The globalized border regime mobilizes many spaces, but also objects like this particular document we call “passport.” We asked the author of The Design Politics of the Passport Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi, who edited together the book Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below, how the act of forging such documents reveals the artificial nature of this regime, and presses on one of its most vulnerable spots.
Mobility across borders requires documentation and identification. Borders demand to know who and what; when, how, and why one moves. This knowing however is not a matter of negotiation but a form of affirmation. Those who want to cross the border are expected to affirm the story that the state has generated about them. The state claims monopoly over the construction of the story. A successful border-crossing is to successfully perform the affirmed story that the state has constructed about the border crosser. Failure of the performance leads to delay or denial of the crossing.
Stories are also composed through forging documents, certificates, and passports. Forged has a double meaning; to fake but also to make. Etymology tells us that forgery can be traced back to Latin words such as faber (smith and falsifier), fabrica (workshop, but also ruse, trick, artifice), and fabricare (to fabricate). Craftsmanship and forgery have always been intimately connected. However, capitalism has gradually separated the act of creation from the act of copying. With the monopoly on crafting certificates and documents, the state claims their “authenticity.”
Accordingly, crafting documents by other actors than the state is criminalized, and their craftsmanship is classified as fraud.
The state poses its claim to monopoly over document-crafting based on moral and legal ideologies, but also on technologies. It imagines its craftwork as highly technical and complicated, something that cannot and should not be understood by ordinary people. Thereby, every time state agents (a forensic expert, a police officer, or a border guard) realize that they have not been able to detect the fakeness of a document, they are baffled, feeling surprise and admiration.
On February 9, 2016, Thai Immigration police staged a spectacular press conference in Bangkok to show their European and Australian Interpol colleagues and journalists that they have finally caught the most wanted fugitive document forger in Southeast Asia. Known as “the Doctor,” a middle-aged man with sunglasses and a face mask was sitting behind a desk full of colorful materials and devices. Interpol officers were roaming around with a sense of shock but also astonishment. The forged passports confiscated by the police were put up on the walls and the tools for forgery on a table; laser cut machines, pressers, different papers, rolls of ribbon and thread, thin leather sheets, as well as metal plates and stamps from various countries.
The Doctor had provided forged passports to travelers who did not have access to legal ones. He was educated as a nurse and had left his country with the aim of reaching Canada to become a physician. But like many others, he was systematically denied entry in his multiple attempts. His waiting time directed him towards passport forgery for others in need of crossing. His nickname, “the Doctor,” also referred to his surgical skills in dissecting, repairing, and readjusting passports in order to revive them and thereby offer new life chances to their bearers. However, the law reasons differently. The Doctor was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Forgers are storytellers who compose stories for individuals who need them. The stories that forgers tell are alternative ones to the stories that are assigned at birth by the state. Forged passports affirm the identification processes, yet at the same time, they unsettle the grounds on which identification operates. Unlike the state-forged story, the non-state-forged story functions in isolation. While the former is constructed through links to other documents and databases, the latter is not. For example, a passport is issued based on birth certificates or documents of naturalization. This is not the case in a forged passport that is forged for a specific purpose which temporally is limited. The power of an official document emanates from the networks of documents and data it is part of. The forged document is unlinked and thereby untraceable. It leaves no traces behind itself. Perhaps this turns the forged document into an opaque object, and so opacity is the power of forgery. A forged passport attests to the official story for border crossing through mimicry, while at the same time, it negates it through revealing the cracks and shortcomings of the story. This duality of affirmation and negation is the main characteristic of forgery.
Accordingly, sometimes states make use of forgery as part of state-making projects. Forgery has become a way for the Iranian state to circumvent international sanctions. For example, to export its oil, Iranian authorities forge shipping documents to hide Iran as the origin. This method of falsifying documents has also been used by the Israeli state to facilitate land-grabbing from Palestinians. According to a report published by Haaretz on May 9, 2016, Israeli officials forged maps and manipulated documents in order to facilitate seizing Palestinian land in the West Bank, to give it to actors who built illegal settlements and outposts.
