Book Review: Paper Trails: Migrants, Documents and Legal Insecurity

Guest post by Emma Patchett. Emma is a postdoctoral researcher with research interests in law and spatial justice, and law and culture. She was previously a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN at WWU Muenster, and has published work on the Roma, migration law and detention spaces. Her twitter account is @eepwrites.

Review of Paper Trails: Migrants, Documents and Legal Insecurity, edited by Sarah B Horton and Josiah Heyman (Duke University Press, 2020).

The recent Windrush scandal is a clear indication of the tyranny of border control enacted through documentation. The Hostile Environment policy required those who had lawfully arrived as children with a right of abode under the 1971 Immigration Act to now provide official proof of their right to remain in the UK. Despite the fact that the Home Office had wiped out evidence of entry by destroying multiple records, they were simultaneously demanding that the individuals in question had to prove their right to remain through the provision of documentary evidence from every year of residency, creating an ‘impossible burden on people who had done nothing wrong’. The inability to fulfil this punitive demand resulted in the criminalisation of people who had for decades been living and working and raising families in the UK. The label of ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘undocumented migrants’ meant that such individuals could were no longer entitled to apply for formal documents or access public services, and in some cases led to detention and deportation ‘to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children’. As the Williams Review makes clear, the resulting scandal left an estimated 500,000 people in the UK with uncertain status due to being rendered undocumented—although given the lack of documentation the extent of those affected is unclear—with the effect of ‘turning lives upside down and doing sometimes irreparable damage’ to those who were denied the right to live and work in the UK on the basis of a ‘profound institutional failure’, which reflects much wider issues of historically racist and exploitative border control.

Sarah Horton and Josiah Heymans’ edited collection seeks to address the double-bind many migrants find themselves within, trapped between the need to be officially recognised in order to escape a precarious, liminal existence without access to rights and even the most basic entitlements, yet at the same time aware that if you do submit or conform to this system you are often rendered more vulnerable. Even the process of acquiring appropriate documents as part of the process of seeking asylum can be neither unreasonably nor hyperbolically called Kafkaesque, as has been frequently highlighted by migration scholars elsewhere. This collection of essays provides an insight into what Horton and Heyman define as ‘bureaucratic inscription’, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to examine how migrant identities are compressed, negated and rendered invisible and or problematic through the law. For them, documents are both ‘distillations of state power’ and ‘a potent site of resistance’ which can be ‘forged, mimicked and subverted’, calling on the reader to acknowledge the materiality of the law as writing subjects into being, rendering them visible and legible at all levels of government.  

Although the editors have created effective sections to categorise the chapters in this collection, there are overlapping themes which emerge in interesting ways across and between these divisions. One key theme is documents as living artefacts that inadvertently disguise the vulnerability of the state, historically obscuring the capitalist exploitation of the imperial project, as Nandita Sharma writes, in which market forces were prioritised over and above the life and liberty of the migrating labour workforce. Similarly, Doris Marie Provine and Monica Varsanyi discuss how drivers’ licenses provide access and entitlement but may also act as a form of functional gatekeeping to maintain local borders and boundaries, and make up the textures of everyday life for migrants to the extent that even private sector actors, through their interactions with various forms of documentation, become implicated in the process of boundary-making, as Cecilia Menjívar explains. In the UK, following the introduction of the ‘hostile environment’ policy, doctors, lecturers, landlords, teachers and many others were required to take on the role of a border guard.

Documents as living artefacts can also, however, be malleable: the materiality of these documents can be the source of resistance to their regulatory function, in the same way that, for example, the artist Bouchra Khalili subverts the bureaucratic governance of borders by asking migrant narrators to inscribe a map with their own counter-hegemonic trajectories. As Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz observes, resistance to migration control can be observed through the ways in which local networks strategically reclaim, reinterpret, challenge and repurpose forms of official documentation in order to contest the policing of migrant communities. Juan Thomas Ordóñez writes about the documentation strategies employed by Kichwa-Otavalo migrants, who creatively and strategically deconstruct, share, borrow and adapt required documents for the purpose of moving through borders. The historical imprint of illegibility arising from Indigenous identity in relation to the state has therefore been turned into a strategy for migration, in which ambiguous and imprecise categorisation permits a more fluid, informal and counter-hegemonic relationship to identifying documents and interactions with the state.

The collection also engages with the implicit spatio-temporality of documentation, and how this context informs particular narratives of belonging. Bridget Anderson applies a temporal lens to visa requirements, as a way of thinking through the bureaucratic construction of boundaries which can invite or deny access on the basis of how a subject is recognised at that particular moment. In doing so, she invites interesting questions about how a migrant becomes a citizen (and vice versa) and how a sense of belonging is mediated through the temporal governance of documents, which—depending on the idiosyncrasies of the document and the particularities of its local or federal implementation—can constitute a sense of fixedness in time or space (of recognition) or, simultaneously, can confer only narrowly-construed and time limited access to particular spaces, on a conditional basis. This reminds me of the way in which many people are rendered stateless without moving an inch from the place of their birth (they are, in other words, stateless in situ): put simply, because a new state emerges around them, the pieces of paper they hold in their hand suddenly transform into worthless documents. Susan Bibler Coutin demonstrates the ways in which migrants enter into negotiation with legal constructions of their lives, and the associated shifting temporal narratives. This dynamic reveals the ‘quasi-magical power of papers and records’ to grant or deny access, to criminalise, and to render a subject visible, or invisible: as Deborah A Boehm writes, documents enable people to be ‘found’ or ‘seen’ by the state and potentially vulnerable to deportation. Hence, there is a level of security in being invisible and ‘uncategorisable’—although this evidently brings with it its own precariousness and lack of rights.

The collection deviates from the majority of scholarship in this area by paying particular attention to the way in which practices of ‘bureaucratic inscription’ reveal the interplay of power relations in the everyday lives of migrants. Doing so is particularly necessary at a time of increased bureaucratic securitization and the ever-growing incursions of border control and the hostile environment, when creative and radical forms of resistance are essential. It would have been interesting to have seen the collection engaging with additional creative interdisciplinary approaches to this topic, perhaps considering critical legal empirical studies from an artistic or literary perspective which evoke the material complexity of the documentation texts themselves. Nevertheless, this collection will be essential reading for migration scholars, those working in the field of legal geography, and those whose research explores issues of citizenship, identity, border control and multi-level governance.