Frontiers of Fear

Immigration and Insecurity in the United States

Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464386
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

On both sides of the Atlantic, restrictive immigration policies have been framed as security imperatives since the 1990s. This trend accelerated in the aftermath of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe. In Frontiers of Fear, Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia raises two central questions with profound consequences for national security and immigration policy: First, does the securitization of immigration issues actually contribute to the enhancement of internal security? Second, does the use of counterterrorist measures address such immigration issues as the increasing number of illegal immigrants, the resilience of ethnic tensions, and the emergence of homegrown radicalization?

Chebel d'Appollonia questions the main assumptions that inform political agendas in the United States and throughout Europe, analyzing implementation and evaluating the effectiveness of policies in terms of their stated objectives. She argues that the new security-based immigration regime has proven ineffective in achieving its prescribed goals and even aggravated the problems it was supposed to solve: A security/insecurity cycle has been created that results in less security and less democracy. The excesses of securitization have harmed both immigration and counterterrorist policies and seriously damaged the delicate balance between security and respect for civil liberties.

Part I

The Framing of Immigration as a Security Issue

Why has immigration increasingly become a matter of security? One common answer relates to the long-standing concerns about national identity, criminality, and economic interests associated with immigration on both sides of the Atlantic. From this perspective, anti-immigrant hostility is fueled—if not legitimized—by the belief that immigrants pose a socioeconomic and ethno-cultural threat to Western societies. Supporters of restrictive immigration policies argue, for example, that immigrants take jobs from native workers,1 reduce their wages,2 and consume more social benefits than they contribute by paying taxes.3 These assumptions, commonly asserted by scholars and politicians, are shared by an increasing number of people on both sides of the Atlantic. According to a survey conducted in 2006 by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, about 52 percent of U.S. respondents (up from 38 percent in 2000) believed that “immigrants are a burden to the country,” taking jobs and housing, and creating strains on the health care system.4 In Europe, 52 percent of respondents (up to 84 percent in Slovakia, and 76 percent in Latvia) said that immigrants did not contribute to their respective countries.5

Immigrants are also regarded as threatening national identity and societal cohesion, especially the newcomers whose perceived ethnic distinctiveness challenges the assimilative capacity of the host societies.6 A plurality of Americans (44 percent) believe today’s immigrants are less willing to adapt to the American way of life compared with those who came in the early 1990s. This opinion applies to immigrants from Asian countries (49 percent viewed them as less willing to adapt) and Latin American countries (45 percent).7 In Europe, the belief that newcomers pose a threat to the ethno-cultural homogeneity of host societies is equally widespread and relies on a construction of immigrants as irredeemably “other” because they supposedly maintain their culture and religious heritage to the detriment of any form of integration.8 At the EU level, findings of a 2003 European Social Survey revealed that 58 percent of Europeans perceived immigrants as posing a “collective ethnic threat,” and 60 percent expressed the belief that “there are limits to multicultural society.”9 Since then, anti-immigrant sentiment based predominantly on perceived threats to values and culture has become widespread in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the belief that immigration has damaged and diluted British culture over the recent years was shared by 58 percent of British respondents in a 2008 survey.10 Most Europeans expressed particular concerns about Muslims—both foreign and native born. In Italy, for example, 67.9 percent of Italians in 2007 believed that Muslims had little intention of becoming integrated.11

Western governments and public opinion often link immigration to higher levels of criminality—both in terms of illegal border crossing and delinquency. Fears raised by the arrival of ethnic others thus coalesce around concerns about the potentially disruptive presence of minority groups who are suspected of having higher crime rates than natives. In the United States, concerns about immigration-related crime reemerged as a prominent policy issue during the 1990s, as illustrated by the passage of laws (such as the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) aimed at controlling illegal immigration and related crime. The use of national origin as a proxy for evidence of potential criminality led various European states to reform their criminal code and/or their immigration regime, such as Greece with the adoption of the Law 1975/1991. This law stated in its preamble that “suddenly Greece became full of foreigners, who by illegally entering, staying and working in the country create enormous social problems; and at the same time they try to solve their inevitable problems by resorting to crime such as drug trafficking, robbery and theft.”12

