Disrupting Undocumentation: Municipal ID Cards against Passport Fetishism

Abstract

In this article, I interpret municipal ID card programs as disruptions of nation-state practices of documentation and what I call undocumentation: requiring specific documentation in a wide variety of situations, while refusing to issue such documentation to people without legal residency. To understand municipal ID card programs as disruptions of these exclusionary practices, I analyze the relation between nation-states, people, and documents through close readings of two works of literature that dramatize the “fictive” nature of this relation: the dialogue on passports in Bertolt Brecht’s 1940 Refugee Conversations, and Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a 1972 play devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona that explores undocumentation during the infamous pass laws in apartheid South Africa. I argue that these works ironize the fetishization of documentation and undocumentation, which disguises the actual relations between people as relations between passports. I then argue that municipal ID card programs do not institute alternative forms of membership on a local level, or create sanctuaries that offer refuge from the secular world of power, but disrupt the monopolization and fetishization of the means of identification and documentation by nation-states, and reclaim these means for everyday use.

Keywords:

• Municipal ID cards
• passports
• undocumented immigrants
• Bertolt Brecht
• Athol Fugard
• Refugee Conversations
• Sizwe Bansi is Dead
• South African pass laws
• refugee politics
• law and literature

In 2019, three left-wing political parties introduced a proposal in the Amsterdam City Council titled, “The Right to the City: City Rights and a City Pass for All Amsterdammers (Regardless of Papers).”¹ Inspired by municipal ID card programs in the United States² and by comparable initiatives in European cities such as Barcelona and Zurich,³ the proposal asked the municipal executive to explore whether the City could develop its own photo ID card with a debit card function, in order to facilitate access to healthcare, the justice system, and banking for people without legal residency. A municipal ID card for all Amsterdam residents, the proposal suggested, could give everyone, including people without legal residency, “symbolic recognition that they are part of the community.”⁴

The Amsterdam proposal was picked up by various national media and provoked considerable controversy, culminating in indignant parliamentary questions by an MP of Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Freedom Party about what he described as the proposed “illegalenpaspoort,” a passport for “illegals.”⁵ In response to these parliamentary questions, the State Secretary of Justice and Security noted that the word “passport” does not appear in the proposal, and that the proposed card “does not in any way have the status or value [of] a document mentioned in article 1 of the Compulsory Identification Act.”⁶ The State Secretary pointed out that it was primarily the local government’s responsibility to evaluate the proposal, but he emphasized that local measures concerning aliens illegally residing in the Netherlands must be in line with the migration policy of the national government.

The Amsterdam city pass proposal hit a nerve, because since the 1990s, the migration policy of the Dutch government has revolved around what I will call undocumenting people without legal residency: requiring specific documentation in a wide variety of situations while refusing to issue such documentation to people without legal residency. Until the 1990s, people without legal residency could obtain a social security number and register with the personal records database, which gave them access to the legal labor market and to public provisions and benefits. However, in the early 1990s, the government began to take drastic measures to “discourage” [ontmoedigen] people without legal residency from staying in the Netherlands.⁷ In 1991, social security numbers were linked to residency, and in 1994, the personal records database was linked to the Aliens Administration System, so that people without legal residency could no longer register. In 1994, the Compulsory Identification Act made it easier for police to check people’s identity and residency status, and the 2005 expansion of this Act required everyone over the age of fourteen, for the first time since the occupation of the Netherlands by the Nazis during World War II, to show an official photo ID to police upon request. In 1995, the Foreign Nationals Employment Act made employers responsible for ensuring that their employees had a valid work permit. And in 1998, the Linkage Act [Koppelingswet or Benefit Entitlement Act] linked access to public benefits and provisions such as social assistance, health insurance, child benefits, care allowances, and housing subsidies to legal residency.

The effect of this policy of undocumentation has been that there are currently tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands who are unable to work legally, apply for welfare benefits, go to college, get health insurance, obtain child benefits, open a bank account, make payments in an increasing number of stores that no longer accept cash, apply for a driver’s license, refill public transport cards, rent a social housing unit, or access a municipal homeless shelter.⁸ Some of these people are frequently put in “alien detention” and then released again, because deportation proves impossible.⁹ Thus, this policy of undocumentation has illegalized tens of thousands of people who were formerly only violating migration law in many other areas of the law as well.¹⁰

According to the explanatory memorandum to the Linkage Act of 1998, the “linkage principle” [koppelingsbeginsel] aims to prevent not only that “illegal aliens are factually enabled to continue their illegal residence” in the Netherlands, but also that “the illegals [sic] and those who are not [yet] admitted can acquire an appearance of complete legality” [een schijn van volkomen legaliteit].¹¹ The memorandum explains the second aim in further detail:

Here we primarily have in mind the phenomenon that especially the alien “in procedure” gradually proves capable of building such a strong legal position—or the appearance of such a position—that he [sic] turns out to be nearly undeportable after the end of the procedure, for instance because he has been able to enter into labor contracts, has acquired obligations towards third parties, etc. Something comparable occurs with regard to those who have deliberately kept themselves outside the admission procedure, yet who have managed to find an entry into the normal society by means of permits.¹²

Preventing that “the illegals (…) can acquire an appearance of complete legality” requires that it be made visible what counts as “the normal society” and what counts as only “an appearance of complete legality.” If this distinction is not continually made visible, the members of “the normal society” could mistake “the illegals” with whom they interact in all kinds of situations where residency status seems irrelevant—just as residency status used to be irrelevant in many situations until the 1990s—for fellow members of “the normal society.” The policy of requiring documentation in a wide variety of situations, of refusing this documentation to “the illegals,” and of requiring documentary controls not only by police but also by a wide variety of private actors—employers, banks, housing corporations, and even homeless shelters and food pantries—aims to make people without legal residency appear before the public as what the government has decided they are: “illegal.”

