US paranoia and the affective life of documents

In the current era of xenophobia and paranoia, where every new face represents a potential threat and the media delights in stoking public hysteria about the looming presence of “radicalism”, “extremism” and “terrorism” (more often than not equated in some way with Islam), the documents one holds, the papers and visas one is able to acquire, more or less defines one’s worth on the stage of international politics. Take for example the contrast between Syrian refugees fleeing the ongoing civil conflict in their country, doomed to risk life and limb making the perilous journey to Europe in search of safety – facing barriers at every border crossing and port authority – while British nationals, equipped with their shiny gold and burgundy British passports – are simply able to hop on a plane and within a few hours find themselves almost anywhere. Indeed, amidst the increased focus on where you’re from and what that entitles you to, in 2014 the Daily Mail published an infographic of “The world’s most powerful passports”, spelling out in black and white the differences a simple piece of paper can make to your life – incidentally, the UK, US and Scandinavian countries topped the list.

Despite the relatively recent history of universal passports (they weren’t required for international travel until after the second world war), the documents one possesses have long defined where one can go, what one can do and how one is perceived. One of the biggest issues facing so-called “stateless” peoples – those who don’t possess adequate documentation, such as the Bidoon in Kuwait, the Roma in Europe and certain tribes in Africa and South America – is the limitations imposed on them due to their lack of a simple piece of paper. Documents, in some form of other, have always harboured a certain amount of power and affect. As Yael Navaro-Yashin argues in her examination of what she calls “make-believe” documents in the Turkish Republic of Cyprus: “when placed in specific social relations with persons, documents have the potentiality to discharge affective energies which are felt or experienced by person… Documents, then, are phantasmatic objects with affective energies which are experienced as real.”¹

So far, so obvious. But what happens when the power of certain documents changes – or, rather, when political circumstances come to shape the ways in which certain documents are perceived, allowing them to open some doors and not others (one of the suggestions for the origin of the word “passport” is an amalgam of the French words “passe portes”, meaning “to pass through doors”)?

This week there have been two news stories that point to the changing power of passports and other forms of documentation in today’s world. The first was the rescinding of US travel permits to a British Muslim family on their way to Disneyland; the second the news that dual citizens of Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan, or citizens of 38 countries, including the UK, who have travelled to these countries in the last five years, will no longer be eligible for a US visa waiver and will be required to submit to a face-to-face interview with a US embassy official in order to apply for a visa.

Predictably, the reasoning behind the changes is the belief that the US needs to tighten border security in the face of international terror threats, especially in the wake of the San Bernadino massacre in which 22 people were killed by married couple Tafsheen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, the latter of whom was granted a K1 fiancee visa by the US embassy in Pakistan to join her US-born husband. The fact that Malik, a US citizen and son of Pakistani immigrants, travelled to Saudi Arabia to meet Farook, and then brought her back to the US, has raised concerns in some circles about the flexibility of travel to and from the US, especially via the visa waiver programme.

However, as many have pointed out, if the background of the San Bernadino killers was really the impetus for the new restrictions, then countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia should surely top the list of “undesirables”, while their absence is suggestive of deeper political reasons behind the changes. As one EU official told the BBC: “If you’re a terrorist, you don’t have a great big Syria stamp in your passport – you have Turkey, for example. It’s not going to catch the people who don’t travel legitimately, it’s going to target the people who do travel legitimately.”

The move has provoked a backlash, with all EU ambassadors of member states co-signing an editorial arguing against the restrictions, while a Facebook campaign and online petition headed by America’s large and vibrant Iranian community have already attracted over 120,000 and 46,000 supporters respectively. The general sense of outrage and injustice felt by the many thousands of innocent people who will be affected by the new measures has been adequately summarised by one commentator on the group Facebook page:

“Thank you House Republicans for making me a Second Class US citizen. I was born in the US to American parents, am a fervent patriot and have lived in the US my entire life, but as of Friday I no longer share the same rights as First Class US citizens… I don’t hold an Iranian passport, but because I traveled (within the last five years) and will travel to Iran to visit my wife’s mother and family from time to time, I will no longer be able to travel to Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom (among 14 other countries) without the arduous and costly process of applying for and hoping for visa approval. Thank you House Committee on Appropriations-Republicans for demoting my citizenship.”

Indeed, one of the biggest worries for those countering the changes is that they are likely to lead to estrangement between family members, especially if citizens of countries such as the US, UK, Australia and EU member states – many of which have large immigrant populations – are unable to visit family in Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan without arousing suspicion from the authorities. Moreover, the changes are also likely to affect academics and researchers conducting ground-breaking and important studies in these countries. How are we supposed to build understanding of these countries and combat groups such as Daesh if Western researchers cannot travel to these places to see things first hand? This is guilt by association taken to ludicrous extremes.

And yet, as draconian and ill-thought out as the changes seem, they are all too in keeping with the growing paranoia of Western states such as the US when it comes to the “brown” (and more often than not Muslim) “other” lurking on their doorstep. It seems that for individuals unlucky enough to have been born the wrong side of an arbitrary line in the sand, or who have the audacity to dare to experience and attempt to understand countries and cultures other than their own, the noose is drawing tighter. If documents are what makes us modern citizens, it seems they can also be what breaks us – all depending in whose hands lies the power to differentiate between these flimsy and seemingly irrelevant pieces of paper.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.