Securing Borders, Securing Power

Tony Payan, author of The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration and Homeland Security:
Slaven eloquently chronicles the turmoil of populist politics around the character of America and the rhetorical use and abuse of the roles that the border and immigration play in it.

Randall Hansen, author of War, Work, and Want: Global Migration from OPEC to Covid-19:
Securing Borders, Securing Power is an outstanding book. It is at once a detailed insider’s account of immigration policy in Arizona and a generalizable account of when securitization strategies succeed and when they fail. These strategies can deliver votes, but they are Faustian pacts that threaten not only immigrants but the Republic itself.

Roxanne Doty, author of The Law Into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Politics of Exceptionalism:
A timely analysis that broadens our comprehension of how the politics of security works in tandem with “normal politics.” Slaven convincingly bridges these two bodies of literature that often remain distinct from each other and enables a creative and nuanced understanding of the relationships between populism, power, processes of securitization, and possibilities for desecuritization.

Wayne A. Cornelius, University of California, San Diego:
Mike Slaven provides a deeply researched and illuminating account of one of the most disturbing events in the recent history of nativist politics in the United States, which opened a new era of anti-immigrant policy making and political activism in states and cities across the country. His perspective is enriched by personal experience in the practical politics of immigration.

Thierry Balzacq, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy:
Mike Slaven has produced a sophisticated and exquisitely crafted explanation of why policy makers and others decide to frame a public problem in security terms and how such choices shift domestic balances of power. The book features a painstaking investigation of Arizona border politics, which sets it well above the best empirically grounded approaches to securitization studies.