In the only article-length discussion of municipal ID card programs to date, political scientist Els de Graauw argues that because it is “constitutionally impossible for cities to expand the formal rights of undocumented immigrants,” municipal ID card programs do nothing but create “local bureaucratic membership” that “[makes] it easier for undocumented immigrants to access basic municipal services and benefits.”¹³ After analyzing various municipal ID card programs in the United States, De Graauw cautions that municipal ID card programs “should not divert attention away from the more important project of pressing for changes in federal law that will allow undocumented immigrants to legalize their status and become US citizens.”¹⁴ For “without legal status and a path to citizenship,” she submits, “undocumented immigrants (…) will never be able to become full members of US society.”¹⁵

In this article, I develop a different interpretation of municipal ID card programs. Whereas De Graauw focuses on existing constitutional limitations on the powers of local governments to create new forms of membership, I propose to analyze municipal ID card programs, instead, as disruptions of the monopolization by nation-states of the means of identification and of the “legitimate ‘means of movement.’”¹⁶ To understand the nature of this monopolization, it is necessary to understand not just the formal legal, but also the symbolic role that documentary politics play in nation-states.

Passport historians have demonstrated that documentary politics have been at the heart of the self-constitution of nation-states. For instance, John Torpey has shown that passports have been central to “the institutionalization of the idea of the ‘nation-state’ as a prospectively homogeneous ethnocultural unit,” because “boundaries between persons that are rooted in the legal category of nationality can only be maintained (…) by documents indicating a person’s nationality.”¹⁷ Radhika Mongia has argued that the origins of “the passport as the definitive state document authorizing national identity and curtailing movement” include passes used in the British Empire to regulate the movement of indentured Indian labor after the abolition of slavery, and post-World War I passport requirements within the British Empire to restrict migration of Indian subjects into white settler colonies.¹⁸ According to Mongia, the modern passport system is a continuation of such colonial “attempts to restrict movement along national lines that are explicitly raced.”¹⁹

Because of the symbolic role that documentary politics play in the self-constitution of nation-states, I analyze the relation between nation-states, people, and documents through close readings of two works of literature that dramatize the “fictive” nature of this relation: the dialogue on passports in Bertolt Brecht’s 1940 Refugee Conversations,²⁰ and Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a 1972 play devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona that explores undocumentation during the infamous pass laws in apartheid South Africa.²¹ I will argue that both these works dramatize the relation between nation-states, documentation, and people as fetishistic. Just as Marx connected the capitalist monopolization of the means of production to commodity fetishism, which disguises the actual relations between people as relations between things, Brecht’s Refugee Conversations and Sizwe Bansi is Dead dramatize how the monopolization of the means of identification and documentation by nation-states fetishizes passports and disguises the actual relations between people as relations between passports.²² I then analyze the Dutch policy of undocumentation as a contemporary manifestation of passport fetishism, and argue that municipal ID cards can disrupt the monopolization of the means of identification and documentation by the nation-state, and reclaim these means for everyday use.

Passport Fetishism in Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations

The first of Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations is an eight-page dialogue written in 1940 titled, “On Passports/On the Parity of Beer and Cigars/On the Love of Order.”²³ The conversation is between two refugees from Nazi Germany en route to the United States talking politics in the railway café in Helsinki. After Brecht sets the scene, the conversation begins as follows:

The big one

This beer is not beer, which is compensated for by the fact that these cigars are not cigars either—but the passport [der Paß] has to be a passport, so that they let you into the country.

In the war economy, nothing is what it is anymore: beer no longer looks or tastes like beer, and cigars no longer taste like cigars. But the fact that beer and cigars are both not “real” or “proper” beer and cigars makes for a certain parity: they are equally not what they are. The only thing that has to be what it is amidst this parity of imparities, or generalized chaos, is passports. His interlocutor agrees, observing that good passports are always recognized:

The stocky one

The passport is the noblest part of a human. Nor does it come into existence as easily as a human. A human can come into existence anywhere, in the most irresponsible [leichtsinnigste] way and without proper reason, but not a passport. That’s why a passport is always recognized [anerkannt] if it is good, whereas a human can be as good as it gets and is still not recognized.

This observation ironizes the population management discourse that Michel Foucault has described as central to nation-states, a statistical discourse premised on the the recognition of a general equivalent, the “normal” member of the nation, and by administering that equivalent in the name of raison d’État.²⁴ For nation-states, taming the randomness²⁵ of the fact that human beings can “come into existence anywhere,” “without proper reason,” by recognizing a general equivalent takes place by means of documentation.²⁶ Consider, for instance, the title of the 1936 book, Population Bookkeeping, by Jacob Lentz, the Dutch “Head National Inspector of the Population Registries,” which begins with the motto, “In the administration/the paper human/is the representative/of the natural human.”²⁷ Lentz’s second book, Personal ID Cards [persoonsbewijzen] (1941), a manual for the introduction of the ID card that he designed for the occupying German Nazi government, had the following motto: “The connectedness [verbondenheid] of person/personal ID card and personal card [kept in the municipal registry]/guarantees the administrative domination [beheersching]/of social life.”²⁸ Brecht’s characters attempt to grasp the nature of the representative relation between what Lentz called the paper human and the natural human, the nature of the “connectedness” of ID card and person. In the above block quote, this connectedness is imagined as a relation between part and whole: the passport is the noblest part of a human being. The other interlocutor attempts a comparison:

The big one

You could say that the human is just the mechanical holder [Halter] of a passport. He gets his passport stuffed into his breast pocket, just like share certificates are stuffed into a safe, which has no value in itself, but contains things of value.

This comparison seems to allude to the fact that legally, humans are only the carriers, bearers, or possessors, but not the owners of passports, because passports always remain the property of the state.²⁹ But does the comparison of passports to share certificates and humans to a safe hold? It is true that passports sometimes allow their possessors to make a claim to a share of the national wealth or public good, and in the perception of Brecht’s characters, a human without a passport is similar to an empty safe in that both have no value in themselves. However, share certificates do not need a safe in order to exist: they can exist “fully” without one. By contrast, the stocky one insists, passports need humans in order to exist fully:

The stocky one

And yet one might contend that the human is, in a certain sense, necessary for the passport. The passport is the main thing [Hauptsach], all due respect, but without an attendant human it would not be possible, or at least not entirely full. It’s like with a surgeon – he needs a patient, otherwise he can’t operate, and to that extent he is not independent, just half a thing with all his qualifications; in a modern state it’s the same: the main thing is the Führer or Duce, but they too need people to lead [zum Führen]. They are great, but someone has to bear the damage, or it won’t work.³⁰

