What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and Where? Devolution and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11

Abstract

If critical geopolitics seeks to upend practices of statecraft as well as mainstream research about it, then the danger is that it does so in terms of spatial structures of intelligibility provided by the latter. I deal with a particular aspect of this problem: how, despite broadening the security agenda, critical geopolitics has for the most part treated geopolitics and security as synonymous with foreign policy and foreign policy studies. One important consequence, as feminist political geographers argue, is that the state and statecraft are treated as abstract forces that float above the contingencies of everyday lives and spaces. To contribute to rethinking the scales of geopolitics and security, I look at the devolution of immigration enforcement in the United States after 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11). So-called 287(g) and inherent authority—two chief elements of post-9/11 local-scale immigration enforcement—have come together to constitute a microgeopolitics of risk intensification for undocumented immigrants in the United States. 287(g) deputizes nonfederal officers as immigration agents; inherent authority empowers nonfederal police to enforce immigration law without cross-designation.