Bureaucratically Legible: American Exceptionalism and Academic Records in Citizenship-Making

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

Documentation makes people (il)legible to bureaucracies. For international students in the United States, encounters with bureaucracies happen through security clearances conducted by their governments, in the collection of biometric information and academic histories at embassies and consulates, when speaking with immigration officials in transit and at border crossings, and for the duration of time at an academic institution (by international student services).This paper draws connections between immigrant and nonimmigrant visa processes by tracing the changing role of education and academic credentials in crafting and implementing U.S. immigration policy over the past three decades. I examine the legislative changes in immigration policies introduced after the1950s featured ‘education’ and ‘special skills’ as central organizing principles for immigration.

Through critical discourse analyses of immigration laws which govern international student visa issuance, international student services policies, and lobbying documents, this paper enumerates how education not only colludes with the state in citizenship formation, it also has an internal set of sorting principles that would appear to run parallel to the state but actually becomes a criterion to confirm the potential for an immigrant to contribute to the “national interest.” This (un)wittingly embeds immigration decision-making processes in academic institutions and implicates those who might otherwise not desire to be part of that procedure. What this means is that “the state is present in the structure of rules and regulations embodied in the law as well as in the institutions for its implementation” (Das 2004, p. 225).

Grades, transcripts, and degrees have become key pieces of evidence in the administration of visas. While not as injurious as the challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees, the encroachment has an effect of creating a politics of proof (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 221), that centers academic qualifications and performance. The requirement to, or the advantages gained by, possessing certain academic documents coopts educational institutions and educators as part of the apparatus of immigration law enforcement and in the production of states of exceptionalism and perpetuating myths such as model minority. Those who monitor international scholars become responsible for deciding what warrants being flagged and reported as an anomaly, as well as generating bureaucratic (academic) records which can be used as evidence in determining the outcome of immigration applications for immigrant and nonimmigrant visas. Thus, the use of education as a proxy for desirability and exceptionalism in visa applications, has become an expected element of immigration applications. And academic institutions and actors, whether or not they know or wish to, participate in that high-stakes process of inclusion and exclusion, shape and differentially define who is legally legible.

Author

• Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University