Passports need humans to exist fully, just as a surgeon needs a sick patient to operate on, and the Führer or Duce need humans to lead. The interlocutors connect these two comparisons on the next page, which I will analyze below. But the “big one” has not finished his meditations on beer and cigars yet:

The big one

The two names that you mentioned remind me of this beer and these cigars. I’d like to think of them as leading brands, the best there is to be had around here, and I see it as a fortunate state of affairs that the beer isn’t proper beer and the cigar isn’t a proper cigar, because if they didn’t happen to be on an equal footing, this café would be almost impossible to run. The coffee probably isn’t coffee either.³¹

The “names” “Führer” and “Duce” remind the “big one” of his beer and cigars, which he would like to think of as “leading” (führende) brands, suggesting yet another comparison: just as passports, the Führer or Duce, or surgeons are the main thing but need humans to exist fully, brands are the main thing but need external objects to exist fully. Naomi Klein has argued that brands emerged at the end of the 19^th century to bestow proper names such as Quaker, Aunt Jemima, Heinz, or Domino on mass-produced bulk products in order to “counteract the new and unsettling anonymity of packaged goods.”³² Similarly, it might be argued that passports bestow nationalities on humans in order to counteract their anonymity after the emergence of capital destroyed, in Marx’s analysis, all personal relations and reduced humans to generic “bearers” of “labor power.”³³ And just as brands allow their owners to collect monopoly rents on the use of the brands’ symbolic and affective content,³⁴ passports allow nation-states to collect monopoly rents on national belonging, for instance by drafting nationals for warfare or by taxing them.³⁵ Brands often have a tenuous relation with the branded products: Brecht’s character’s beer and cigars are not even real beer and cigars, despite their leading brands that make them recognizable as the best there is to be had.

Some genealogies of modern documentation see identity documents as successors of earlier practices of marking human bodies with brands, scars, or tattoos signaling enslavement or conviction of a crime, or with visible marks on clothing such as the yellow badges that Jews were made to wear by some European rulers in the Middle Ages and the early modern period and that the Nazis revived.³⁶ Indeed, documentary requirements continue to be associated with criminalization and racial stigmatization. For instance, when the Dutch government, in 1994, introduced mandatory identification for the first time since the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, some critics considered it to be a criminalization of the entire population,³⁷ while others objected that it facilitated ethnic profiling.³⁸

The big one does not want to keep his interlocutor from further reflecting on his theme, the passport:

The stocky one

I’m just surprised that they’re currently so bent on counting and registering people, as if they could lose one, normally they aren’t like that. But they must know very precisely that you are this person and not another, as if it weren’t entirely the same who they let starve to death.³⁹

After they introduce themselves to each other, the big one responds with a possible explanation:

Ziffel [the big one]

Care [Die Sorge] for the people has greatly increased in recent years, especially in the new state entities. It’s not like before: nowadays, the state cares [kümmert sich]. The great men who have surfaced in various parts of Europe take a keen interest in humans; they can’t get enough of them. They need lots. At first none of us could fathom why the Führer was gathering up so many people from around the borders of Germany and transporting them into the middle. Only since the war started has it become clear. He has considerable wear and tear [Verschleiß] and needs a stockpile [Haufen]. But passports are primarily there because of order. Order is absolutely essential in times like this. Suppose you and I were allowed to wander around without any proof of who we were: nobody would be able to find us when we need to be deported [abgeschoben], that wouldn’t be order. You were talking about a surgeon earlier. Surgery only works because the surgeon knows, for instance, where in the body the appendix is staying. If the appendix could move away without the surgeon knowing - into the head or the knee – the removal would pose difficulties. Any friend of order will attest to that.⁴⁰

The connection of passports to care and order in this passage is eerily similar to the language of Lentz’s above-mentioned and roughly contemporaneous Personal ID Cards, whose first sentence reads: “The domination of social life, with reference to public order and security, is the task of the government and demands its constant care [zorg].”⁴¹ Lentz argued that in the current “extraordinary circumstances,” “when the threat of disruption [ontwrichting] of the laboriously constructed order is looming,” the primary means to restore that order is “the ordering system of identity cards.”⁴² The ID card that Lentz designed for the occupying Nazi government proved almost impossible to forge, and was instrumental in carrying out the deportation of Jews, Roma, and Sinti to the extermination camps.⁴³

Brecht’s passage ironizes this discourse of care by revealing its deadly implications in the Third Reich, which various theorists have analyzed more recently as thanatopolitics or necropolitics.⁴⁴ Just as the example of medical care given in the above passage is the appendectomy, the example of the Führer’s care for the body politic is deporting its members en masse. Both require keeping track of the body’s members’ locations and movements by means of documentation. A couple of pages later, Brecht takes this logic to its conclusion by having Ziffel summarize why it is important to count and register people:

Ziffel [the big one]

[Order] consists of wasting according to plan [daß planmäßig verschwendet wird]. Everything that is thrown out or spoiled or destroyed must be written down and numbered, that’s what order is.⁴⁵

At the end of this conversation, the interlocutors conclude:

Kalle [the stocky one]

You can put it this way: Where nothing is in its proper place, there is disorder. Where in the proper place there is nothing, there is order.

Ziffel [the big one]

These days, order is mainly at the place where there is nothing. It is an appearance of lack.⁴⁶

In times when nothing is what it is except passports, the modern state’s care, facilitated by a documentary politics that allows it to track people’s locations and movements, manifests itself as necropolitics, letting people starve, using them as cannon fodder, or killing them directly. In such times, passports are not a means to ensure that everyone is in their proper place, but a means to waste people, to realize what counts as order: a space without people, an empty territory.

Undocumentation in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

Passport fetishism is also at the heart of Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a 1972 South African play devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona.⁴⁷ However, whereas Brecht’s dialogue focuses on the relation between documentation and (deadly) population bookkeeping, Sizwe Bansi is Dead dramatizes (deadly) population management by means of undocumentation.