Finally, some politicians, elements of the media and public opinion, and several academic experts argue that immigration poses a threat to state sovereignty. This claim is linked to the multiplication of international and domestic constraints such as globalized market forces and human rights instruments that undermine the sovereignty of the nation-states, as well as the subsequent emergence of various actors (such as international and domestic nonstate actors) who influence the policymaking process.13 In the field of the new global political economy, some scholars argue that globalization challenges the territoriality of the state, and more important its capacity to manage the movement of people across borders.14 Through the globalization of technology, they contend, networks connect migrants with receiving countries and encourage immigration—from “mail-order brides” to prearranged employment. Globalization also enhances the development of a major pro-migrant international business sector (involving travel agents, bankers, lawyers, recruiters, and people smugglers), while multinational corporations address the restrictive national immigration policies by imposing an elastic supply of labor. States have to deal not only with domestic and international nonstate actors but also with transnational actors who gain an increasing influence on outcomes in international politics. In the field of social movement theory, some authors emphasize the impact of an emergent “world society” on an international environmental regime, or its influence on the creation of social development policy. Others emphasize the emergence of a global transnational civil society in which social movements together constitute a basis for an alternative world order.15 Thus, taken together, economic, legal, and political globalization reduces the autonomy of the states. Facing the challenge to “reconcile the conflicting requirements of border-free economies and border controls to keep immigrants out,” states are constrained by international forces and regulations. The state itself “has been transformed by the growth of a global economic system and other transnational processes.”16

These concerns about the negative effect of immigration—on economic prosperity, national identity, social order, and state sovereignty—predated 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Europe. Yet those events have turned these concerns into immigrant-related security fears. As a result, implicit associations between immigration and insecurity are now deeply ingrained. Indeed, both immigration and terrorism pose similar challenges to the management of border crossing, as well as the ability of states to provide safety and prosperity to their citizens. Like immigration, terrorism is often depicted as the “dark side of globalization”; and when bombings are perpetrated in the name of an extremist anti-Western ideology, terrorism is also a “threat to national identity”—actually more lethal than any forms of multiculturalism. It follows from this that the fight against terrorism should include immigration measures and, conversely, restrictive immigration policies should tackle the issues related to terrorism. This perspective assumes logically that the link between immigration and terrorism is obvious: immigrants are foreigners and pose a threat; terrorists are foreigners and pose a threat as well; thus any immigrant may be a terrorist, and consequently the best way to prevent terrorism is to be tough in dealing with immigrants. This “worst-case scenario” approach justifies a catchall strategy that has been the foundation of U.S. and European immigration policies for the last decade.

At first glance, this inferential linkage between immigration and terrorism is appealing. Terrorism undeniably constitutes a long-term threat. The events of 9/11 were followed by the Madrid and the London bombings, in addition to a significant number of failed plots—from the attempted bombing near the Glasgow airport in July 2007 to the narrowly avoided one at Times Square in New York City in May 2010. There is also evidence of a global crisis of immigration controls: the more that states manage immigration, the less successful they appear to be, as illustrated by the increasing number of illegal immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic.17 This crisis fuels alarmism about the integrity of the external borders and therefore raises further concerns about internal security. This sense of vulnerability, in turn, generates fear and hostility—the two main components of “migration phobia,” which according to the political scientist Mikhail A. Alexseev “implies that uncertainty about the causes of real-world developments and exaggeration of their implications are precisely the perceptual mechanisms that make people threatened—whether these developments actually warrant caution or not.”18

Yet the assumed immigration-terrorism linkage suffers from many flaws, addressed in the following chapters. Let us consider the first part of the immigration-insecurity equation, the one that assumes current immigrants pose a threat because they are too numerous and are more distinct than prior waves of immigrants. A closer examination of this “rhetoric of invasion” reveals that the dangers associated with immigration are greatly exaggerated. Three key aspects framing the perception of immigrants as “enemies” deserve particular attention: questionable data, historical amnesia, and a subsequent clash of misperceptions. The current immigration-insecurity nexus is characterized by two interrelated trends: the overestimation of migration scale, and the underestimation of migrant assimilation. The first trend seems to vindicate the traditional perspectives of intergroup conflicts, notably those assuming a direct correlation between migrant hostility and the size of migrant communities. Yet, although economic concerns matter, empirical data on both sides on the Atlantic suggest that the magnitude of immigration-related fears results mostly from the exaggeration of the distinctiveness of some immigrants. As Jack Citrin and John Sides argue in their cross-national study of anti-migrant sentiment, “attitudes toward immigrants have become increasingly divorced from context as the issue has become politicized.”19

Second, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that immigrants are more likely to engage in violent activity than “natives.” On the other hand, evidence is plentiful that the level of criminal victimization is greater for immigrants than for the majority population. In Europe, for example, this is notably the case for Somali refugees in Finland, and Roma in Hungary, both of whom display a level of assault or threat victimization that is four times the rate of the majority population. Other minority groups with high rates of victimization (at least twice the rate of the majority population) are North Africans in France, Italy, and Spain.20 Furthermore, the assumption that immigration poses a threat to national security has been disconfirmed by the fact that an increasing number of terrorists are not immigrants, while the vast majority of immigrants targeted by security measures are not terrorists.

