U.S. Immigration Control : Bodily Policing in the Modern Surveillance State

Sammanfattning

With the advent of the second Trump administration, new directives and policies for border control and immigration restrictions have emerged through various facets of the United States government. This thesis will aim to analyze select policies and techniques of migration and essentially seek to understand how racist discourses concerning migration fuel and enable expansive new surveillance technologies that are used upon the American population. Such research will be conducted through a critical and qualitative discursive analysis that will seek to define both an identifiable discourse and the demonstrable effects of it. Official texts and press releases from both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will be utilized as a source of migration discourse, with theoretical concepts derived primarily from Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe being used to define the possible racist and postcolonial nature of such discourses. With a discourse identified and subsequently analyzed, the analysis will turn to Mobile Fortify, a policing application used by the DHS, and how this new technology coincides with the racialized nature of the aforementioned discourse and its connection to racist concepts outlined in the chosen theories.