At the time of the play, the misnamed Natives Abolition of Passes Act, 1952 required all” natives” from the age of 16 to carry a passbook or reference book, referred to by the government as the “book of life,” and by Black South Africans, in Afrikaans, as the dompas (dumb pass).⁴⁸ This pass law was part of a enormous bureaucracy and police apparatus established to control the movements of the black population and to maintain a system of “differentiated African labor power.”⁴⁹ The apartheid government had established independent “homelands” or “bantustans” in what were generally the most infertile parts of the country, and called these entities independent nations.⁵⁰ “Natives” who were said to belong to these homelands needed a “native identity number” and a permit in their passbook in order to be able to enter South Africa as “guest workers.” Failing to present the correct documentation during pass controls carried heavy fines and prison sentences.⁵¹ In the year the play was devised, an average of nearly 1,500 trials for pass law offenses took place every single day.⁵² Athol Fugard was intimately familiar with the pass laws, because he had been working as a clerk at the Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg.⁵³

The play begins and ends with a frame narrative of an illiterate black man who comes to a black-owned photo studio to have his picture taken. The sign on the studio advertises pictures for “reference books; passports; weddings; engagements; birthday paties and parties”; the studio’s adjacency to a funeral parlor immediately evokes an association between photography, passbooks, and death.⁵⁴ For twenty pages, the photographer, whose name is Styles, chats to his customer about the meaning of photography for black South Africans (“This is a strong-room of dreams”) and about his past as a car factory worker, particularly the day when “Mr Henry Ford the Second” visited the plant and all the workers had to put on a show while Styles humorously mistranslated Ford’s pompous English to the workers. When Styles finally takes his customer’s picture, the picture “’comes to life’ and dictates the letter that will accompany it” to the customer’s wife.⁵⁵ The content of the letter makes up the remainder of the play.

The story in the letter is about a man named Sizwe Bansi (played by the actor who played the customer) who receives a stamp in his passbook during a nightly raid saying that he must leave Port Elizabeth within three days and return to his “home district” or “bantustan” of Ciskei. His friend Buntu (played by actor who played the photographer) explains that “if the book says go, you go.”⁵⁶ When Sizwe asks, “Can’t I maybe burn this book and get a new one?” Bantu responds that the book is connected to a computerized card, and that he would be immediately deported if he would apply for a new one.⁵⁷ Working without a book is not an option, because even “domestic vacancies” by “little white ladies” require “book in order,” and in any case, Sizwe would risk becoming a “victim of raids.”⁵⁸ Thus, “there is no way out,” except to go work in the mines.⁵⁹ However, this suggestion leads to a turning point in the dialogue, because when Sizwe objects, “You can die there,” Buntu is “stopped (…) into taking possibly the first real look at Sizwe.” ⁶⁰ “You don’t want to die,” Buntu says, and Sizwe confirms, “I don’t want to die.”⁶¹

After a night of drinking, Sizwe walks into an alley to relieve himself and discovers that the rubble he thought he was urinating on is in fact a dead body covered in blood. Sizwe wants to report the murder to the police, but Buntu warns him that because his passbook is not in order, the police would immediately arrest him for the murder. Sizwe then realizes that they can find his address on the dead man’s passbook (“That passbook of his will talk”), but Bantu refuses to go to the dead man’s home, “Single Man’s Quarters,” which he describes as a “big bloody concentration camp,” because “They’ll fuck us up, man!”⁶² Sizwe then asks, “Would you leave me lying there, with your piss?…I wish I was dead.”⁶³ Sizwe, who’s drunk, starts to tear off his clothes and addresses the audience:

Look at me! I’m a man. I’ve got legs. I can run with a wheelbarrow full of cement! I’m strong! I’m a man. Look! I’ve got a wife. I’ve got four children (…) Wherever you go…it’s that bloody book. You go to school, it goes too. Go to work, it goes too. Go to church and pray and sing lovely hymns, it sits there with you. Go to hospital to die, it lies there too!⁶⁴

However, when Bantu discovers that the dead man’s passbook contains a work seeker’s permit, he persuades Sizwe to take on the identity of the dead man, who is named Robert Zwelinzima, by changing the photo in the dead man’s passbook. When Sizwe objects, “How do I live as another man’s ghost?” Buntu responds:

Wasn’t Sizwe Bansi a ghost? (…) When the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau what did he see? A man with dignity or a bloody passbook with an N.I. [Native Identification] number? Isn’t that a ghost? When the white man sees you walk down the street and calls out, ‘Hey, John! Come here’…to you, Sizwe Bansi…isn’t that a ghost? Or when his little child calls you ‘Boy’…you a man, circumcised, with a wife and four children…isn’t that a ghost? Stop fooling yourself. All I’m saying is be a real ghost, if that is what they want, what they’ve turned us into. Spook them into hell, man!⁶⁵

After burning his own passbook, Sizwe Bansi is dead and “Robert” is “alive again. Bloody miracle, man.”⁶⁶

For Sizwe, proper documentation is a matter of life or death. The stamp in his passbook undocuments him, changing his status from differential inclusion in the urban population (as an “African” or “native” “guest worker”) to illegalized, thereby exposing him to the risk of deadly violence, either by starving, by falling victim to a mining accident, by being “fucked up” in the “Single Man’s Quarters,” or at the hands of the police.⁶⁷ Sizwe’s desparate undressing, while wishing he was dead, is an attempt to have his humanity recognized (“Look at me! I’m a man”), but as in Brecht’s Refugee Conversations, the undocumented human can “be as good as it gets and is still not recognized.” In apartheid South Africa, Sizwe’s undocumented nakedness can only appear the way that the “abstract nakedness” of stateless people, in Hannah Arendt’s analysis, appears to the “civilization” of the nation-states that had produced this nakedness as the remainder of those who had been “vested” with nationality, namely as “barbarians” or “savages” who pose a fundamental threat to that “civilization.”⁶⁸ Arendt observed dryly that when it came to recognizing the dignity and human rights of those who had been rendered stateless, “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”⁶⁹

Buntu, the pragmatist, understands this and “[collects] Sizwe’s discarded clothing.”⁷⁰ He takes it upon himself to help Sizwe put on a credible performance of his new identity as Robert Zwelinzima, by acting out various scenarios in which Sizwe will be asked for his passbook: collecting his pay; opening an account at a store; getting on the church register; and being stopped by police in the street.⁷¹ While acting out the latter scenario, Sizwe promises he will try it, and Buntu responds: “Of course you must, if you want to stay alive.”⁷² Sizwe’s undocumentation not only puts him in a position where he is not protected by the state: it exposes him to the full force of the state’s violence, in addition to other forms of violence. Apart from the risk of deportation, Buntu’s warning that the police will not only not protect Sizwe by allowing him to report a crime, but will actually arrest him for the murder, demonstrates his awareness of the arbitrariness of state violence against the undocumented.

While acting out the role of the priest, Buntu urges Sizwe: “Be careful lest when the big day comes and the pages of the big book are turned, it is found that your name is missing. Repent before it is too late.”⁷³ Buntu’s humorous role play within the play ironizes the political theological origins of the notion of the passbook as a “book of life.” The notion of a book of life played a key role in the apartheid government’s documentation policies: minister of the Interior Eben Dönges had already elaborated on the concept in his introduction of the Population Registration Bill in 1950,⁷⁴ and in 1970, the South African government relaunched its population registry with an ambitious IT project called the “Book of Life Project,” with big IBM computers housed in a newly constructed Pretoria high-rise that was preposterously named “Civitas.”⁷⁵ The image of the book of life appears repeatedly in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, which associate documentation with salvation⁷⁶ and present undocumentation or deregistration as divine punishment.⁷⁷

The “miracle” of “Robert’s” resurrection hinges on Sizwe’s adoption of a pass that, as Brecht’s dialogue puts it, is “recognized, when it is good.” This adoption entails living as “another man’s ghost.” Buntu’s suggestion, however, is that Sizwe Bansi was already a ghost even before he was undocumented, because he was only seen by the racist state (“when the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau”) as “a bloody passbook with an N.I. number,” or interpellated by the state’s racially privileged “nationals” (“when the white man sees you walk down the street and calls out”) with racist phrases like “Hey, John!” or “Boy.” In both cases, the “salvation” from exposure to the violence of the police, hunger, or deadly working conditions that is offered by the recognition of a good passbook involves a misrecognition of who Sizwe really is. For Sizwe Bansi, whose allegorical name is a Xhosa phrase connoting “the black nation as a whole,”⁷⁸ “there is no way out”⁷⁹: his choices are limited to documentation, which means living like a ghost, misrecognized by the state and in social life, and undocumentation, which means being exposed to the risk of violent death. At the very end of the play, the scene returns to the photo studio of the frame narrative. Styles, who had smiled to Mr. Ford in the car factory in order to perform the role of the happy worker, urges “Robert” to “hold it” for “just one more” picture: “Now smile, Robert…Smile…Smile…”⁸⁰

Passport Fetishism, Undocumentation, and Municipal ID Cards

Contemporary undocumentation can be interpreted as a global application of the South African apartheid government’s management of its black population by means of undocumentation, documentary controls, and selective documentation discussed in the previous section. For just as the apartheid government undocumented many black people by declaring them to be nationals of sovereign “homelands” in order to deny them any rights and grant only some of them conditional residence as “guest workers,” contemporary nation-states, particularly in the Global North, use undocumentation to control the movements of the global—often racialized⁸¹—poor and secure the differential inclusion of workers in their economies.⁸² This undocumentation often amounts to a complete deprivation of rights, which is legitimated by the operating fiction of nationality law: that every person can turn to her own nation-state for the realization of her rights and can thus be denied any rights in all other nation-states, with the exception of “humanitarian” rights to food, shelter (to be sharply distinguished from housing⁸³), and emergency medical care, and with asylum law and the Convention on Statelessness supposedly remedying the “exceptional” cases.⁸⁴ However, for many undocumented people, “returning” to their supposed “homeland,” if it is not already impossible because the “homeland” refuses to issue documentation for entry, leads not to the protection of their rights, but, on the contrary, exposes them to state and non-state violence, often including severe economic deprivation.

Undocumentation not only serves to control the movements of the global poor and secure the differential inclusion of workers in the economy: it also has an important symbolic function. In her 2008 book, Making People Illegal, Catherine Dauvergne argues that the word “illegal” has become a “globally meaningful identity label” referring to “have-nots” against which prosperous nation-states in the Global North define their own communities as deserving “haves.”⁸⁵ Dauvergne sees migration law as the “last bastion of sovereignty” in an era when global forces have eroded much of the agency of national governments. Labeling some people as illegal, Dauvergne argues, turns the “moral panic” of nationals about extralegal migration into law in order to project national sovereign control.⁸⁶ Nicholas de Genova shares Dauvergne’s observation that in an era of waning national sovereignty, nation-states stage “spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’” in order to visibly assert their sovereignty.⁸⁷ Whereas Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), analyzed the political production of what she loosely referred to as stateless and rightless people as the calamitous but unintended byproduct of the logic of the nation-state form as it manifested itself after the collapse of the European empires, Dauvergne and De Genova argue that in the twenty-first century, illegalizing immigrants has become a deliberate strategy of nation-states to assert their sovereignty and oppose national belonging to those they turn into visible “others.”⁸⁸

Material state practices of documentation and undocumentation are central to the spectacles of migrant illegality described by Dauvergne and De Genova. Undocumentation does not make the undocumented invisible. On the contrary: nation-states make their sovereignty visible before those they privilege as nationals by demonstrating their power to document and undocument and to make documentation and undocumentation matter, imposing or requiring documentary controls in an increasing amount of situations in which migration status used to be irrelevant. To put it in Brecht’s terms: nation-states strengthen the national brand identification of their nationals through a fetishization of documentation and by demonstratively relegating the racialized global poor residing on their territories, by means of undocumentation, to the unsettling anonymity of bulk humanity that “can get as good as it gets, but is still not recognized.” This demonstrative undocumentation, through a proliferation of sometimes very conspicuous, increasingly outsourced documentary controls in a wide variety of situations, visibly exposes people, divested of the protective “clothing” of nationality symbolized by “good” passports, to the violence of the state’s own “deportation regime,” as well as to the violence of criminals, labor exploitation, insufficient access to healthcare, housing, shelter, and food, and a general lack of prospects.⁸⁹

Municipal ID cards can disrupt these nation-state practices of undocumentation both on a practical and on a symbolic level. Such disruptions have already been taken place in various cities in the United States since 2007, which the Amsterdam proposal to explore the development of a municipal ID card program references. The first local government to introduce a municipal ID card was the City of New Haven, CT, which launched its Elm City Resident Card program in 2007 after two grassroots social justice organizations had prepared an elaborate proposal.⁹⁰ Although primarily intended for New Haven’s estimated 10,000–15,000 undocumented residents (about ten percent of the population), the card is issued to any applicant who can prove identity and residence in New Haven through a combination of documents, for instance a combination of a national identification card, a driver’s license, a utility bill, and an original document from a health or social services organization attesting to the applicant’s residency in New Haven.⁹¹ The card displays the card holder’s name, date of birth, photo, signature, home address, and an expiration date, and costs $10 for adults and $5 for minors. It can be used to identify oneself to local authorities, including New Haven Police, who have developed a policy to not inquire about a person’s residence status unless they are investigating criminal activity.⁹² The card can also be used to open a bank account, so that undocumented people no longer need to carry or store large amounts of cash and risk being robbed.⁹³ Finally, the card can be used to access city facilities such as libraries, pools, and the recycling center, pay for parking, and make purchases at participating local businesses. New Haven’s municipal ID card program has inspired local governments around the United States to introduce comparable programs, including San Francisco (2009), Oakland (2013), Richmond, CA (2014), New York City (2015, the largest program in the U.S. with over a million and a half card holders), Newark (2015), Detroit (2016), Chicago (2017), Northfield, MN (2018), Providence (2018) and Philadelphia (2019).⁹⁴

An event that propelled the introduction of the New Haven ID card program was the murder of 36-year-old bakery worker Manuel Santiago in 2006 by a robber who had been waiting for him to cash his paycheck.⁹⁵ Because he was undocumented, Santiago had been unable to open a bank account and thus had to carry large amounts of cash, which made him a “walking ATM” for robbers.⁹⁶ A year earlier, two Latino immigrant rights grassroots organizations had already called attention to this danger in a report that asked for the introduction of a municipal ID card in New Haven, and Santiago’s murder sparked a mobilization that convinced the city to launch the first municipal ID card program.⁹⁷ The grassroots organizations had already noted that while the 2001 Patriot Act requires banks to verify the identity of persons seeking to open an account with methods that are “sufficient to enable the financial institution to form a reasonable belief that it knows the customer’s true identity,” it does not require the verification of migration status.⁹⁸ Indeed, the purpose of the identity verification requirement is to combat terrorism and money laundering, not to turn banks into enforcers of migration law. Municipal ID card programs have managed to convince a number of banks to accept municipal ID cards to confirm the names, dates of birth, and addresses of new customers.⁹⁹ Thus, they disrupt the exclusion of undocumented people from the financial system.

Another major objective of municipal ID card programs in the U.S. has been to disrupt the subsumption of all encounters with police to the enforcement of migration law. Municipal ID card programs have developed policies with local police departments to accept municipal ID cards in most policing situations, so that an undocumented person’s encounter with the police does not generally carry the risk of detention and deportation. The above-mentioned report by Latino immigrant rights organizations in New Haven notes that the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to persuade municipal authorities to assist in enforcing migration law, but argues that enforcing migration law is a diversion of law enforcement forces from what police ought to be concentrating on, namely fighting crime. ¹⁰⁰ Moreover, the report argues, local police enforcing migration law conflicts with “community policing,” which requires a good relationship between immigrants communities and the police.¹⁰¹ Such a relationship is necessary if police is to be effective in protecting immigrants against violent crime and labor exploitation, to which undocumented people are particularly vulnerable.¹⁰² In addition, municipal ID cards allow people who have been undocumented by the national government to access schools, libraries, city services, and federal buildings.¹⁰³

Municipal ID card programs in the U.S. have used the general recognition of the legitimacy of city governments to verify a person’s name, date of birth, and address, so that people can identify themselves in situations that call for identification but in which someone’s migration status is irrelevant.¹⁰⁴ Thus, these municipal ID card programs have been able to disrupt the monopoly of nation-states on identifying people by means of documentation. Municipal ID cards should not be interpreted primarily as membership cards giving access to a “sanctuary,” but rather as tools of profanation. Instead of creating a sacred space for “the removal of things from the sphere of human law,” municipal ID card programs profane the fetishization of passports by nation-states, making the means of identification available again for everyday use by anyone, including people without legal residency.¹⁰⁵ Countering the reduction of some people to holders of national brands and of others to anonymous bulk humanity, municipal ID cards disrupt some of the effects of passport fetishism and of the spectacle of undocumentation, and reclaim an instrument for interacting in the many instances of social life that require identification, but that need not have anything to do with migration law.¹⁰⁶

Disclosure Statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct application of this research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michiel Bot

Michiel Bot is an associate professor of Law and Humanities at Tilburg University. After obtaining my PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2013, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College from 2013 to 2015, and a visiting assistant professor of Literature and Society at Al Quds Bard College in the West Bank in 2015. I have published about the right to offend, freedom of speech, and freedom of demonstration, and my current research focuses on law and race and on refugee politics. Recent articles include “The Right to Boycott: BDS, Law, and Politics in a Global Context” and “The Conditions of ‘Savages’? Statelessness, Politics, and Race in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Notes

1 “Het recht op de stad: stadsrechten en een stadspas voor alle Amsterdammers (ongeacht papieren).” Initiatiefvoorstel van de raadsleden Roosma (GroenLinks), Simons (BIJ1) en Kiliç(DENK), 24 januari 2019. My translation.

2 The first U.S. city to introduce a municipal ID was New Haven (2007). Other cities with such a program include San Francisco (2009), Oakland (2013), Richmond (2014), New York City (2014), which currently has more than a million card holders, and, more recently, Newark, Detroit, and Chicago.

3 Bea Schwager, “Die Züri City Card – eine städtische Identitätskarte für alle,” National Center of Competence in Research: The Migration-Mobility Nexus. https://blog.nccr-onthemove.ch/die-zuri-city-card-eine-stadtische-identitatskarte-fur-alle/ (last accessed March 2, 2022).

4 “Het recht op de stad.”

5 Brief van staatssecretaris Knops aan de voorzitter van de Tweede Kamer, betreffende vragen Bosma (PVV) over het Amsterdamse voorstel voor een ‘illegalenpaspoort’, 20 augustus 2019, 2019-0000439160.