Another paradox in state falsification of documents occurs in practices of deportation. While states punish people for traveling on forged passports, authorities also use fake and forged documents to deport migrants. On March 31, 2005, the Melbourne-based newspaper The Age published a brief news article about a bizarre and unlawful deportation of a man with the same forged passport he had used to enter Australia. Likewise, US immigration has used fake documents to deport non-citizens. On September 30, 2015, Al Jazeera America reported a case of deportation from the US to Cameroon, where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had used a falsified one-way passport for the removal of the Cameroonian man. According to advocacy group Families for Freedom (mentioned in Al Jazeera report), the numbers of deportations by ICE with travel documents of dubious validity might be much higher than we would expect. Similarly in 2018, Israel issued fake travel permissions to be able to deport migrants to Uganda.
These examples demonstrate the contradictions embedded at the heart of identification processes conducted by borders. Both the state and the forger do the same thing: they assign a fixed identity to a body through papers. The forger changes the link between one person to a country which otherwise is taken as permanent and naturalized truth. Both the state and the forger are in the business of producing identities with different aspirations and for the benefit of different groups.
If we examine borders from below, then forgery appears to be a response to the state’s monopoly over identity production mechanisms. In contrast to the state’s seeing-from-above approach, which is based on externalizing irregularities that would frame forgery as criminal acts, seeing-from-below identifies the contradictions and inconsistencies within the system of the nation-state.
These contradictions are not new: they emerged once the question “who are you?” became the basis for which one is granted the right to a place or freedom from a place. The question is never really addressed to the person being asked the question. It is rather a rhetorical statement inwardly formulated: “Are you the one I think you should be?” The Doctor simply answered this question according to his knowledge of how identification processes work through papers, materials, machines, performances, and rituals of border crossing.
Because forgery reveals the contradictions inherent in the state, it is criminalized. By criminalizing forgery, the state conceals the fictitious origin of its national identity production, rendering its own stories authentic and real. So if a forged story, unlike the state-crafted one, can save a life, why is it less authentic? Which one is more real? Which one is truer to life?
If state documents are based on fatalistic grounds, for example the place of birth or DNA determining possession of a strong passport or a weak one, forgery makes a disruption and offers an opening and change through the negation of one’s destiny. A successful forgery follows the rules of the border regime, but at the same time undermines it by unsettling the claim of authenticity and by turning the document into an opaque and untraceable object.
Criminalization of the rival, the forger, has been a way for the state to secure its monopoly over the knowledge of seeing, detecting, and capturing mobile populations. The moment an unauthorized person gains this knowledge of forgery, they are criminalized.
Amir Heidari, a previously Sweden-based passport forger who spent many years in prison before being deported, reverses this criminalization by asking who is the real forger, as he made it clear in a conversation captured in Mahmoud’s book The Design Politics of the Passport (2019):
“The world is a forged reality. Forgery is what the state does. The state is a forged entity in itself. If Sweden issues 9,000,000 passports to define a nation called Sweden, why can’t I issue a hundred thousand passports to those who flee war, conflict, and violence and are in urgent need of help and movement? Based on what moral position, am I a forger, a criminal and the state is not? What is forgery? Forging is an act of making something out of nothing. It is bringing to existence something unnatural and presents it as natural, like the state, like the borders made by the state. They are forged; they are made; they are unnatural things that look or make us believe that they are natural. Making borders is a form of forgery too. Now, you tell me who is the ‘big forger’ here? The state or me?”
Amir points to this criminalization by arguing how access to this forbidden knowledge can guarantee our freedom. His point however, is not confined only to this century as this has been the case for the oppressed throughout history. Let’s take the example of the so-called “slave pass” system in the 17th century United States. Like all identification systems built on monopolizing knowledge, this pass worked based on access to literacy for some and banning it for others. Keeping enslaved people illiterate was the foundation through which this system worked. These “slave pass” papers were handwritten texts by slave owners permitting their bearers to leave the plantation. They were easy to forge as long as one could read and write.
