Defined by the Flood: Alarmism and the Legal Thresholds of US Political Asylum

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alarmism has enabled the extension and reconfiguration of sovereign power at thresholds of human mobility in ways that exemplify the shifting and polymorphic nature of borders. Extending critical geopolitical scholarship on alarmism and the geographies of bordering, this paper examines how alarmism is used to exert control over legal-discursive thresholds that people must cross to gain political asylum in the US. By analysing the most ambiguous area of asylum protection: proving that persecution is motivated by one’s “membership in a particular social group”, I demonstrate how refugee definitions are often contested and changed in response to “floodgate fears”, a type of alarmist legal argumentation. Rather than addressing the merits of an individual asylum case, the floodgate argument invites speculation about the effects a particular juridical decision will have on future cases, and therein translates wider racist, nationalist fears of being overwhelmed by alien “others” into otherwise banal legal codes. In precedent-setting asylum law, these fear-laden speculations can shape legal-discursive thresholds for years to come, enacting targeted exclusion and widening the pool of “legitimate” targets of evolving border enforcement tactics. This analysis of legal alarmism and the formation of asylum case law focuses on the unique relationship between the particular social group threshold and the history and contemporary struggles of Central American asylum seekers.