"PAPER TRAILS is an edited volume that offers a critical analysis of various types of identity documentation, such as U.S. state-issued driver's licenses, to examine the power dynamics between migrants and traditional immigrant-receiving countries. In the United States, Canada, and the European Union, states are providing temporary and provisional legal statuses for migrants while making it increasingly harder for them to earn permanent legal status, a phenomenon known as "Global Apartheid." The effects of those temporary legal statuses on migrants are profound. This collection unites anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and political scientists to examine the processes through which migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems at various scales of government to show how states exert their power and how migrants navigate new systems of control. The project is divided into three parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part I outlines the basic features of identity documents in traditional immigrant-receiving countries. Nandita Sharma examines the historical construction of the category of "migrant" as opposed to "citizen," and Bridget Anderson considers immigration policies in the United Kingdom specifically. Doris Marie Provine and Monica W. Varsanyi analyze the political struggles around driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico. The second part of the book looks at how documents shape migrants' experiences of space and time, focusing on the multiple and unpredictable spaces in which migrants encounter the power of the state. Finally, part III examines how state control is mutable and seemingly never-ending, and it describes the numerous ways in which migrants and their advocates engage creatively with the state. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in migration studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, and security studies"--
The contributors to Paper Trails examine migrants' relationship to the state through requirements to obtain identification documents in order to get legal status.
Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance.
Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi
