Asylum Applications and the Materiality of Law
One of the principles that I attempt to communicate to my students in Geographies of Migration and Mobility is the principle that law, often represented as an abstract and theoretical exercise above everyday life, has an everyday materiality of its own, and that this materiality can tell us something about how law functions as a social practice.
This principle is relatively well-accepted in the critical social sciences and legal studies. Among the many relevant studies are Nick Blomley’s Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power, Bruno Latour’s The Making of Law, and Alison Mountz's Seeking Asylum each in their own way speak to the ways in which law is made real in actual social spaces by people far from the lofty architectures of national supreme courts or the Conseil d'État.
But being accepted does not mean that it has been exhausted.
In my own research on removal proceedings, I was drawn to the assembly of legal cases as an epistemological problem. I found the process of examining client narratives, the fragility of human memory, differences in the cultural conceptions of time and temporality, attempts to locate and collate documents that are scattered across government offices across the country and around the world, the power asymmetries in who is allowed to even have a laptop in court—all of this requires attorneys and clients who are facing deportation to produce knowledge that simultaneously resists and reproduces law as hegemonic.
What sticks out to me about this epistemological work is how it becomes consumated in and through the production of physical files. And I do mean physical, because although most courts have relied on digital filings for quite some time, the immigration system still relies heavily on paper files. This may be changing somewhat with the roll-out of ECAS this month, but the observation still stands for now.
During previous fieldwork, one of the social practices I noticed among immigration attorneys was the tendency to, I suppose we could call it, performatively (which is not to say insincerely) celebrate the completion of an asylum application by posting an image of the volume of the asylum application on social media for their peers. This would often serve both as an opportunity to commiserate over the massive work that asylum cases require and also as an opportunity for critique of the immigration system. (“I mean, seriously. If this is what it takes to apply for asylum, how does the government expect migrants to do this on their own?!” That kind of thing, all very valid, in my view.)
Now, back to my classroom. I typically spend part of a class day describing the work that goes into asylum cases and illustrating the volume of these applications as an aside, one of those “I caught a fish and it was THIS BIG”-motions with my hands to show the size of asylum applications I’ve seen. But yesterday I decided to try to do better for my students by asking the #immigrationtwitter world to share photos that they have of asylum applications. And they delivered. Big time.
I encourage you to check out the thread and the photos that attorneys posted online. I will share my initial post here and several of the posts to get you started. As you look at these photos, perhaps the short discussion above about the materiality of law will help you to look at these massive filings with fresh eyes and see them not merely as stacks of paper but as the materialization of regimes of knowledge that determine life and death.
But just one last thing: a big big “thank you” to all of the attorneys who were generous with their photos—and who are generous everyday with what you for a living. I’m excited to see how this helps ground our discussion of the materiality of asylum law this week.
THANK YOU FOR READING! 🙏🏼
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Thanks for this, very thought-provoking! The pictures say it all.
Wow...Think of all the trees that had to be made into paper to print these applications! It would be nice if asylum cases could be done completely electronically and save everyone the costs of paper and postage.