Frederick Douglass learned to write a free pass for himself and his comrades for an unsuccessful escape in 1836. His escape plan failed because he was betrayed by a fellow escapee. However, two years later after being sent to a shipyard in Baltimore as a punishment, he managed to escape by dressing like a sailor, carrying a sailor’s pass borrowed from a friend, a Black seaman. Seated in the colored person wagon on a train from Baltimore, Douglass was nervous as the conductor was approaching him to check the free papers of African American passengers. His “whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I suppose you have your free papers?” asked the conductor, to which he answered: “No, sir; I never carry my free papers to sea with me.” “But you have something to show that you are a free man, have you not?” “Yes, sir,” Douglass answered, “I have a paper with the American eagle on it, that will carry me round the world.” Turns out, the train conductor was more concerned by the authorized weight of the American eagle on the pass, than by the description of the owner of the sailor’s pass—Douglass’ seaman friend—who did not look like him at all.
In this sense, literacy is not only conceptual and textual but also technical and performative knowledge.
It was the key to freedom and this is why the forgery of free passes was essential to the network of underground railroad operations struggling for the freedom of enslaved Black people in the US.
The slave pass forgery resulted in more escapes and loss of capital for slave owners. Consequently, slave owners formed a new system of individual identification that connected slave passes with run-away ads and organized slave patrols to find and recapture fugitives. This is how a systematic information technology for surveillance over enslaved bodies emerged, as Simone Browne describes in her book Dark Matters (2015). This information technology put in place by slavery produced unique individual identities based on the body and its visual, physical markers and features, in order to see, detect, and capture enslaved fugitive laborers. This was the backbone of a racialized identification system in the early phases of racial capitalism. Today’s biometrics are a continuation of this racialized system on an extensive scale.
While Frederick Douglass was trying hard in Baltimore’s shipyard to learn reading and writing in order to be able to forge a pass, in Europe, philosophers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte and John Stuart Mill were developing theories of freedom that linked the state’s efficiency to systems of individual identification. Freedom according to these thinkers was only “possible” through regulating the identities of mobile populations. The freedom these European white men were imagining was achieved in the coming centuries, through the regulation of the freedom of movement for the racialized populations of the world.
Histories of “Black fugitivity,” as Tina Campt calls it, has taught oppressed people that the key to breaking from these oppressive systems of identification is to understand how they work—in order to be able to refuse the effects of oppression through an act of inhabitation. This act of inhabitation occurs when one participates within certain structures, but nonetheless refuses to be defined fully by structural oppression. Histories of document forgeries by the poor, the enslaved, Jews, Romas, and all illegalized travelers across centuries and geographies teach us that knowing how a document is designed and made, opens up the possibility to remake the document. This knowledge facilitates mobility for those who are denied mobility otherwise.
Almost twenty years ago, Amir Heidari was invited by the Uppsala Association of International Affairs in Sweden to give a lecture to students. He read an open letter to the public, making a call to all smugglers across the world to organize a unified mass movement for all the stateless people in camps, all asylum seekers in transit countries and all migrants stuck between borders across the world. Heidari said: “If they do this, then this would not look like ‘smuggling,’ but rather a revolution [conducted] by revolutionaries [who are] not armed with lethal weapons, but merely with their feet.” In exercising their right to move, the masses will shake the world and the hierarchical order that is articulated by walls, passports, fences, and guards. He added:
“Refugees neither rely on nor believe in the world order that has been created. Neither do they recognize where the borders have been drawn. They do not believe in travel documents that are evidence of discrimination and human division.”
For this revolution to happen, all forgers of the world need to unite on the side of the poor who are stuck, delayed, oppressed, and murdered at the borders of racial capitalism.
It is only then that we will have “a world in which no one would need a forger,” as explained by the late Adolfo Kaminsky, the great forger of the Resistance movement during the Vichy regime in France and the Algerian National Liberation Front’s (FLN) struggle for liberation.
To refuse the story imposed on us by states; to break from the chains of enslaving identification, forgers of the world, unite! ■