You're just mucking up their farm, see.

The police, four of them, stopped him in his tracks.

A female policewoman pressed her palm against his chest and pushed him sternly but not aggressively, using force but not violence. With her push she moved him about a foot from where he was originally standing; it was not a purposeful gesture, but a symbolic gesture of the power of the state over this African immigrant. It was as if to say, "even though we don't recognize you as legitimate, you will be the subject of the state now at this moment and you will succumb to us."

I sat in a beauty salon waiting for my turn to be serviced. I --legitimized by that small blue card inside my wallet, given to me upon civil marriage, that little plastic covered card that allowed me to find fair employment -- sipped a frappuccino in the cold air conditioned place where people who can afford to go to have unessential things done to their hair, skin and nails. I watched curiously out the window at this unfortunate black man sweating in the hot Andalusian sun trying to keep a smile on his face to hide the worry he felt, the worry evident in his posture.

The police were not brutal in any way to the suspect although they demanded that he hand over his backpack to which he cooperatively complied. The man watched as items, which just minutes prior were his personal belongings, became items on display for the officers and for the women staring out the salon window. He continuously shifted his weight from one leg to another. He appeared to not quite know what to do with his long, dark, lanky arms that he decided to fold and then unfold, possibly discarding the folded arms option so as not to appear defiant in any way.

The policeman in charge of the backpack passed the man's items that had been previously concealed in the privacy of his person to another policeman to hold.

A wrench.

A compact mirror.

A small blue book.

A calendar, crumpled.

A pair of sunglasses, broken.

A bar of soap in a plastic baggie.

Papers, but, alas, not the right kind of papers; not the ones that legitimize a human being. Not the ones that make a person a real subject of the state and therefore easily managed. Without such papers this man was an unreliable subject who the state could not keep track of, who may disappear into thin air at whim and reappear elsewhere, evading official stamps of approval or rejection, necessary paperwork and nosecounts, ducking under the diocese of the nation-state apparatus, sidestepping jurisdiction at the last second.

Without such papers, he didn't fit into the perfectly crafted forest of organisms to be managed.**




This is the real reason why the state will not allow for "illegals". It is not because the state and those who represent it are genuinely concerned about the jobs available to constituents or that they are concerned over the balance sheets of federal and local budgets, and exactly how much illegals subtract from or add to them. It is merely a question of knowledge of subjects and therefore power and veto over them. Those who attempt to float in anarchy above territorial dominion are simply not tolerated.

"Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and by region, with all the resources, wealth & poverty of each place; [the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all separated according to the place of their residence? ...[Would it not be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own office, to review in an hour's time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths?"

--Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686*

This makes sense to me, but I'm amazed by how in tune to this idea this policewoman is with her seemingly insignificant gesture, not only of physical power, but of power on paper, theoretical power, symbolic power. She knows that even one "illegal", whatever his sad story is about his exile from sub-Saharan Africa, is a challenge to state sovereignty itself, a rebellious tree growing in the wrong place in the wrong tree farm, attempting to convert the place into a wild, unmanageable forest.



As a person who has defied borders myself, who has also spent my time in Europe sin papeles, jumping over the hoops of the state while everyone else around me got to jump through them, it is difficult to not feel that people should be able to move freely across borders, (just as products and production lines do) as an obvious human right. The lost creativity, lost input and lost ideas that get hidden along with the illegals with whom they originate, pushed under the dirty rugs in their tiny rooms of their infrahousing and in the shacks outside the city they are forced to inhabit is a devastating loss to the world and especially to the country they have fled to. All of that human potential, so great, becomes suppressed as they stand on street corners selling packets of Kleenex, or selling bootleg CDs while always keeping an eye out for the cops.

I understand their frustration, their desire to go where they need to go for survival, but my situation is not even remotely comparable. I never had to survive. I never had to fumble my way through questions in the airport about what I was doing here. It never even mattered. Nobody suspected that a 21 year old blonde from the first world was an illegal. I remember standing in the line at Customs with my heart racing and sweat dripping down my back, watching officers interrogate brown colored people in line ahead of me for what seemed like ages on why they were attempting to come into Spain. The officers held their passports up to the light to make sure they hadn't been fudged, consulted with other, more senior customs officers on what to do next. But when it was finally my turn they just said "buenos dias" and opened my passport and put a new stamp on it, never even bothering to look through it, where they would see that I was clearly living here in Spain illegally.

Nobody ever pushed me with the palm of their hand in a symbolic gesture of power or demanded that I hand over my belongings, even though I feared at times they would. And while those days are gone now for me, I remember feeling a fraction of their fear and impotence, because I too was a rogue weed growing in the middle of a perfectly aligned forest of trees, always expecting someone to uproot me at anytime and toss me out of the perfect tree farm and throw me back into the one that I corresponded to.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Quoted in Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

**The comparisons in this post to the forest are also based on James C. Scott's book. You can read a short except of the book here where Scott compares the difference between a forest which is wild in its flora, organic inhabitants, and freely growing trees in a balanced ecosystem with a tree farm where the only thing that matters is the knowledge of the forests' equivalency in terms of firewood, paper, or pulp. Any plants or animals that don't fit perfectly into the calculated tree farms are not tolerated.

"Perfect Alignment" by lakewentworth via Flickr.

"Fageda d'en Jorda" by MorBCN via Flickr.

StumbleIt