https://www.ucpress.edu/books/on-the-record/paper

Jennifer Chacon:  You note in the book that when immigrant residents want to avail themselves of various forms of relief from the threat of deportation (or, to be more legally precise, removal), they often have to establish their own exceptionality, demonstrating why they are deserving of legal relief that is not more widely available.  Could you explain how people document their eligibility for exceptional relief, and also about how they resist the narratives of exceptionality, even as they leverage them for legal relief?

Susan Coutin:  Depending on the form of relief they are seeking, immigrant residents may need to show that they are qualifying relatives of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, their deportation would cause an exceptional hardship, they were victims of crime and collaborated in the investigation, they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin, they immigrated to the US as children and were educated here, or the number of years that they have been in the United States. To do so, they gather records such as marriage and birth certificates, family photos and correspondence, medical records, letters, police reports, country conditions information, school transcripts, immigration-related documents, check stubs, bank statements, rental contracts, receipts, and more. Ironically, as they demonstrate their exceptionality, they are also making themselves socially visible in ways that convey ordinariness: they have relatives, work, study, make purchases, rent homes, go to the doctor. Demonstrating ordinariness resists narratives of exceptionality, claiming that their lives have intrinsic value.

Jennifer Chacon:  You spent a lot of time observing lawyers engaging in legal craft – the processes by which lawyers try to mediate between the immigrant and the state.  You describe situations where documentation is simultaneously a necessary element of claims for relief and a potential detriment to those claims.  What did you learn about how lawyers navigate this mediating role? Are there any notable differences between the ways that attorneys describe their role and what you observed in the course of your study?

Susan Coutin:  Lawyers’ and other service providers’ mediating role was complex! I learned that they sometimes discovered forms of eligibility of which their clients were unaware. A striking example was an appointment at which a paralegal reviewed an undocumented Salvadoran client’s expired work permit, asked if they had applied for asylum during the 1990s, and announced that the client was potentially eligible to apply for residency. From a code on the expired permit, the service provider knew that the client had applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the early 1990s, a requirement for the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This client left with the hope of becoming a lawful permanent resident! More often, attorneys had to deliver the devastating news that clients were ineligible to apply for anything or were even barred from future admission. And most commonly, attorneys and service providers’ mediating role consisted of assessing documents’ evidentiary value and identifying discrepancies in their records that had to be corrected or explained as their cases moved forward. Service providers typically referred to their roles by the type of case or the specific task performed, such as a screening appointment or a TPS renewal. I termed providers’ work legal craft because of the expertise involved in reviewing records, completing forms, taking declarations, and assembling applications.

Jennifer Chacon:  This book captures some of the ways that undocumented immigrant residents think about justice, and about what an ethical and humane system of law would look like.  What are these alternative visions of justice?  And what did you learn about how lawyers navigate the legal world that is while being mindful of the legal world their clients envision?

Susan Coutin: Those who were seeking status in the United States, whether for themselves or their family members, longed for a world in which laws and policies would enable families to be together, opportunities to regularize one’s status would be plentiful and affordable, people would not be subjected to illegalization or criminalization, those with temporary protection would be awarded permanent status, and immigrant residents would be treated with dignity and respect. The lawyers, paralegals, clerks, and volunteers who I shadowed at the nonprofit delivered services in ways that prefigured this vision of what law could be. They expressed empathy for their clients, listening to their concerns. When service providers had to ask questions that might be perceived as invasive or accusatory, such as about clients’ criminal histories, providers often apologized, stressing that they were merely translating questions on the forms. Service providers were deeply committed to empowering their clients with legal knowledge, so they took the time to explain the laws and processes that they were implementing. Providers also sought to reduce the administrative burden of applying for legal status. To that end, they charged low fees, assisted clients in obtaining documentation, and put in long hours doing much of the paperwork themselves. My research and volunteer work in the nonprofit gave me a glimpse of what the U.S. immigration system could be like if such practices were adopted by US officials: law could be a form of support for people who were compelled to move for family or because of harm or risk.

Jennifer Chacon:  What would you want anthropologists who study documents to take away from your book?

