Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable looks at how these instruments determine legal status and prescribe rights. The book explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy as they reinforce violent structures on often already vulnerable women. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather produce new vulnerabilities and reproduce old ones.