2026 Theses Master's

Constructing the Threat: The Gendered Language of Security and Its Impact on U.S. Migration and Asylum

Likins, McKenna

This thesis examines how securitization language employed by the United States executive branch over the past two decades shapes asylum and refugee policy formulation, implementation, and lived outcomes, with particular attention to gender and region of origin. Drawing on securitization theory, feminist security studies, and critical discourse analysis, the study argues that executive-level framing of migration as a security threat functions not merely as rhetoric, but as a governing practice that structures credibility assessments, access to protection, and institutional behavior within the asylum system. While securitization scholarship has extensively analyzed migration governance, its gendered and intersectional consequences within U.S. asylum adjudication remain insufficiently examined.

This thesis reframes asylum not simply as a legal process under strain, but as a human rights regime increasingly governed through security logics that normalize exclusion, detention, and exceptionalism as routine features of protection. Rather than treating restrictive outcomes as administrative failures or capacity shortfalls, the project demonstrates how securitization reconstitutes the very purpose of asylum, shifting it from a rights-based obligation grounded in international law to a discretionary, suspicion-driven system oriented around risk management and deterrence. In this framework, access to protection becomes conditional, contingent, and unevenly distributed, shaped less by the severity of harm than by whether claims align with dominant security narratives.

By explicitly connecting executive power, gendered discourse, and asylum governance, the thesis challenges prevailing assumptions that migration policy operates as a neutral or technocratic domain. It shows how executive-branch language does not merely reflect political priorities but actively structures legal interpretation, bureaucratic practice, and the recognition of credibility and deservingness. Gendered and racialized constructions of threat and victimhood become embedded within asylum systems, producing hierarchies of protection in which some forms of suffering are rendered legible and others are dismissed, depoliticized, or criminalized. These dynamics undermine core international obligations, including non-discrimination, due process, and the right to seek asylum, while allowing rights-restrictive measures to be justified as necessary security responses rather than normative departures.

The contribution of this thesis lies in its synthesis of feminist international relations, critical asylum law, and human rights scholarship to demonstrate that asylum outcomes are not only shaped by law or policy design, but by the discursive exercise of power. It advances the claim that who is protected, and who is rendered suspicious, invisible, or expendable, is fundamentally determined by how security is spoken, operationalized, and institutionalized. In doing so, the project offers a framework for understanding contemporary asylum governance as a site where gender, executive authority, and security discourse converge to reshape the boundaries of rights and belonging.