abstract: From its founding, the United States has always claimed to be a nation of immigrants, yet in the past century the issue of immigration has become an even more contentious political issue surrounded by heated rhetoric filled with passion, but devoid of information. This thesis hopes to interrupt this rhetoric with a thorough analysis of immigration politics in Arizona through a legal lens, a theoretical lens and an empirical lens. While this thesis by no means looks at all facets of immigration politics, it informs in a manner that adds depth by providing information on the history behind, and legal arguments surrounding, the most contentious piece of immigration legislation in the United States at the moment. It then provides a theoretical analysis of how immigration legislation has created carceral networks and a panoptic gaze in Arizona specifically. It ends with a recommendation for further empirical research to partner with both the legal and theoretical frameworks. This thesis concludes that, fortified with over a century of case law, the plenary power doctrine is unwavering, and it makes federal immigration legislation an overly powerful tool in our political system from which the courts can offer little if any protection. Congress walks a fine line between preempting immigration regulation and devolving immigration regulation. SB 1070 and the 287(g) program are two contested areas of immigration regulation, which both exhibit and alter the power relationships of immigration politics in Arizona. Additionally, the application of the theories of Michel Foucault illuminates the power relationships at play in Arizona - from the power relationships among nation states in the broader political arena of geopolitics and colonialism to the face-to-face power relationship between a police officer and a stopped/detained/arrested person in a Foucauldian carceral network. This thesis ends with a call for empirical research that would yield an opportunity to analyze these relationships. This thesis discusses the importance of empirical study. It situates the study within the genre of surveillance studies and its theorists. It analyzes similar studies, and identifies the variables the most illuminating for this analysis. This thesis is written in the hope that a researcher will pick up where this thesis has left off. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Social Justice and Human Rights 2011

The state of Arizona became the main corridor for unauthorised migration into the United States in the early 2000s. A security approach to the issue at the state and local levels of policymaking became increasingly marked later in that decade. This escalation challenged the longstanding settlement in the United States that immigration was an exclusively federal matter, but occurred during a time when, by traditional measures, the unauthorised entry problem was easing. Such a development raises important questions about why security is chosen as a policy approach, highlighting the need to understand the securitization of immigration as a matter of political rationality. This thesis uses recent immigration politics in Arizona as a case study in order to examine why policymakers treat an issue like immigration as a security issue, when other interpretations are available. This thesis provides a detailed historical narrative of the evolution of migration and border-security politics at these levels of government in Arizona from 2004, when a broad political consensus began to emerge that there was a security problem on the international border which the state had to act to address, to 2011, when the then-years-long trend of securitizing immigration at the state level was abruptly halted. Taking an interpretivist approach to understanding policymaking, this thesis employs semi-structured elite interviews with state and local-level policymakers in Arizona, and extensive analysis of media and government documents. This research contributes originally to knowledge in two main ways. First, it furthers the migration politics field by advancing its understanding of the securitization of migration, and particularly the phenomenon of parties across the political spectrum coming to support security approaches towards, and restriction of, immigration. This thesis thoroughly explains the occurrence of this phenomenon in a major case, identifying the elite political logics, strategies, and understandings that were instrumental in the decisions that composed this process. Second, this thesis contributes to a developing security-studies literature that conceptualises securitization not as an “exceptional” form of politics, but as driven by “normal” political considerations. This research identifies how competitive democratic political logics produced phenomena usually ascribed by securitization theory to exceptionalism, including the narrowed field of contestation around security issues, and the adoption of policies that would previously have been considered extreme. It also examines how, in this case, securitization was successfully contested democratically. In this way, this thesis contributes toward the development of a concept of “security politics.”

On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 ("Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act") into law. This legislative effort raised questions about how political and legal thought are immersed in talk of citizenship in our present time. While the Supreme Court rejected the majority of this law two years after it was signed, concerns over issues of legality, law enforcement, and citizenship still remain. The main questions posed in this dissertation are the following: How are Latinos portrayed as citizens by media? What types and tones of citizenship are advanced in SB 1070 news coverage? To learn more about citizenship constructions, I analyzed newspaper coverage of SB 1070 by using a critical approach that combines quantitative and rhetorical analyses. I examined the following six newspapers were examined: Los Angeles Times and La Opinión (Los Angeles); Miami Herald and Diario Las Américas (Miami); Arizona Republic and Prensa Hispana (Phoenix). They were reviewed over a six month period, specifically from December 1, 2009, to May 31, 2010. I searched each edition by using physical copies, microfilm, and internet databases, for stories on immigration, Latinos, and citizenship as it related to SB 1070. After these newspapers were collected, a content analysis was conducted followed by a close textual analysis. The data reveals three major findings. The first finding is that both English and Spanish newspapers tend to frame citizenship as legal status. The second finding is that Spanish newspapers require their news consumers to translate between languages (specifically English and Spanish), as well as consider different cultures (American and Latino customs) and diverse politicians (international political figures). The third finding is that Spanish newspapers provide many more photos, especially of protests against this legislative effort. The two main conclusions of this dissertation are (1) that Spanish newspapers require their readers to have a double-consciousness, and (2) that there is value in using more than one kind of methodology. / text

abstract: The stories that we tell matter. Public storytelling influences how we think about ourselves and how we treat others. This project explores how Arizona's Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070) affected the development of social identities such as citizen, immigrant (documented and undocumented), and public administrator through public storytelling. The question of how a public policy shapes identity development is relatively under-explored in the literature. Critical aspects of feminist and political theory demonstrate that identity is affected by discourses, such as performatives and accounts of oneself. A public policy authorizes public administrators to issue or demand discourses, such as performatives and accounts of oneself, from the individuals they encounter. Moreover, the text of a public policy resembles an account of oneself, delivered on behalf of a fabricated subject. In this project, the structural elements and storytelling techniques of SB 1070 are drawn out through tools derived from the field of narratology. When applied to the text of SB 1070, narratological tools reveal four major organizing principles or plots, all of which center on the identification and punishment of four types of individuals or organizations: (a) employers of undocumented immigrants; (b) transporters/shielders of undocumented immigrants; (c) undocumented immigrants; (d) state and local government agencies or officials that do not fully implement federal immigration law. An analysis of 321 news stories published after SB 1070's passage reveals that some plots resonated more than others with storytellers. The storytelling about SB 1070 also makes visible the policy's power as a discourse to unsettle the identities of citizens, immigrants (documented and undocumented), and public administrators. It also raises concerns about who bears the responsibility for the impact of policies like SB 1070, which have been passed but not implemented, and yet have a tangible impact on the lives of citizens and other residents. These findings suggest that not only can public policy unsettle social identities, but proposes complicated questions about who is responsible for the harm inflicted on others when a public policy is passed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Public Administration 2014

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