagination at all comparable to that which presently congeals around Arab and other Muslims living in the United States, and which has figured ‘immigration’ in general as an utterly decisive site in the ostensible War on Terror. The new nativism of antiterrorism has clearly not made the vast majority of
contemporary (non-Muslim) migrant groups into primary objects of the sorts of racial profiling that proliferated since September 11, 2001. Nevertheless, the practical ramifications for all migrations and migrant transnationalism are already
profound – above all evidenced by the complete subsumption (as of March 1, 2003) of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – and may very likely be still more dramatic. Subsequently, the ultimately abortive Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner bill), passed on December 16, 2005 in the House of Representatives, entailed the single most expansively punitive immigration legislation in U.S. history. This bill would have criminalized all of an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants residing in the United States by summarily converting their ‘unlawful presence’ into a felony (§203) and rendering them subject to mandatory detention upon apprehension (§401), and likewise would have converted any and all immigration violations – however minor, technical or unintentional – into felonies punishable with imprisonment, such that ‘legal’ permanent residents would have been irreversibly rendered as ‘illegal aliens’ for any variety of innocuous incidental infractions (§203). In addition to numerous other draconian provisions, the bill also sought to impose criminal sanctions, with imprisonment as a penalty, on anyone construed to knowingly ‘assist’ (§202) an ‘unlawful’ migrant (whether undocumented or previously ‘legal’ and subsequently criminalized), with definitions so expansive that even immigration lawyers could have plausibly been subject to imprisonment (Mailman and Yale-Loehr, 2005). ‘It is paradoxical,’ remarks Etienne Balibar, in a related but different context, ‘to target those who in fact live the most insecure lives as being primarily responsible for the growth of insecurity’ (Bojadžijev and Saint-Saëns, 2006, p. 24). Paradoxical, indeed, but quite productive nonetheless, as we will see. In response to this legislative ambush, mass protest mobilizations during the
spring of 2006, overwhelmingly comprised of migrants and citizens of color, forcefully established that undocumented migrant working people, although having only the most tenuous claim to ‘rights,’ were not at all prepared to languish in docile subjection. An estimated half a million marched in Chicago on March 10 (reportedly the largest single demonstration on record in the city’s history, only then to be surpassed by the subsequent demonstration of approximately 750 000 on May 1), followed by at least a million in Los Angeles on March 25 (in addition to several smaller protests that week), hundreds of thousands in New York City at various rallies in early April, as well as tens of thousands each in numerous other cities, culminating in several millions nationally with the ‘Day Without an Immigrant’ one-day general strike and boycott on May 1.3 These events took the political establishment by storm and forcefully galvanized widespread public awareness of the U.S. Senate’s then-ongoing deliberations over the House legislation. Ultimately, the law in question proved to be politically untenable. Nevertheless, the parties to the legislative debate finally did approve a similarly punitive but dramatically more limited law, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, ostensibly providing for further fortification of the U.S.– Mexico border with hundreds of miles of new physical barriers to be added to the existing 125 miles of fence. Amidst the controversy over new immigration proposals, but rather less well known, KBR – a company famous for scandals
concerning its war profiteering in Iraq and a subsidiary of Halliburton (the corporation formerly directed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney) – was quietly awarded on January 24, 2006 a $385 million contingency contract that provides for the creation of new detention facilities ‘in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.’4 Those prospective ‘new programs’ that might require mass detentions, predictably, are shrouded in an ominous ambiguity. But ‘detentions’ – which is to say, more precisely, indefinite imprisonment without formal charges or any semblance of due process of law – have indeed been the hallmark of the Homeland Security State, and non-citizens have overwhelmingly been figured as its special targets. Much, then, revolves around the economy of ‘illegality’ that renders a migrant or other foreign visitor more or less subject to the caprices of the Rule of Law.