Another shortcoming of the immigration-insecurity nexus is that the framing of immigration as a security issue started by the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even if we were to accept that restrictive immigration controls can prevent terrorism, while counterterrorist policies can manage immigration flows, the securitization process generated a long series of negative outcomes before 9/11, such as an increasing illegal immigration, despite enhanced border policing; the development of the people-smuggling industry; the implementation of a piecemeal counterterrorism legislation; and a growing tension between enforcing immigration controls and preventing terrorism. To the extent that all the measures that were intended to fight illegal immigration and to prevent terrorist attacks have failed, one can wonder why the post-9/11 approach looked a lot like the pre-9/11 one.

One common answer relates to the alleged decline of state sovereignty. In the aftermath of 9/11, U.S. and European restrictionists contended that the reassertion of state sovereignty in the field of immigration was long overdue. Arguing that border controls were too lax prior to 9/11, they advocated tougher measures aimed at counteracting the dark forces of globalization. Yet, upon close inspection, it appears that this stance has effectively been challenged in many ways by the record of the securitization process before 9/11 in many ways. The evolution of immigration and asylum policies in Europe and the United States illustrates that states are extraordinarily inventive in circumventing international norms, including human rights regimes. The multiplication of nonstate actors does not imply the decline of state sovereignty, especially in the field of the “governance of security.”21 Rather than a diffusion of authority to nonstate actors, this represents “a shuffling of cards within the state.”22 Consistent with scholars who are “bringing back the state,”23 I argue that immigration policy remains one of the last bastions of the traditional Westphalian state. I therefore contend that the inability of Western states to manage the social dynamics of the migratory process before 9/11 should not be interpreted as an indicator of their limited capacity to rule.

Chapter 1

Newcomers, Old Threats, and Current Concerns

There are at least two ways in which immigration is perceived as challenging the societal integrity of receiving countries. The first one relates to the dramatic increase in the number of people who have immigrated (legally or illegally) into Europe and the United States. Both areas have previously experienced high levels of immigration, but the current sharp rise in the flows of new immigrants is nonetheless noteworthy. In Europe, excluding the former USSR, the number of immigrants rose from 14 million in 1960 to 33 million in 2000. The EU-15 member states hosted between 18.7 million and 20.1 million legal foreign residents in 2002.1 In 2008 the estimated number of foreigners reached 30.8 million in the EU 27. The foreign-born population of the United States increased from 9.6 million in 1970 to 33.5 million in 2003.2 According to the American Community Survey, the estimated number of foreign-born residents reached 38.5 million in 2009.3 The rhetoric of “invasion” is always intrinsically linked to the issue of illegal immigration. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that 10.3 million illegal immigrants resided in the United States by 2004–5, representing 29 percent of foreign-born persons.4 In Europe, according to International Labor Office estimates, there were 2.6 million illegal immigrants in 1991, including asylum seekers whose applications were turned down but did not leave.5 In 2005 the European Commission put the number in the vicinity of 3 million, with between 400,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants arriving annually.

Second, much of the debate over the threats posed by immigration focuses on the qualitative characteristics of the newcomers. It is commonly argued that the vast majority of immigrants now consist of non-Europeans who are too “different” to assimilate and therefore pose a threat to national identity.6 Samuel Huntington, for example, claimed that Asians and Hispanics challenge the substance of the American creed: “America’s third major wave of immigration that began in the 1960s brought to America people primarily from Latin America and Asia rather than Europe as previous waves did. The culture and values of their countries of origin often differ substantially from those prevalent in America…. Cultural America is under siege.”7

Although most Americans celebrate their heritage as a nation of immigrants, immigration raises fears about the preservation of national identity. Such a nativist stance has gained popularity since the 1990s, as illustrated by the widespread success of Peter Brimelow’s book Alien Nation: Common Sense ab...

Table of contents

• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Framing of Immigration as a Security Issue
• Part II. The Dynamics of Policy Failure
• Part III. Why Do Failed Policies Persist?
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes