The Story of Points of Proof

In March of 2005, I flew to Detroit at the invitation of the Arab American National Museum, which at the time was still under construction in Dearborn, a suburban Michigan township with one of the most concentrated and deeply rooted Arab-American communities in the United States. The museum was scheduled to open in May 2005, and had commissioned me to make a community-based project for their inaugural exhibition, a survey of contemporary Arab-American artists curated by Salwa Mikdadi. The exhibition had gone through several different incarnations before settling on the name IN/VISIBLE sometime in February, and one of the earlier ideas had been to organize the show around the idea of "Negotiating Democracy." While political pressure around the museum's opening made the moment too delicate for full-scale provocation, Salwa and I both liked the idea of preserving some of that original inquiry in my project, which was the only piece in the show to be produced specifically in and for Dearborn.

The form and content of Points of Proof developed from three factors: first, a continuation of the ideas and issues I was exploring as part of an ongoing, open-ended, collaborative project about the human cost of immigration policy, the Disappeared project; second, the museum's site in Dearborn, where an incredibly cohesive Arab-American community is bordered by Detroit, still one of the most racially divided cities in America; and third, a response to the particularly turbulent politics of immigrant rights at that moment, as embodied in the debate over the REAL ID Act. REAL ID, which strips illegal and temporarily legal immigrants of the right to a U.S. driver’s license and sets new, near-impossible standards of proof and credibility for asylum claims, was passed just before the exhibition opened in May. The question posed by Points of Proof thus reflects the situation in which ever larger numbers of American immigrants find themselves by asking everyone to reduce their American identities to a single point of proof – points being the system used by a number of state DMV bureaus to rate different documents for their effectiveness as proof of identity.

In the Detroit version of the project, the question was first asked in 30 interviews videotaped in urban Detroit and suburban Dearborn, which are translated online into captioned Polaroids of the interview subjects and the proof they brought to the interviews. The edited video was then exhibited in the museum for six months, after which it was also shown in New York and Los Angeles. During these shows, visitors could fill out postcards with their own answers to the same question. On the front of the postcards was the image above this text, which itself re-visualizes four different answers to the question collected during an earlier stage of the Disappeared project. You can read what people wrote on the backs of the postcards here.

The online version of Points of Proof was commissioned by the Longwood Digital Matrix in 2006, and produced during residencies at Smack Mellon and the Akademie Schloss Solitude by media artist Mariam Ghani with assistance from Sam Ghosh and Ed Potter.

A Brief History of REAL ID

The REAL ID Act was introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R. 418 on 1/26/05 by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican from Wisconsin. The stated aims of REAl ID were as follows: to establish and rapidly implement regulations for State driver's license and identification document security standards; to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States; to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal; and to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence. REAL ID passed the House as H.R. 418 and was referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in February 2005. After heated debate over various provisions, the text of H.R. 418 was appended as Division B to the emergency spending bill H.R.1268, which was primarily intended to fund emergency appropriations for tsunami relief and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for fiscal year 2005. In conference, some of the provisions of Division B were modified. H.R. 1268 became Public Law No:109-13 on 5/11/05.

The debate over REAL ID centered around three points: first, the renewed commitment to militarization of the US-Mexican border; second, the increased burden of proof placed on political asylum-seekers, who would now be required to show tangible and "credible" evidence of direct persecution, in many cases upon their first arrival in the US, with the decision to believe or disbelieve the proof left in the hands of inexpert airport customs officials; and third, the creation of new regulations for state drivers' licenses, which would require state DMVs to centralize their databases and compare them to social security information, stripping licenses from anyone without a valid social security number. The debate over drivers licenses became an issue taken up not only by immigrant rights advocates, who claimed that taking licenses away from undocumented immigrants would result only in increasing the numbers of uninsured drivers on the road, but also by privacy watchdogs like the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who worried that a centralized DMV database was not only an irresistible target for privacy violations of all kinds, but also the first step towards the imposition of a national ID card -- which indeed was more or less the thrust of one of the original provisions of REAL ID, which however became modified in conference in Congress.

The Current State of Immigrant Rights in the USA

Since REAL ID was passed in May 2005, the immigration debate has raged on, with federal legislation stalled somewhere between amnesty proposals, guest worker schemes, and enforcement strictures. In December 2005, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4437, aka the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, a bill (once again sponsored by Jim Sensenbrenner) whose blatantly anti-immigrant provisions galvanized immigrant communities, immigrants' rights activists, and legal advocates into a flood of protests, organizing, and education that culminated in the school walk-outs of March 2006 and the nationally coordinated protest marches and economic boycotts of May 1st, 2006. On May Day, up to half a million immigrants and supporters marched in both Dallas and Los Angeles; 100,000 or more in Chicago and New York; 60,000 in Atlanta; 50,000 in Denver; 20,000 in Phoenix; 30,000 in Seattle; and even 25,000 in Madison, Wisconsin - according to mainstream press accounts - LA Indymedia, for example, reported that the two separate Los Angeles marches had a combined attendance of almost a million people. The May Day marches marked a moment of genuine political awakening both in the immigrant community, and also among observers who realized for the first time the sheer numbers and power of the people coming out of the shadows for the first time. In response, moderates in the Senate patched together the bi-partisan immigration "reform" bill S.2611, aka the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which passed the Senate on 5/25/06. The conference committee was then left with the task of reconciling the House bill, which links immigration enforcement to anti-terrorism efforts through a common language of security and control, with the Senate bill, which attempts to balance its equally damaging enforcement provisions against a three-tier system that would offer some, but not all, illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the only agreement finally reached on immigration by the 109th (2005-06 session of) Congress was to approve the building of 700 miles of high-security fencing along the Mexican border -- without however coming to terms on the necessary appropriations to fund the fence. All other decisions were delayed until Congress was reconvened in the fall, then delayed again by the Republican-controlled Congress trying desperately to hold on to their seats in election season and reluctant to touch any sensitive issues. But over the summer of 2006, conservative lawmakers literally took their show on the road, holding "immigration hearings" in town halls across the country and prompting activists who had been excluded from these hearings to organize competing assemblies and protests, as well as a new round of national marches in September.

Scary developments in recent months include: summary deportation of political asylum seekers to countries (like Somalia) formerly deemed too unstable to make any such return possible; criminal prosecution of corporate employers of illegal immigrants; the return of sweeping night raids by ICE agents; FBI eavesdropping on the New York Immigration Coalition, among other advocacy groups; legislation that retroactively authorizes many illegal government actions, including detention programs, treatment of detainees, authorization of torture and spying on citizens; and local lawmakers attempting to fill in the gaps in federal regulations by making it a criminal offense to be an illegal immigrant within the borders of their townships. Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists are planning for next May. Their goal is to organize the largest national protest marches in years around the slogan "No human being is illegal."

Comments? Questions? Bugs?
Contact us at proof [at] kabul [dash] reconstructions [dot] net (replace the words in brackets with the symbols they describe).

FURTHER INFORMATION

Wikipedia article on REAL ID
The version of REAL ID passed by the House of Representatives
The ACLU's take on REAL ID
EPIC on national ID cards and the REAL ID act

How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database
Direct link to the See the Disappeared reference page
Mariam's ongoing file of disappearance-related del.icio.us bookmarks
The Visible Collective's Disappeared in America
The New York Immigration Coalition (an umbrella organization for a broad coalition of advocacy groups across the state)
The National Immigrant Solidarity Network (a national coalition of grassroots immigrant rights activists)

Essay for Viralnet on Points of Proof and how to design warm data projects
Essay with Chitra Ganesh on our collaborative Disappeared project for Bare Acts: The Sarai Reader 05
The Arab American National Museum home page
An article by Maymanah Farhat in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
about the AANM exhibition for which the first version of Points of Proof was produced
The Longwood Digital Matrix home page
Everything you might want to know about the artist

No to the anti-immigrant HR4437/SB2611 bills
No to the militarization of the border
No to the criminalization of immigrant communities
No to the planned immigrant crackdown across the country
No to the guest worker program
No to employer sanctions
Yes to amnesty for undocumented immigrants
Yes to immigrant family reunification
Yes to a humane path to citizenship
Yes to labor rights and living wages for all workers