Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Lynn Stephen
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699907
• Subject Matter: ArticlesImmigration

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 7–25

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699907

© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

7

Creating Preemptive Suspects

National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration

Policy, 1980–Present

by

Lynn Stephen

Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their

impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who

have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that

through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States

has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from

Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal,

undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.

Un análisis de las políticas de inmigración, defensa fronteriza y seguridad nacional y

su impacto en individuos, familias y comunidades de México y Centroamérica que residen

en los Estados Unidos como inmigrantes o refugiados desde mediados de la década de 1980

sugiere que los Estados Unidos ha creado, a través de programas migratorios como la

Prevención por Disuasión, un conjunto de políticas que generan “sospechosos preventi-

vos,” es decir, categorías de personas de América Central y México que pueden ser

sistemáticamente excluidas como peligrosas, criminales, indignas y de menos valor que los

ciudadanos estadunidenses.

Keywords: Mexico, Central America, National security, Immigration, Asylum

The purpose of this article is to provide a broad analytical framework for

thinking about U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies

and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and

Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees. I

suggest that since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the United States has crafted

a set of policies that continue in different and more severe forms into the pres-

ent. These policies have created categories of people from Central America and

Mexico who can be systematically excluded by being labeled as dangerous,

criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens. Borrowing the

category of “preemptive and preventive action” advocated by the national

Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, and

participating faculty in Latin American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s and gender studies

at the University of Oregon. This text is based on the Society for Applied Anthropology 2015

Michael Kearney Memorial Award for outstanding scholarship in migration, human rights, and

transnationalism, a lecture delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the 75th annual meeting of

the Society for Applied Anthropology in April 2015.

699907LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17699907LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESStephen / CREATING PREEMPTIVE SUSPECTS

research-article2017

8 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

security strategy of President George W. Bush (2002),1 I call these categories of

people “preemptive suspects.”

At the same time, as neoliberal models of trade and governance have become

consolidated in the hemisphere since the 1980s, they have facilitated the entry

of large numbers of people with uncertain immigration status who can serve as

laborers. Today these policies have converged with the current border defense

policy of Prevention through Deterrence, which deliberately pushes migrants

and refugees into extremely dangerous desert corridors and causes death and

injury. As described by Jason de León (2012; 2015), Rocio Magaña (2008; 2010;

2011), and others, Prevention through Deterrence is a deliberate policy of death.

What I want to argue here is that the ideological framework of Prevention

through Deterrence (a stepchild of Bush’s preemption doctrine) and its effects

on migrants, refugees, and immigrants from Mexico and Central America are

not new or even post-9/11. We can trace their ideological underpinnings to the

Reagan era, particularly in relation to the integration of U.S. foreign policy in

Central America with asylum policy. I want to suggest, following the broader

implications of the work of Elana Zilberg (2011), Jason de León (2015), Rocio

Magaña (2008), and Seth Holmes (2013), that our current focus on the ways in

which the material and symbolic bodies of migrants and migrant workers

embody suffering, radical inequality, and marginalization simply repackages a

set of cultural, political, and economic messages that justify differential treat-

ment of migrants, refugees, and immigrants and their criminalization.

My framework has the following elements:

Use of historical racial/ethnic hierarchies and coloniality to justify the cre-

ation of what I call preemptive suspects—people identified, detained, harmed,

and even killed because of their categorization as dangerous and/or dispos-

able.

Differential perception (through socialization with racial, gendered, and cul-

tural discourses) of particular people as intrinsically dangerous (black men,

indigenous peoples, the homeless, the mentally ill, activists) and/or as having

fewer rights and less value than others (women, children, migrants, refugees,

particularly those of racial and ethnic minorities) (Eberhardt, 2005; Eberhardt

et al., 2006).

Equation of these categories of the dangerous and the unworthy with cate-

gories of fear—in the twentieth century under Reagan communists, subver-

sives, and guerrillas and in the twenty-first terrorists, criminal aliens, and

illegal aliens, among others.

Militarization of public spaces, the police, and official and unofficial defense

groups.

Impunity for those who kill and harm the categories of people I have just

described and collusion of local, county, state, and federal officials in this effort.

Justification of these people’s death, injury, or lack of rights as their own fault

or as a necessary sacrifice to improve the lives of those worth more.

Part of this framework draws on the concept of the “transborder,” which I

have developed to suggest how people, communities, families, and ideas move

across a variety of boundaries (Stephen, 2007). Here the concept does important

work in suggesting how policies and practices of border defense, securitiza-

tion, and militarization affect people involved in migration networks and