Securing Borders, Securing Power: The Rise and Decline of Arizona's Border Politics

329 Pages·2022·2.695 MB·English

by  Mike Slaven

SECURING BORDERS, SECURING POWER

SECURING BORDERS,
SECURING POWER
T H E R I SE A N D D E C L I N E O F
A R I Z O NA’ S B O R D E R P O L I T IC S
MIKE SLAVEN
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Slaven, Mike, author.
Title: Securing borders, securing power : the rise and decline of Arizona’s
border politics / Mike Slaven.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000670 (print) | LCCN 2022000671 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231203760 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231203777 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231555227 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Border security—Political aspects—Arizona. | Arizona—
Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Arizona—Politics and
government—1951– | United States—Boundaries—Mexico.
Classification: LCC JV6912 .S53 2022 (print) | LCC JV6912 (ebook) |
DDC 325.7910905—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000670
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000671
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-f ree paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover photo: IrinaK © Shutterstock
Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ARIZONA AND THE RISE OF
POPULIST BORDER-S ECURITY POLITICS(cid:2)1
1. A BORDER EMERGENCY IS BORN(cid:2)28
2. SECURING VICTORY(cid:2)70
3. THE TOUGHEST MEASURE(cid:2)113
4. A LINE IN THE SAND(cid:2)151
5. THE POLITICAL GAME OF SECURITY ON THE
ARIZONA BORDER: PARTY COMPETITION, POPULISM,
AND COUNTERSECURITIZATION(cid:2)184
6. APPRAISING ARIZONA: POSSIBILITIES FOR
IMMIGRATION POLITICS(cid:2)222
Appendix: Methodology 245
Acknowledgments 257
Notes 259
Index 309

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 can-
not 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 unaccept-
able 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 Ari-
zona 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 crit-
icism. 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
2(cid:2)INTRODUCTION
principles had come to nothing. There was a crisis, it was argued— a gap-
ing 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 ear-
lier. “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 char-
acterize much of early twenty- first- century politics, an event prefiguring
the rise of Donald Trump.2 Declaring a new kind of emergency and cit-
ing 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 begin-
ning nor the end of the story.
A HARDENING LINE
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 poli-
tics is hotly contested by both those who paint immigration as a threat
and those who emphatically reject this claim. Public opinion on immi-
gration in many Western democracies, not least the United States, is com-
plex.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 immi-
gration as a matter of security when other interpretations are available?
Understanding this choice can perhaps help us imagine or pursue dif-
ferent possibilities for immigration politics or for other issues that are
treated as security concerns. The task of this book is to address this
INTRODUCTION(cid:2)3
question— to grasp why, given the circumstances of politics and the seem-
ing 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 under-
standing 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 fed-
eral 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 Arizo-
na’s government was not dominated by “border hawks” who agitated for
immigration enforcement as a matter of ideological priority. On the con-
trary, for much of this period, nonhawkish figures in both the Demo-
cratic 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