In the United States, the management of Mexican migration
involves moments of securitization related to mobility, and set
against a backdrop of technical, partisan, federal, and public controversies.
This paper asks whether it is expedient for certain Arizona actors
to portray cross-border mobilities as a threat to be managed by building
“walls.” It questions the role these actors played in the pre-Trump era
in setting the terms of the “build the wall” debate. The analysis highlights
the central role of the “wall” as a securitization tool for dealing
with local opposition, but also the publicization of the pro-wall narrative
through a series of confrontations with the federal government in the
media, parliamentary, and judicial arenas. On a theoretical level, the
analysis calls for a reassessment of the relationship between securitizing actors and the public using two corpora : post-Copenhagen theories of
securitization and the construction of public problems.
