Watchful Citizens
| Author | James P Walsh |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663913519286 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Watchful Citizens:
Immigration Control,
Surveillance and
Societal Participation
James P Walsh
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
To refine wholesale accounts of transnationalism, scholars have cited the amplification
of border enforcement and immigration control. Whilst received analysis emphasizes
multiple processes whether border militarization, mass deportation or the cross-
deputization of local authorities, other trends remain unexplored. Employing the
insights of scholarship on the diffusion and decentralization of policing and crime
control, this work interrogates the enlistment of private individuals in official gatekeep-
ing efforts. Drawing on relevant empirical examples – anonymous tip lines, voluntary
immigration posses, border vigilantes, local anti-immigrant ordinances and other
practices that compel, encourage and include societal participation – it assesses three
modalities of citizen involvement: deputization, responsibilization and autonomization.
Each displays distinct state–society relations and techniques for mobilizing societal
actors and energies. In addition to illuminating the complexities, consequences and
contradictions of contemporary immigration control, this article enriches understand-
ings of social exclusion and the redistribution and transposition of government amidst
neoliberal restr ucturing.
Keywords
Citizenship, crime control, immigration, neoliberalism, policing, responsibilization,
surveillance, vigilantism
Corresponding author:
James P Walsh, Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Science and Policy Forum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
PA 19104, USA.
Email: jpwalsh84@yahoo.com
Social & Legal Studies
2014, Vol. 23(2) 237–259
ªThe Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663913519286
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Introduction
Immigration law and policy provide privileged domains for assessing neoliberalism’s
contradictory imperatives. Whilst the economic requirements of flexibility and global
competitiveness have engendered a loosening of borders to lubricate flows of nomadic
professionals, experts and financiers (Ong, 1999; Shachar, 2011), market rationality and
social retrenchment have heightened collective disenchantment. To defuse popular anxi-
ety, traditional values and fears of threatening others have been mobilized as reactions to
and diversions from pervasive dislocation and insecurity. Unwanted and unauthorized
migrants provide central targets of these efforts and are routinely constructed as threa-
tening cultural identity, the welfare state and national security. In response, borders have
been hardened significantly (Shamir, 2005; Walsh, 2011) and represent critical fault
lines where the antimonies of ‘securitized nationalism and free-market transnationalism’
collide (Sparke, 2006: 153).
This article extends investigations of globalization, state restructuring and immigra-
tion control. Whilst amplified gatekeeping challenges claims of unbridled transnational-
ism and deterritorialization, such trends are part of a double movement in which the
regulation of borders and social boundaries is simultaneously intensified and diffused
throughout the social field. In accentuating these changes, this article departs from neo-
liberalism’s exclusive conceptualization as a political–economic project and interrogates
it as a complex of policy instruments, institutional arrangements and technical interven-
tions involving the ‘reinvention’ of government.
More than the hollowing out of government through deregulation and privatization,
neoliberalism involves the redistribution or ‘deplacement’ of state ‘functions and
effects’ (Trouillot, 2003). Characteristics of this process are partnerships and cooperative
arrangements involving the transfer of responsibility for social reproduction and legal
regulation to non-state actors, whether voluntary agencies, firms or citizens. Beyond
complementing fiscal conservatism, these arrangements interpellate individuals and
communities as ‘active’ subjects responsible for numerous tasks previously falling
within the purview of the state (Rose, 1999).
Traditionally linked to welfare and service delivery, privatized and collaborative
templates of government now encompass political surveillance, crime control and legal
regulation. Alongside intensive policing and authoritarian penality (Simon, 2001; Wac-
quant, 2009), criminal justice has witnessed the emergence of ‘plural’ or ‘third-sector’
policing strategies involving partnerships whose agents and formal status transgress the
public–privateand state–societydivide (Garland, 2001;Loader, 2000). Witnessedin nume-
rous initiativessuch developmentshave fundamentallytransformed crimecontrol strategies
and reveal the state is no longer the exclusive agent in governing disorder and insecurity
but one, albeit important, node in a diffuse network of practitioners (Johnston, 1992).
By emphasizing how the institutional coordinates of policing extend beyond the
sovereign state scholars of crime and punishment have made important contributions
to understandings of legal regulation and social control. This article argues these insights
provide significant leverage in unpacking concurrent changes in the surveillance and
regulation of non-citizens and can serve as a foundation for a reformulated approach
to immigration control. Interest in migration policy has recently burgeoned with scholars
238 Social & Legal Studies 23(2)
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