États-Unis : frontière sécurisée, identité(s) contrôlée(s) ?

Technologization of Security: Management of Uncertainty and Risk in the Age of Biometrics

“…This unexpected change started in California with the fingerpointing of undocumented immigrants coming from Mexico and Latin America as the causes of the social and economic problems of this state. Under the pressure of local politicians, Californians adopted in 1994 Proposition 187 transforming undocumented immigrants into illegal beings, denying them public education, public social services and public health care and leading to the stiffening of border controls by the adoption of security programs like Operation Gatekeeper and Hold the Line (Ceyhan 1997;Andreas and Snyder 2000;Nevins 2002). Stressing the need for more secure identity documents, Proposition 187 raised the question of bogus documents presumably utilized by illegal aliens and the criminal stealing of identity documents (especially the Social Security number) and transformed it into a public concern.…”

“…Often assumed as a consequence of 9/11, the technologization of security actually finds its roots in the early eighties in the US with the repatriation of Vietnam War devices and their redeployment at the Mexican-American border in 1986 for intercepting smugglers during the "War on drugs." 2 The process continued in the nineties with the problematization of immigration leading to the tightening of border controls against illegal immigration (Andreas 2000;Ceyhan 1997Ceyhan , 2004 and to the constitution of a security continuum linking together drugs, immigration, asylum, crime and terrorism (Bigo 1996). With these early drivers, biometrics was introduced as a technique of the identification of undocumented migrants seeking to (re)enter the US from its Southern border.…”

The Management of Border Security in NAFTA

“…As the defense of security for the EU has shifted to its enlarging external borders, cooperative agreements and arrangements in the border zones along the former and now internal to the EU national borders (similar to the Canada-U.S. border) have emerged. Borders have become regions instead of lines, as people see the need to have functional arrangements that straddle former borders (Bort, 2003;Ceyhan, 2001;Hobbing, 2003;Nogala, 2001).…”

Sécurité, frontières et surveillance aux Etats-Unis après le 11 septembre 2001

“…Aussi convient-il de rappeler que la problématisation de la sécurité et des frontières a commencé dès les années quatre-vingts avec la guerre contre la drogue à laquelle ont été reliées la lutte contre l'immigration clandestine et la criminalité transnationale. C'est dans ce cadre que la frontière avec le Mexique a été transformée en un laboratoire des technologies les plus sophistiquées de surveillance et de contrôle avec le déploiement d'environ 54 agences de sécurité, y compris des militaires sous forme d'un Joint Task Force (JTF6), dont la mission était d'empêcher l'entrée des personnes « indésirables » sur le territoire américain et de surveiller les mouvements 5 . De même, sur le plan de la défense, si les années 1990 ont été des années de réduction budgétaire pour les armées, cela ne signifie pas que le Pentagone et l'industrie militaire aient réduit tout effort de recherche et de production en matière de technologies de sécurité.…”