By Daniel Melo
There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.
The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.
Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.
The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.
By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.
The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).
To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.
Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.
Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.