6 Ib.

7 The term “discourage” can be found in the explanatory memorandum to the Linkage Act of 1998, Kamerstukken II 1994/95, 2433, 3, par. 1.2.

8 See the report of the Ombudsman Metropool Amsterdam, Onzichtbaar: Onderzoek naar de leefwereld van ongedocumenteerden in Amsterdam en Nederland, februari 2021. Available at: https://www.ombudsmanmetropool.nl/Nieuws-Publicaties/article/1298/Ombudsman-vraagt-aandacht-voor-kwetsbaarheid-ongedocumenteerden (last accessed March 2, 2022).

9 A frequently updated overview of publications on alien detention in the Netherlands can be found on the website of the Meldpunt Vreemdelingendetentie: https://meldpuntvreemdelingendetentie.nl/publicaties/ (last accessed March 2, 2022).

10 For an overview of the effects of the Linkage Act in the first ten years, see J. Walther, “Losgekoppeld en uitgesloten: (Illegale) vreemdelingen en overheidsvoorzieningen gedurende 10 jaar Koppelingswet,” Migrantenrecht 9–10 (2008): 326–30.

11 Kamerstukken II 1994/95, 2433, 3, 1.

12 Ibid.

13 Els de Graauw, “Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants: Local Bureaucratic Membership in a Federal System,” Politics & Society 42, no. 3 (2014): 309–30, 324, 313. Hiroshi Motomura briefly discusses municipal ID card programs as measures to “counter federal immigration enforcement indirectly by helping to integrate unauthorized migrants locally,” in Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85.

14 De Graauw, “Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants,” 324.

15 Ibid.

16 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5.

17 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–2. By contrast, Andreas Fahrmeir argues, “[t]he main purpose of pre-modern passports was not to certify the bearer’s nationality, but to indicate the bearer’s rank in what was essentially a semi-personal letter of recommendation.” Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789-1870 (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 101.

18 Radhika Viyas Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” Public Culture 11:3 (1999): 527–56, 547. See also Amit Kumar Mishra, “Indian Indentured Labourers in Mauritius: Reassessing the ‘New System of Slavery’ vs. Free Labour Debate,” Studies in History 25, no. 2 (2009): 229–51. Mark Salters points out that “the passes used in the colonies were neither true passports nor internal passes.” Mark B. Salters, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener, 2003), 56.

19 Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” 554.

20 Bertolt Brecht, Refugee Conversations, trans. Tom Kuhn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Bertolt Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).

21 Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, in Athol Fugard, Township Plays, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–92.

22 Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secrets,” Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 163–77.

23 Brecht, Refugee Conversations. I have modified the translation throughout, and will refer to the page numbers in the German text. Flüchtlingsgespräche, 7.

24 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 311–32.

25 Cf. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

26 Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris : The Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3–4.

27 J.L. Lentz, De bevolkingsboekhouding (Den Bosch: De Vuga, 1936), p. 1 (my translation).

28 “De verbondenheid van persoon,/Persoonsbewijs en persoonskaart/waarborgt de administratieve beheersching/van het maatschappelijk leven.” J.L. Lentz, Persoonsbewijzen: Handleiding voor de uitvoering van het besluit persoonsbewijzen (Arnhem: G.W. Van der Wiel, 1941), 3 (my translation).

29 See, for instance, the German Paßgesetz of 1986; art. 1 refers to the possession (besitzen) of passports by German citizens, but specifies that passports are the property (Eigentum) of the state. Or see 22 CFR § 51.7 (a): “A passport at all times remains the property of the United States and must be returned to the U.S. Government upon demand.”

30 Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche, 7–8.

31 Ibid., 8.

32 Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999), 22.

33 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: Norton, 1988), 56–60. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 270.

34 Zoe Sherman, “Opening Value Theory to the Brand,” Rethinking Marxism 29, no. 4, 592–609, 603.

35 Of course, the ability to maintain a monopoly on a brand’s symbolic and affective content is premised on regimes of private intellectual property rights that are themselves guaranteed by nation-states.

36 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 21. Claes, Passkontrolle!, 72. On branding enslaved people, see the chapter on “Branding Blackness” in Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 89–129.

37 Anita Böcker, Identificatieplicht: oplossing of oorzaak van problemen? (Nijmegen: GNI, 2002).

38 Leo Balai and Peter Rodrigues, “Identificatieplicht en migranten,” in Jan Holvast and André Mosshammer (eds.), Identificatieplicht (Utrecht: Jan van Arkel, 1993), 50–62.

39 Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche, 7–8.

40 Ibid., 9.

41 Lentz, Persoonsbewijzen, 3. The word zorg (care) appears three times on this first page.

42 Lentz, Persoonsbewijzen, 4.

43 ‘J.L. Lentz en het dilemma van de ambtenaar in bezettingstijd’, in G.H.J. Seegers en M.C.C. Wens, Persoonlijk gegeven: Grepen uit de geschiedenis van bevolkingsregistratie in Nederland (Amersfoort: Bekking, 1993), 83–101.

44 Giorgio Agamben has argued that the “[t]he National Socialist Reich marks the point at which the integration of medicine and politics, which is one of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics, began to assume its final form (…) The physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 143. Roberto Esposito sees a “profound connection” between the Nazis’ “therapeutic attitude and the thanatological frame in which it is inscribed”: “[t]o the degree the doctors were obsessively preoccupied with the health of the German body, they made a deadly incision, in the specifically surgical sense of the expression, in its body.” Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 115. Cf. also Michel Foucault’s argument that “[t]he Nazi State [made] the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.” Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003), 260.

45 Brecht, Refugee Conversations. Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche, 11.

46 Ibid., 14.

47 A video registration of a performance is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93a2xx5e-Gw. (last accessed March 2, 2022).

48 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act, Act No. 67 of 1952. See also the informative glossary in Athol Fugard, Township Plays, 233–36. See also Keith Breckenridge, “The Book of Life: The South African Population Register and the Invention of Racial Descent, 1950-1980,” Kronos 40 (2014): 225–40, as well as Breckenridge, Biometric State, 138–63.

49 Doug Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1987), xi.

50 Albert Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 84.

51 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act, Act No. 67 of 1952, section 15.

52 “Glossary” in Fugard, Township Plays, 233–6.

