Mobilizing Documents: Identification, Bureaucracy, and Policing in Transnational Mobility

ABSTRACT This co‐authored essay builds on a growing anthropological literature that engages critically and creatively with idealized official and popular ideas about documents of/in migration regimes. Documents are often championed as a common and unquestionable good in transnational migration but they are intrinsically tied to inequalities and exclusions. As such they can be the source of hope for migrants, but are frequently also the source of violence, normative judgement, and control by a range of state and non‐state actors. In conversation with Nicole Constable's book, Passport Entanglements , this essay draws on the ethnographic research of its six co‐authors to discuss the shifting temporalities and scales of documents in their encounters with people. From aspal (“real but fake”) passports to well‐meaning international NGOs and profit driven brokers, we review the bureaucratic infrastructures of mobility controls that produce varying degrees and kinds of violence, exploitation, and vulnerability for differently situated people. Engaging with these shifting temporalities and multiple scales of documents, we argue that documents not only help or hinder people's mobility but are themselves in motion through significant relations.