Susan Coutin: There are so many things! Perhaps most fundamentally, my book demonstrates that documents are active rather than inert. They take on new meanings depending on how they are used. For example, a school transcript that originally served as a record of academic work or a bank statement that focuses on financial transactions can become a “presence document” that is included in an immigration case to demonstrate that a particular person was in the United States over a specified period. When documents are redeployed in this fashion, their other possible meanings do not simply disappear, rather, documents potentially exceed the use to which they are put. Thus, a transcript or bank statement submitted as a presence document also conveys the ordinariness of the applicant’s life, potentially reinforcing the notion that they are de facto members of the US polity. Documents also have an archival quality: a collection of documents may have layers in that records of past events bring these forward in time, and assembling documents in a particular order conveys implicit narratives.

The book also suggests that the relationship between documents and that to which they refer is complex. A birth certificate provides evidence of a birth, but of course is not actually the birth itself. The birth as an event lies outside of the documentary record, even as the birth certificate makes a birth legally cognizable. David Dery refers to such legal representations as “papereality,” noting that in bureaucracies, papereality can take priority over the events, people, and objects to which papers refer. This power to construct social realities makes papers especially useful for immigrant residents who may hope that the papers – receipts, check stubs, correspondence – generated by their lives in the United States establish that they belong here and are deserving of status.

Further, in the book, I highlight ways that immigrant residents who face a high administrative burden exhibit agency by documenting back to the state through the papers that they accumulate and the claims that they file. Instead of waiting to see how they will be “inscribed” within government bureaucracies, as Sarah Horton and Josiah Heyman put it in their volume, Paper Trails, immigrant residents take on what I called an anticipatory administrative burden, gathering the documentation that they hope to someday be eligible to submit. Immigrant residents gain documentary expertise by virtue of living in the United States and being asked for their papers, therefore they, like attorneys and paralegals, practice legal craft in preparing immigration cases.

The image on the book’s cover conveys the creativity involved in making something of one’s papers. The cover art is a reproduction of Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s piece, “Dacament #7.” The artist used a USCIS envelope as a canvas for painting a plant. To me, this beautiful artwork conveys the notion that papers can be brought to life, and that those to whom papers refer can transform their meanings.

Lastly, the book suggests that it is important for anthropologists to pay attention to the technical and material side of documents. It matters whether forms are completed online or by hand, if they generate a bar code (which means that answers that are corrected by hand, using white out, won’t change the bar code), what makes documents look official or unofficial, how stamps, seals, and signatures are used and interpreted, and what sort of paper they appear on. Documents also have aesthetic features. One attorney told me that the many creases in a love letter that her client was submitting added to its authenticity: the client had seemingly repeatedly folded and refolded this letter, suggesting that it was important. Silences within documents also matter. What is not stated? How large are blanks on forms? What is off rather than on the record? These are all questions for anthropologists who study documents to consider.

Jennifer Chacon:  Finally, the book offers some important lessons for those who study immigration law and policy.  You describe your own work not as a passive recounting, but as its own form of “documenting back” to the state.  Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, and say a bit about how you understand the obligations of scholars doing this work?

Susan Coutin: Ethnography can be a form of accompaniment and a means of witnessing. Accompaniment refers to working alongside people who face precarity, exclusion, marginalization, persecution and other forms of injustice. Witnessing, then, consists of documenting these experiences. Volunteering in the legal services department of a nonprofit and shadowing service providers positioned me among legal advocates who were practicing legal craft with and on behalf of immigrant residents seeking legal status. I documented these experiences by writing fieldnotes, doing interviews, and producing ethnographic accounts. I describe my approach to research as not only an ethnography of law but also a paralegal ethnography in that my own role during research was akin to a paralegal who performs legal tasks under an attorneys’ supervision. My book documents the ways that immigrant residents are impacted by US immigration law, the legal craft practiced by service providers, and the visions of a more just future articulated by those seeking legal status and their allies. By producing accounts that deepen understandings and are grounded in respectful and empathetic relationships with interlocutors, scholars who engage in accompaniment and witnessing can contribute to the sorts of transformational imaginings that promote social justice.