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>> 97 3 Grafting Terror onto Illegality In his September 2001 speech to O’Hare International Airport workers in Chicago, President George W. Bush proclaimed, We’re a nation based upon fabulous values. We’re also a nation that is adjusting to a new type of war. . . . We face a brand of evil, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time in the world. These are people who strike and hide, people who know no borders, people who are—people who depend upon others. And make no mistake about it, the new war is not only against the evildoers, themselves; the new war is against those who harbor them and finance them and feed them.1 The post-9/11 moment asked Americans to risk their lives as well as others ’ lives in a “new type of war” waged against the “evildoers” of the world. Although Bush intended for his audience to equate “evildoers” with “terrorists ,” he did so with descriptors that could easily refer to gang members (“people who strike and hide”), undocumented immigrants (“people who 98 > 99 way, as queer studies scholar Jasbir K. Puar contends, “the terrorist and the person to be domesticated—the patriot—are not distant, oppositional entities , but ‘close cousins.’”3 In this instance, both the undocumented patriot and the illegal terrorist are recruited relationally to conceal the violences that U.S. systems of value direct toward its devalued and disposable others for the purpose of silencing the dead of all nations and nationalities. Because the dead can force us all to reckon with the violences that produced them, the ever-present haunting of these restless ghosts will always be the most salient threat to the United States. Under Surveillance and Suspicion Because the national demand for so much death risks citizens’ lives when invoking the right to kill others, the demand must be rationalized as more than political, more than economic, and more than social and cultural. Not many will answer a call to likely death unless those othered politics, religions, or economies appear to jeopardize life itself. For states that govern through biopower , that threat to human existence is manufactured to manage and be managed in everyday life. Unlike disciplinary power, Michel Foucault explains , biopower is a “power of regularization,” a power that is about “making live and letting die.”4 In these instances, racism is the “basic mechanism,” the technology of biopower that justifies and naturalizes why the state makes some live and leaves others to die.5 Race, region, and religion, in contemporary discourses of terrorism, interchangeably stand in for the “other” that threatens human life itself, functioning as the “more than” subtext that legitimates the call to arms. These othered threats become fundamental, immutable , and biological through appearing to establish, in Moustafa Bayoumi’s words, a “blood relationship to Islam.”6 Hypostatizing the threat of another way of life, racism transforms the threatening politics of another worldview into the world’s always threatening other. Violent and unforgiving in its means and intentions, the war on terror far exceeded the biopolitical day-to-day objectives of regulating and regularizing populations in the United States by not only seeking control over life but also demanding domination through death. Beyond letting die and making live, the war on terror insisted that it was the United States’ right to determine who may survive and who must die, to exert the power to let live and make die. For a state that regulates its population through biopower, racism is “the precondition that makes killing acceptable,” but when a state secures its sovereignty through necropower, killing does not need to be justified because what a population finds acceptable is irrelevant.7 “Necropower” 100 > 101 terror as the world’s war, any group the United States identifies as “terrorist” is invasive no matter where it resides or where it might materialize. The language of invasion also invokes discourses of immigration in the United States, particularly discourses of Latina/o undocumented immigration . Media scholar and anthropologist Leo Chavez’s analyses of the “Latino Threat Narrative” illustrate that the narrative of invasion has typified the ways in which Mexican immigration have been depicted for more than three decades (since the late 1970s).12 Along similar lines, media scholar Otto Santa Ana posits that during the Proposition 187 campaign in California, “immigration as invasion was the least obscure anti-immigrant metaphor in general use.”13 As Santa Ana further argues, “the war metaphor used during the...

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