08 Feb Migration and security

Sometimes, i try to disentangle the relationship of security and migration – 11 years ago, i think writing a bio/anatamo-politics chapter on the international mobility of bodies in relation to health and illness and national security would have been infinitely easier that it is today, if only because i keep having to return to the Department of Homeland Security. that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the U.S. Coast Guard fall under DHS gives pause to worry. Today, more than most days, i suppose, this is weighing heavily on the minds of academics, activists, and concerned citizens of the U.S. and abroad as we watch the Senate confirmation hearings for the appointment of John Brennan to the head of the CIA unfold.

The drive to secure U.S. territory “against possible threats” is dependent on a political anatomy (F, 28) that eviscerates the lived experience of the individual for their construction through and subjugation to expert knowledge production. The “right now” of security forestalls the future experience of those articulated upon through the technologies of securitization, even as an imagination about a possible (horrible) national future is employed. Thus, certain (global) subjects are written out of “security for” and written into “security against” – in many ways, immediately stripping the subject of basic human rights – whether we are talking about the deportation of Haitian’s to cholera-riddled, still post-disaster Port-au-Prince, or the hunting down of “kill targets” with unmanned drones.

Regardless, the question of migration is beginning to move in stride with other questions related to security in the public sphere. A recent article in Al Jazeera, echoed at Salon, explores the question of a new form of exiling: people stranded either in the U.S. or away from it because of their being named on the no-fly list. The extraordinary peculiarity of these powers over mobility through this quickly morphing assemblage of security technologies would be ironic if not for the devastating and real effects on the bodies of those caught in this arrangement of internal mechanisms.