ABSTRACT
For many commentators on immigration, the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington signalled a profound and unprecedented turning point. Observing that a critical aspect of the political response to the attacks has been the creation of an entire migration-security complex, John Tirman’s (2004) introduction to a recent collection on migration and security is typical in this respect. Writing about the response taken within the American homeland itself, he has documented some of the more immediate ways in which this complex was forged. Based on the widespread perception that the culprits for the attacks were ‘‘porous borders, generous entry policies, violations of the terms of entry, and the entry of immigrants from the Middle East more generally’’ (Tirman 2004: 2), a widespread public anxiety about immigration has been intensified. At the level of the law, this has sanctioned certain dramatic moves, not least the rapid expansion of state powers under the USA Patriot Act to detain aliens without due process. But there have also been developments changing the very structure of the state and the organization of sovereign power. For instance, Tirman points to the bureaucratic fusion of migration and security. The most immediate institutional expression of this fusion is surely the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the transfer of its functions and units into the Department of Homeland Security whose mandate it is to ‘‘prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats a hazards to the Nation’’ (Department of Homeland Security 2004; quoted in Inda 2006: 153). According to Tirman, the forging of this nexus of migration and security
is not limited to the US homeland. In one country after another, he notes,
the pursuit of al Qaeda cells, conducted by various security agencies, has uncovered not only their money-laundering activities, their brief alliances with organized crime or the geographical expanse of the network. This international ‘‘war on terror’’, a campaign that forms the global counterpart to the project of homeland security, has also revealed that:
Virtually all of this illegal activity, designed to support a large, dispersed network of political violence, was conducted by migrants, underscoring along with the US military and police campaign to destroy or disrupt their actions, the newly minted connection between security and migration, or, to use an unwieldy term, the ‘securitization of migration’.
