One Raid at a Time: How Immigrant Crackdowns Build the National Security State

By Roberto Lovato, The Public Eye Magazine
Spring 2008, Vol. 23, No. 1

[...] Contrary to the electoral logic prevailing in "pro-immigrant" and mainstream media explanations of the current buildup of the(anti)immigrant government bureaucracy, ICE's war on immigrants is not solely, nor even primarily about shoring up support for the Republicans and other prowar political and economic interests as most analysts and activists would have us believe. A look at precedents for this kind of government anti-immigrant action yields the conclusion that using immigrants to build up government policing and military capabilities is, in fact, a standard practice of the art of statecraft. The historical record provides ample evidence of how national security experts, politicians, elected officials, bureaucrats and other managers of the state have used immigrants and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies as a way of normalizing and advancing militarization within the borders of the United States (the"homeland").

At a time when the mortgage and banking crises make obvious that the American Dream is dying for most, a time in which even its illusion is hardly tenable as revealed in polls that found that less than 18 percent of the U.S. population believes it is living the "AmericanDream," the state needs many reasons to reassert control over an increasingly unruly populace by putting more ICE agents and other gun-wielding government agents among the citizenry. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v23n1/immigrant_crackdowns.html