53 https://profiletheatre.org/12-13/about-fugard/ (last accessed March 2, 2022)

54 André Brink, “’No Way Out’: Sizwe Bansi is Dead and the Dilemma of Political Drama in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 39:4, January 1, 1993.

55 Sizwe Bansi is Dead, 169.

56 Ibid., 171.

57 Ibid., 171.

58 Ibid., 172–3.

59 Ibid., 173.

60 Ibid., 174.

61 Ibid., 174.

62 Ibid., 180–1.

63 Ibid., 182.

64 Ibid., 183.

65 Ibid., 185.

66 Ibid., 190.

67 On the differential economic inclusion of the black population by means of passes, see Hindson, Pass Controls.

68 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 302.

69 Ibid., 299.

70 Sizwe Bansi is Dead, 183.

71 Ibid., 183.

72 Ibid., 190.

73 Ibid., 188.

74 “A population register is actually a book containing the life-story of every individual whose name is recorded on that register. It contains the most important acts relating to such a person. In some cases the life-story of the individual is very short. In the case of a stillborn baby it contains only one entry and one page. In other cases a long life-history has to be recorded in that book. All those important facts regarding the life of every individual will be combined in this book and recorded under the name of a specific person, who can never change his identity. It is only when thelast page in that book of life is written by an entry recording the death of such a person, that the book is closed and taken out of the gallery of the living and placed in the gallery of the dead.” Cited in Breckenridge, “The Book of Life,” 225.

75 Breckenridge, Biometric State, 172.

76 “But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book” (Daniel 12.1); “But nothing unclean will enter [the new Jerusalem] (…), but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Revelation 21.27). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

77 “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book” (Exodus 32.33); “This is the second death [after the dead have been brought back to life on Judgment Day], the lake of fire; and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14–15). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition.

78 Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, 86. Wertheim translates Buntu as humankind.

79 For a critique of the fact that the play offers no way out, see Hilary Seymour, “’Sizwe Bansi is Dead’: A Study of Artistic Ambivalence,” Race & Class XXI, 3 (1980): 273–89. Cf. also André Brink, “’No Way Out’: Sizwe Bansi is Dead and the Dilemma of Political Drama in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 39:4, January 1, 1993.

80 Sizwe Bansi is Dead, 192.

81 Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” 547. Nicholas de Genova has observed a “new dynamics of racialization and new formations of racism” in the name of the “apparently race-netural and presumptively ‘legitimate’ politics of citizenship.” Nicholas de Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement,” in Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Peutz (eds.), The Deportation Regime (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 33–68, 55.

82 For a discussion of the differential inclusion of migrant labor in a global context, see the section on “Differential Inclusion” in Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or The Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 157–66.

83 Defence for Children International (DCI) v. the Netherlands, European Committee of Social Rights October 20, 2009, Complaint No. 47/2008, par. 41–8.

84 Thomas Spijkerboer, “’Wij zijn hier,’” Nederlands Juristenblad 2013/1204, 19.

85 Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18.

86 Dauvergne, Making People Illegal, 2, 17. On this point, see also Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York: Routledge, 2006), ix–24.

87 Nicholas de Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality.’”

88 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 290.

89 Nicholas de Genova, “The Deportation Regime.”

90 Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Acción, “A City to Model: Six Proposals for Protecting Public Safety and Improving Relationships Between Immigrant Communities and the City of New Haven,” New Haven, CT, October, 2005.

91 Kica Matos, “The Elm City Resident Card: New Haven Reaches Out to Immigrants,” New England Community Development 1 (2008): 1–7. For a list of accepted documents, see: https://www.newhavenct.gov/gov/depts/vital_stats/elm_city_resident_card.htm (last accessed March 2, 2022)

92 http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2006/12/city_to_immigra.php

93 The card was precipitated by community organizing following the 2006 robbery and murder of a 36-year-old Mexican bakery worker without residence status. Matos, “The Elm City Resident Card,” 3.

94 “Municipal ID Card Programs Take Hold in U.S. Cities,” govtech.com, March 2020, https://www.govtech.com/gov-experience/Municipal-ID-Card-Programs-Take-Hold-in-US-Cities.html (last accessed March 2, 2022). See also the English Wikipedia entry on “City identification card.” Apart from ID cards issued by local government authorities, the Latin American Legal Defense and Education fund, a Princeton-based nonprofit advocacy group, has been issuing the Mercer County Area Community ID card in partnership with organizations such as the Trenton Soup Kitchen and the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in 2011; the card has been endorsed by the county sheriff, the county prosecutor, and the police departments of five municipalities. Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund 2019 Impact Report, 8.

95 Matos, “The Elm City Resident Card,” 3.

96 Ibid., 3.

97 “A City to Model: Six Proposals for Protecting Public Safety and Improving Relationships Between Immigrant Communities and the City of New Haven,” Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Acción, New Haven, October, 2005, 1 and 3–4.

98 “A City to Model,” 4.

99 Tamara C. Daley, Laurel Lunn, Jennifer Hamilton, Artis Bergman, and Donna Tapper, IDNYC: A Tool of Empowerment: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of the New York Municipal ID Program (New York: Westat/Metis Associates, August 2016), 8.

100 “A City to Model,” 2.

101 Ibid., 28.

102 The New York Police Department recognizes the IDNYC as a valid form of identification, and for certain offenses police officers can issue a court summons instead of arresting someone. Daley and others, IDNYC: A Tool of Empowerment, 31.

103 Daley and others, IDNYC: A Tool of Empowerment, 20.

104 Not all local ID cards have been issued by local government authorities: the Latin American Legal Defense and Education fund, a Princeton-based nonprofit advocacy group, has been issuing the Mercer County Area Community ID card in partnership with organizations such as the Trenton Soup Kitchen and the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in 2011; the card has been endorsed by the county sheriff, the county prosecutor, and the police departments of five municipalities. Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund 2019 Impact Report, 8.

105 Giorgio Agamben gives the following simple definition of sacralization and profanation as opposite operations: “[i]f ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term [in ancient Roman law] that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.” Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007), 73–92, 73.

106 I thank the participants in the Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy seminar at Tilburg University, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and I thank the participants in the meetings of Amsterdam City Rights for the stimulating conversations I have had with them about municipal ID cards.