Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia’s Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe

Abstract

In the current era of increased security and with growing concerns about immigrant "others" present in both the United States and the European Union, this book seeks to answer two questions. The first relates to whether framing immigration policies as national security issues (termed "securitization of immigration") has actually enhanced internal domestic security. And second, has the use of these counterterrorist measures solved commonly related immigration problems such as higher numbers of illegal migrants, increasing ethnic tensions, and the appearance of homegrown radicals?Chebel d'Appollonia finds that this securitization of immigration has failed to achieve these goals, and, in fact, has made the security situation worse, on two continents. A central image in her analysis is a resulting spiral of insecurity created by these policies. First, governments reclassify immigrants and minorities as potential terrorists. This necessitates law enforcement to watch them, and, where appropriate, deprive these groups of their civil liberties through new security acts. As a result, a small minority of these groups is likely to become radicalized, which creates more distrust among the population at large and the implementation of new security measures.In order to analyze these main questions and further highlight this spiral, Chebel d'Appollonia examines them in three parts. In the first section, she provides a thorough literature review and investigates how this framing of immigration in terms of national security is nothing new. She debunks the commonly made assertions that recent immigrant groups pose more danger than previous immigrant waves through detailed historical examination of immigration and contemporary rhetoric thereof in both the U.S. and Europe. Then she studies pre-9/11 immigration policies to show how there has been a century of "special circumstances" which warranted policies to isolate and limit certain immigrant groups which were seen as possible enemies of the state. She concludes this section by reviewing the post-9/11 security measures in both the EU and the U.S. and shows that these events were used to support the ever-expanding "war on terror" and buttress immigration policies with no room for leniency, increased border security, and the presence of immigration controls beyond the border.In the second part, Chebel d'Appollonia outlines three main reasons how and why these new security policies enacted to escalated security, but generated new threats. The failures are related to increased border controls, implementing more security measures, and integration policies, all of which have all had unintended consequences that undermine the intended result. With the assistance of evidence from governmental reports, budgets, and national surveys, she makes a strong case for the policy failures. This failure is especially convincing in her analysis explaining radicalization of immigrant groups in the West and how the threat of terror is more likely to come from within than from abroad.The third section...