Sovereign intimacies: The lives of documents within US state‐noncitizen relationships

Abstract

In the United States, the doctrine of plenary power grants the federal government considerable discretion in formulating US immigration policies. With only limited court review, the executive and legislative branches of government can create or abrogate immigration policies quite suddenly. This produces extreme uncertainty in the lives of noncitizens, who must collect check stubs, bills, medical records, and other documents in hopes of eventually being able to submit them as part of a legalization case. Such record‐keeping practices enable noncitizens to speak back to the state in its own language, thus exploiting opportunities to challenge illegalization. The discretion that has been deemed key to US sovereignty therefore makes not only immigrants but also the state vulnerable as it endows documents with transformative potential. [immigration, sovereignty, documents, vulnerability, intimacy, law, United States]

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…At a historical moment when Trump's calls to build a wall and send armed civilians to guard the border in the face of the so‐called migrant caravan dominated the news and even shut down the government in early 2019 (even after Obama's record‐breaking deportations show us that these problems are not new), many ethnographers focused on the logics and effects of these assemblages. Work on immigration drew attention to the violent impacts on individuals in the face of states’ efforts to contain people at border zones, whether behind walls and borders (Jusionyte ) or within legal and bureaucratic frames (Abarca and Coutin ; Richland ). Jusionyte () and Sangaramoorthy () both focused on injury in relation to immigrants to emphasize the violent impacts of state immigration and border policies on vulnerable bodies.…”

“…She pointed to the vulnerability of migrant laborers and their inability to access consistent care, but also to the “band‐aid care” some providers are willing to give migrants despite their lack of official papers. Building on this attention to paperwork, Abarca and Coutin () showed how bureaucratic regimes of documentation attempt unsuccessfully to surveil noncitizen migrants in the United States and argued that these failures underscore the tenuousness and vulnerability of state power. Related questions about how states mobilize violence against people within their borders animated Michael Herzfeld's Morgan Lecture, “What Is a Polity?…”

On the Radar: System Embeddedness and Latin American Immigrants' Perceived Risk of Deportation

“…Although these documents help legalizing immigrants to "speak back to the state" by demonstrating a record of their positive contributions to US society (e.g., Abarca and Coutin 2018;Menjívar and Lakhani 2016), collecting and delivering this paper trail to the US immigration regime also makes visible immigrants who previously strived to limit their visibility. 18 Marina gathered documents demonstrating her eligibility for DACA, including medical and school records as well as tax filings.…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…Here it becomes clear that United States as an isolated phrase (indicating the article's geographic focus, as the AAA publication director advises for keyword listings) does not tell us much about the United States as a research setting or analytical trope for specific topics. In 2018, United States indexed articles discussing a broad range of topics, including documents in state‐noncitizen relations (Abarca and Coutin ), romance writers (Taylor ), neoliberal corporate hiring (Gershon ), bureaucratic regimes concerned with endangered species (Errington and Gewertz ), Hopi tribal consultation (Richland ), transnational flexible farmers (Ofstehage ), Christian praise dancers (Elisha ), empathic military training (Stone ), quantitative science in population health (Mason ), and citizen campaigns in court (Greenhouse ).…”