Restriction, Preference, Discretion: Racial Contours of Documentation and the Limits of American Exceptionalism

• In Event: Fashioning New Grammars: Black Survival, Critical Educative Spaces, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

Not only is education the most common reason Africans travel to the U.S., but African immigrants to the U.S. have one of the highest educational attainment rates of any group (Anderson, 2015; Gambino et al., 2014; Mbaya, Mrina, & Levin, 2010). Nonetheless, the educational achievements of documented African immigrants reflect a longer history of structural power in transnational locations that have left education the predominant immigration pathway available.

This paper traces changes in immigration law to understand how racial ideology, settler colonialism, and education (literacy and academic credentialing) drove Congressional debate in the crafting and amending of immigration law. I examine how Congress carefully crafted the meaning and intent of immigration (and citizenship) and the imperial acts at play in the inclusion and exclusion of different populations, based on race and national origin. Further, I explore how inclusion and exclusion based on education is inscribed within the law and what the implications are for immigrants seeking to emigrate based on academic excellence/performance. My main argument is that the statutes and clauses that restrict immigration based on skilled labor are part of the U.S. narratives of exceptionalism manifest in the nation’s desire to be the ‘the best and the brightest.’ Using archival documentation, critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), discourse tracing (Redden, 2017), I explore how those seeking to meet the requirements reiterate existing cultural discourses, which therefore reinforce racialized and classed archetypes used to admit or disqualify particular immigrants. To do this, I focus on how academic records constitute the process of building and proving a case of being a desirable immigrant.

Drawing on cases of non-precedent immigration appeals decisions published by the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, this paper reveals how discretionary application of immigration law to the given facts of a case might be understood not simply as arbitrary determinations but also illustrations of how the U.S. decides on who becomes an immigrant. Looking at common themes from Ghanaian, Kenyan, and Nigerian appellants, I highlight the significance of academic records and exceptionalism for inclusion for immigrants from these three former British colonies, where English is one of (or the) national language and that have sizeable U.S.-based Black immigrant populations.

Documentation is often heralded as a pathway to alleviating precarities experienced by undocumented immigrants. Educational documents get deployed in the process of creating footprint within the confines of the law. In the process, academic institutions become brokers (have become brokers) for immigration evidence. However, immigration pathways are historically produced in specific ways to allow a particular archetype of people to enter. As such, even when Africans meet those requirements, they still have to contend more broadly with the internal racial formations, classed expectations, and anti-immigrant sentiments.

Author

• Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University