Constructing Threats and Constructing Public Problems: Mobilisations in Favour of 'Walls' in Arizona

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.