ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, the international passport has been an archival practice. As Mark Salter underscores in Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (2003), the passport as well as other ID documents have always been a feature of the activity of matching a person to a number through which the particulars of that person can be traced in other records. 1 As Craig Robertson explains, regarding the USA: ‘In the 1920s the increased administrative reach of the federal government produced a documentary regime of verification in which documents begat documents to produce official identities verified through the archival memory of the state.’ 2 Admittedly, this confidence in the archive contrasts with earlier practices. Even in countries where one had both international passports and checks at the national borders, passport inspectors did not always believe that it was necessary to check the passport and did not always have confidence in this document. 3 Robertson illustrates the latter case with an example from the US borders before the First World War. At that time, immigrants were not required to carry identification documents, even if the federal government had taken control of the administration of the US borders in the late 1870s. Until the outbreak of the First World War, such documents were not thought to provide an accurate determination of an individual’s identity. Robertson refers to the documents issued to Chinese immigrants who were exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act, which the immigration officials apparently ignored. The officials trusted their own ability to verify on the basis of physical appearance the identity of Chinese as merchants and students rather than the distant authority of Chinese government officials and U.S. diplomatic agents distilled in what they considered a questionable document. 4 According to Robertson,
It was only during and after the World War I that an increased official perception of the value of identification documents led to sufficient enforcement of documentary evidence in the issuance of passports and visas for the U.S. officials then to trust them to provide a useful form of individual verification at the border – that is, to perform the specific role of allowing ’the state’ to remember people who crossed the border at official points of entry. 5
