Description
Book SynopsisTracing how the issue of unauthorized migration consumed Arizona state politics from 2003 to 2010, this book provides new perspective on why policy makers adopt hard-line views on immigration and how this trend can be turned back. Mike Slaven presents an insider account, weaving a compelling narrative of power struggles and political battles.
Trade ReviewMike Slaven has produced a sophisticated and exquisitely crafted explanation of why policy makers and others decide to frame a public problem in security terms and how such choices shift domestic balances of power. The book features a painstaking investigation of Arizona border politics, which sets it well above the best empirically grounded approaches to securitization studies. -- Thierry Balzacq, coeditor of
The Oxford Handbook of Grand StrategyMike Slaven provides a deeply researched and illuminating account of one of the most disturbing events in the recent history of nativist politics in the United States, which opened a new era of anti-immigrant policy making and political activism in states and cities across the country. His perspective is enriched by personal experience in the practical politics of immigration. -- Wayne A. Cornelius, University of California, San Diego
A timely analysis that broadens our comprehension of how the politics of security works in tandem with “normal politics.” Slaven convincingly bridges these two bodies of literature that often remain distinct from each other and enables a creative and nuanced understanding of the relationships between populism, power, processes of securitization, and possibilities for desecuritization. -- Roxanne Doty, author of
The Law Into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Politics of ExceptionalismSecuring Borders,
Securing Power is an outstanding book. It is at once a detailed insider’s account of immigration policy in Arizona and a generalizable account of when securitization strategies succeed and when they fail. These strategies can deliver votes, but they are Faustian pacts that threaten not only immigrants but the Republic itself. -- Randall Hansen, author of
War, Work, and Want: Global Migration from OPEC to Covid-19Slaven eloquently chronicles the turmoil of populist politics around the character of America and the rhetorical use and abuse of the roles that the border and immigration play in it. -- Tony Payan, author of
The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration and Homeland SecurityThis book offers a compelling narrative account of immigration politics in Arizona. Bringing the political conflicts around immigration to life, Slaven demonstrates how framing immigration as a security matter is like opening a Pandora’s box, releasing demons that participants in the political arena (especially moderates) then struggle to control. -- Kimberly Morgan, author of
Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policy in Western Europe and the United StatesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Arizona and the Rise of Populist Border-Security Politics
1. A Border Emergency Is Born
2. Securing Victory
3. The Toughest Measure
4. A Line in the Sand
5. The Political Game of Security on the Arizona Border: Party Competition, Populism, and Countersecuritization
6. Appraising Arizona: Possibilities for Immigration Politics
Appendix: Methodology
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
