Anti-terror rhetoric fuses illegal immigration, smuggling, and terrorism into one threat schema

Evidence

Illegality itself is constructed as a global system that conflates the criminality of smuggling and tra≈cking with terrorism. The final statement by the New York Times confirms this by connecting immigration with terrorism in a logic that defines illegality as a set of practices and networks brought together through a causal link. Illegal immigration, terrorism, and tra≈cking go to together in this schema of interchangeable objects that ultimately work to control and regulate immigration through the rhetoric of anti-terrorism. In other words, uncontrolled border crossing brings not only dangerous people but also dangerous objects, ideas, and practices. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 274

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on how institutions construct categories—here illegality is a socially constructed container merging distinct phenomena.
• SEED: Article angle: how the conflation of smuggling and terrorism in security discourse serves to justify immigration restriction—the rhetorical machinery behind ‘illegal’ as a single category.