I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

“How Hybrid Bureaucracy and Permit Regimes Made Citizenship” tracks the bureaucratic response to the violence of partition, war, and independence in each of the states, focusing on the mobility regimes established to prevent return in Israel and India, where the documents and evidentiary demands of the mobility regimes enabled claims to citizenship. Focusing on the adoption of the colonial bureaucratic toolkit of emergency by the governments of independent India and Israel to restrict the mobility of returning Muslim and Palestinian refugees, the chapter show how mobility restrictions became obstacles to claims to citizenship. Demonstrating how the transfer of bureaucratic practices governing mobility depended on the continuity of emergency laws, this chapter shows the divergent outcome in Cyprus, which relinquished emergency laws at independence.

This chapter analyzes the nationwide coordination and concealment of the government’s “anti-Haitian campaign.” What they called the anti-Haitian campaign was actually the beginning of a genocide that the perpetrators variously misrepresented in terms of deportation, imprisonment, forced labor, and flight. This chapter brings to light leading functionaries, including Emilio Zeller and Reynaldo Valdez who played key strategic roles as architects of the genocide. By exploring records of mass arrests, and the jailers’ own descriptions of conditions of imprisonment over the course of 1937, the chapter casts doubt on the exact fate of detainees. The anti-Haitian campaign also included racialized discourse around disease, vagrancy, and illegality. The chapter argues that not only was the 1937 Genocide planned, but that a critical appraisal of the actions that the officials were willing to write about offers one of the best windows into the killings that they deliberately concealed. It wrestles with the interpretive problem of official concealment and suggests that deportation was also a euphemistic cover for killing. This chapter interrogates the fact that military and migratory documents are completely absent for the northern border regions during the most violent months of 1937 and places the archival record into dialog with eyewitness accounts.