Paper Trails: Extraordinary Proof, Academic Evidence, and American Exceptionalism in African Immigration

• In Event: Economizing Life Through Educational Reforms: The Reconfiguration of Racialized Hierarchies and Differential Human Worth

Abstract

Governments do not arbitrarily bestow alien, immigrant, or citizen subject-positions; they analyze and accept various forms of evidence to provide legal documentation. This paper illustrates how invoking academic achievements as evidence in immigration procedures calculates “the differential life worth of racialized bodies in terms of their contribution to future economic productivity, thereby rendering quantifiable which lives are worth being born, protected, or extended, and which lives might be abandoned” (Murphy, 2017, pp. 11-12). I argue that focusing on discourses of American exceptionalism and model minority myths applied to African immigrants in the United States offers a unique vantage into how immigration processes determine and demarcate human worth.

Drawing on discourse tracing (Redden, 2017) and critical discourse analyses of non-precedent immigration appeals, this paper first explains the extensive requirements that skilled labor immigrants must meet to gain their legal status. Evidence of educational achievements is used by officials to make discretionary links between the applicant’s past success and future potential; that is, are they indeed “worthy” or “the best and the brightest” (Keyes, 2012, p. 102)? Second, I argue that the cases’ use of education and skilled labor as evidence to make comparative distinctions has consequences for the making and governing of immigrant subjectivities. The seemingly innocuous ways that applicants learn to choreograph themselves work to reproduce narratives positioning Anglophone African immigrants as “iconic vessel[s] of human capital” (Murphy, 2017, p. 117)—precisely by discrediting those without similar qualifications as undesirable. These cases reiterate how immigrants “rely upon certain discursive expectations to gain recognition as subjects” (West, 2013, p. 28).

Lastly, these cases illustrate how immigrants (un)wittingly submit to the bureaucratic paper trails that invoke narratives of American exceptionalism for evidentiary purposes. This performative act of citizenship (West, 2013) is embedded in historically informed U.S. national imaginaries of the model minority and of the American Dream. This ongoing, co-produced characterization of exceptionalism reinscribes metrics of achievement as benign, objective calculations of immigrant value that continue to render other lives as both morally and economically inadmissible. The analysis also highlights the irony that, although immigration policy uses educational metrics to generate a hierarchy of immigrant value based on projected “ability to contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation” (Murphy, 2017, p. 6), and African immigrants have the highest educational attainment rate of any group (US Census, 2014), Black immigrants are nevertheless consigned to the lowest strata of employment compensation (Darity, 2014; Darity et al., 2018).

The paper highlights the need for curriculum studies methodologies to attend to (extra)curricular spaces such as immigration policy to understand how what is taken as “evidence” of individual merit within schooling draws from and contributes to larger mechanisms for differentiating the relative value of racialized populations. It underscores the material consequences when metrics of academic qualification and achievement lend the appearance of scientific and legal objectivity to judgments of who is marked as “deserving” or “undeserving” of documentation and citizenship.

Author

• Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University