Rethinking the Threat: A look into the History of U.S. Securitization of Immigration and the Path Toward Desecuritization

Abstract

In recent years, Donald Trump has empowered racism and xenophobia to become more overt in the U.S., specifically toward immigrants of colour. His popular political slogan ‘Build the Wall’ has been an attempt to mask his and his supporters’ racism against many minorities using claims of national security, though many have criticized this as being a larger symbolism of walling off America from supposed foreign threats. This study aims to display the history of the U.S. government’s securitization of immigration to show patterns of racial discrimination against people of colour that has long preceded Trump and will long succeed him. Through a constructivist lens, this paper claims that the perception of immigrants and immigration as a threat is socially constructed and unnatural and by using a widened security analysis to analyze the alleged threats that immigration poses to the state, politics, economy, and society, this paper deduces that the U.S. immigration policies no longer reflect the realities of contemporary threats. This paper proposes that desecuritization of immigration will serve to benefit the U.S. and its citizens more in all security sectors as immigrants have made positive contributions to the country, and thus the U.S. government should urgently work toward developing its policies to reflect this. Keywords: Securitization, desecuritization, immigration, racism, xenophobia, American identity, and national security