The Interiorisation and Localisation of Border Control: A US Case

In 2010, Jan Brewer, the Governor of the State of Arizona, signed SB 1070, a highly controversial law that has come to symbolise new attempts in the US by sub-national governmental units (in this case, state governments) to introduce legislation to prohibit the settlement and facilitate the expulsion of immigrants, especially undocumented Latinos. Despite much opposition, in June 2012 the US Supreme Court actually upheld the law’s most hotly contested provision. It deemed that the law’s requirement that law enforcement officers ask whether individuals they apprehend during the course of their regular duties are indeed legal residents of the US was constitutional (Liptak, 2012). By September 2012, a federal judge ruled that Arizona police could begin enforcing SB 1070. According to critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the law allows state and local police to racially profile Latinos. In the State of Arizona, being Latino and ‘immigrant-looking’, often synonymous with ‘undocumented-looking’, is practically a criminal offence that renders one possibly subject to deportation. Since the passage of SB 1070, many other states have followed suit. There has been a great deal of discussion and debate about the ways states bordering Mexico and other states in the American South such as Alabama and Florida have been attempting to introduce similar anti-immigrant legislation (e.g. see Robertson, 2012). However, state attempts to regulate the settlement of immigrants are a national trend.