**2. Material vs. Constructed Threats**

Health security is understood broadly to be where individuals' and public health interacts with economic security, food security, and the possibility for civil unrest, and therefore is not simply the way in which 'disease may affect military capacity ... and the impact of conflict on health and health care' (McInnes 2014, p. 7). Davies et al. (2015) have shown that states have been paying closer attention to the threat of infectious diseases, within a broader global health security push resulting in increased expenditure and action when outbreaks and health threats (such as anthrax attacks) occurred. A material or objective threat results in actual harm, rather than solely perceived harm. COVID-19 is a prime example of where states acted to combat a materialised health threat due to the largescale impact on human life, the economy, and national security. To manage the material threat of COVID-19, many states deployed police and military personnel to enforce public health laws and regulations. However, Boon-Kuo et al. (2020, p. 3) found that 'Police do not simply enforce stated public health goals—the extent of discretionary authority awarded to police under COVID strengthens their role in defining *who* and *what* constitutes a health threat' allowing for expanded securitisation during a global pandemic by law enforcement bodies. This enabled law enforcement to pursue their 'usual suspects'—migrants and other vulnerable populations commonly perceived to be a criminal threat—under the guise of a material public health threat (Boon-Kuo et al. 2020, p. 10).

Securitisation is a form of discursive power, whereby expressing the perception of the threat itself constructs that threat and enables an actor to respond in kind. The 'threat' and perception thereof is subjective—perceived as an existential threat by the referent object (that which is threatened). A widely recognised definition is that of eminent Copenhagen School security scholars Buzan and Wæver (2003, p. 491), who state that securitisation is 'the discursive process through which an intersubjective understanding is constructed within a political community to treat something as an existential threat to a valued referent object, and to enable a call for urgen<sup>t</sup> and exceptional measures to deal with the threat'. Therefore, if an issue or entity is constructed as an existential threat to the state as the referent object, then the state can also construct a mandate through which to take extraordinary action. Clapton (2021, p. 132) further explains that 'while securitisation theory's emphasis on the discursive production of security means that threats and referent objects could be anything that actors say they are, this is coupled with a fixed definition and logic of security'.

Over the past two decades, there has been a gradual securitisation of migration, constructing a 'pervasive and insidious connection between migration, crime, and other issues, including national security' (Franko 2019, p. 35). States use increasingly securitised language to describe migrants who have committed criminal offences as a (subjective) threat to national security, through which states have gained a political mandate to take extraordinary action in expelling criminal non-citizens. Crimmigration is a concept which describes states' increasingly harsh legal and policing approaches towards non-citizens, and is a practical representation of the securitisation of migration (Stumpf 2006). Criminal deportation is one of the two 'faces' of crimmigration, describing increasingly harsh approaches taken when those that commit criminal offences in-country are resubjected to migration back to their country of origin (Stumpf 2013). This is particular to migrants, as if a citizen had committed the crime, they would be sentenced, and then released back into the community as a free person, whereas migrants—after serving the same sentence—receive a secondary removal from society: exclusion from the state itself through deportation. Deportation decisions are predominantly intended to reduce the risk to the deporting state. Weber and Pickering (2013) use the terminology 'exporting risk' through return: by returning non-citizens and using political rhetoric against them, the state is portraying the reduction of risk or 'threat' to society from those who are different and could have a negative societal impact through crime. It is this constructed 'threat' of criminal non-citizens and the action of deportation to remove such a threat that I argue is being prioritised over the material threat of COVID-19.

Franko (2019, p. 36) has framed those who are excluded from society on the grounds of crime and immigration, as 'the crimmigrant other'—whose deviance is not just shaped simply by their criminal offending or their non-citizenship, but also by 'another social condition, which distinguishes him or her from other groups of deviants and outsides that have been traditionally portrayed in criminological and sociological literature'. She suggests that 'deportation entails in many respects the production of fear' (Franko 2019, p. 38); therefore, the 'crimmigrant other' framing is part of the discursive power of securitising criminal non-citizens, enabling further extraordinary action against them, such as deportation.

Cooper (2020) found that Australia in particular, has long securitised migration issues. Billings (2019, p. v) claims that Australia is 'at the forefront of crimmigration globally', due to harsh Australian criminal and immigration law enabling large-scale immigration detention and deportation, and prevention of asylum seeker entry by sea. New Zealand too, has been seen to apply crimmigration concepts both in its deportations to Pacific Island states (see McNeill 2021), and in receipt of New Zealanders deported from Australia (see Stanley 2017; McHardy 2021).

Less studied than individual perceived or material threats is when a state faces multiple threats at once, both material and constructed, and how states might address or prioritise these threats. Therefore, proposing how constructed and material threats are balanced when faced simultaneously is this article's original contribution to the literature. Clapton (2021, p. 131) outlines that 'attention must be paid to the ways in which dangers are discursively framed rather than the spatial location of responses to identified dangers or the forms of response that eventuate'. I hypothesize that when faced with multiple simultaneous threats, because a state only has finite resources, how the state frames and securitises such threats and then apportions its security resources on the basis of this framing is therefore indicative of where they consider the greater threat to be. When states have continued to focus on deportation in the face of a material threat that has affected the world to the extent that COVID-19 has, the securitisation of migration and deportation has clearly been weighted more heavily within the risk assessment, and taken priority, including of resourcing. The 'crimmigrant other' is deemed a higher perceived threat than the material threat of a global pandemic, at the expense of migrants' welfare and the potential health risk of detaining people in close proximity and moving people at a time when borders are otherwise closed.
