From border war to civil war: the despotism of the border and full-spectrum authoritarianism

Migration and borders – or more precisely, the spectacles of ‘border crisis’ – have taken center stage in public debates in migrant-‘receiving’ countries, worldwide. Alongside an escalation in border violence, there has likewise proliferated a variety of reactionary right-wing (‘populist’) political movements that can only be adequately characterized as anti-immigrant fascism. In this context of alarmist yet incessant discourses of migrant/refugee/border ‘crisis’, nonetheless, the populist enthusiasm for an increasingly authoritarian politics of borders and migration tends to simply intensify and extend the inherently authoritarian and despotic character of how borders always-already operate and serve as premier sites for the enactment of a state’s sovereign power, particularly as targeted against non-citizen border crossers. Reciprocally, this rather routine border authoritarianism then animates and fuels a wider drift toward full-spectrum political authoritarianism. Starting from ‘illegal’ migration and border ‘invasion’, there ensues an authoritarian project of ‘civil war’ that depicts ‘domestic’ political rivals (fellow citizens) as ‘enemies’ and social ‘threats’. To demonstrate this argument, this article analyzes the brazen and unabashed authoritarianism that has been unleashed upon the United States by the second Trump administration.