Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11

SIX: UNSEEN DANGERS AS DEFILEMENTS

82 six UNSEENDANGERSASDEFILEMENTS One cannot think for very long about unseen dangers without confronting ideas about pollution and defilement. In the first place, biological weapons , which occupy so large a place in current thinking about terrorism, make a direct connection between unseen dangers and pathogens, which have so significantly affected Western ideas about harm caused by invisible agents. Second, much of the thrust of homeland security policy has been on enhancing the security of borders and preventing anything harmful from crossing them. Two of the five goals DHS secretary Michael Chertoff set were “keeping bad people out of the country and keeping bad stuff out of the country.”1 As Chapter 3 indicated, much of his department’s work has been directed at trying to make the discriminations that would allow these goals to be realized. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax letters occurred in an environment that had already been preoccupied with issues of contamination by two earlier developments, a preoccupation with new diseases and increasing controversy about illegal immigration. Nancy Tomes calls the period since 1985 a time of “germ panic,” although she notes that “the current wave of anxiety might better be described as a viral panic.”2 Led by HIV/ AIDS but encompassing afflictions like Ebola as well, the post-1985 period erased previous levels of confidence about public health. At roughly the same time, America was undergoing a demographic shift under the pressure of mass immigration on a scale not seen since the period prior to the imposition of immigration restriction in 1924. A consequence of mass im- Unseen Dangers as Defilements 83 migration has been the rise of what some have termed “the new nativism” in the form of organizations devoted to repatriating or blocking illegal immigrants , preventing the use of languages other than English, and similar causes. The coinciding of terrorist attacks on America with these trends introduces a theme that is rarely directly addressed in discussions of terrorism: the theme of pollution and defilement. The presence of terrorists and/or their weapons constitutes the introduction of impurities, the violation of American territory in more than the technical legal sense. Homeland security is therefore an effort to prevent such contamination. Contemporary preoccupation with illegal immigration and infectious or contagious disease has made issues of purity particularly salient, even in contexts where they are not strictly speaking applicable. The Immigrant as a Defiler American hostility toward immigrants has a history that goes well back into the nineteenth century, when nativists identified immigrants with criminality, ignorance, disease, and “un-American” ideas. First the Irish, then southern and eastern Europeans, faced such charges, often interwoven with hostility to their Catholic or Jewish religion. Mass organizations and political parties, such as the “Know Nothings,” both fed off of and stimulated anti-immigrant sentiment, which continued until restrictive legislation was passed in 1924.3 However, these restrictions were eliminated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which became effective in 1968. With the act coming into effect, a so-called new immigration began, much of it from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It, in turn, has begotten its own form of nativism. That nativism has taken two forms: organizations for the purpose of lobbying and supporting political candidates and paramilitary groups that promised to guard borders. In 1979, a Michigan ophthalmologist, John Tanton , founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In succeeding years, Tanton and his associates created spinoff groups, turning FAIR and its associates into a network of purportedly grassroots organizations with the goal of cutting off immigration.4 Despite their claims of mass memberships, they remained relatively small into the early 2000s.5 By the middle of the decade, however, the organized anti-immigration movement had expanded massively.6 This was due not only to increasing numbers 84 Unseen Dangers as Defilements of immigrants but to their distribution, for large pockets had appeared in small and medium-sized communities in the heartland that had never in the recent past experienced concentrations of non-English speakers. They were often drawn by the prospect of jobs others would not take, for example , in slaughterhouses. No matter what drew them, culture clashes were inevitable. Beginning in about 2000, vigilante groups began to appear on the U.S. side of the American border with Mexico, seeking to forcibly bar the movement of illegal immigrants. In many cases, individuals and organizations on the extreme Right...