and aliens visible or legible to state power (Scott 1998; see also Cohn 1987; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Dirks 2001; Mamdani 1996; Torpey 2000). The passport, for instance, brings citizens into the state’s “embrace” (Torpey 2000) with accompanying rights and obligations. Legally present aliens may be marked as such through residence permits or visas, which inscribe a bureaucratic visibility that entails certain benefits as well as exclusions (Malkki 1995a). Those who are undocumented may be “non-existent” within the legal body of the nation-state (Coutin 2000) yet hypervisible (and vulnerable) to the state’s regulatory gaze (Feldman 2011). While documents are, indeed, deeply enmeshed in these politics of legibility and visibility, the effects of such regulatory projects are unpredictable. I show that the pink card, as a technology of regulation, also facilitated highly variable reconfigurations of regulatory activities, as police, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers engaged with and made use of the document.
I also suggest that these many indeterminacies of documenting limbo in Greece expose holes integral to the process of governance itself. Foucault (1991: 93) characterizes the “art of governance” as “the right manner of disposing things so as to lead to an end which is ‘convenient’ to each of the things to be governed.” Describing “things” as “men in their relations, their links” (93), he asserts that governance has multiple teleologies: “a plurality of specific aims … a whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such” (95). Foucault suggests that this plurality of relationships and “things,” which elsewhere he defines as a dispositif (apparatus) (1980 [1977]), has gradually become incorporated into the political formation of the state and its “downward” (1991: 91) mechanisms of regulation. By considering how the pink card figured in a particular project of governance, and the nexus of relationships that in turn “governed” the document, I highlight multidirectional, indeterminate forms of governance that unfold within and alongside the regulatory work of the state.
Origin Stories
The man tells me he was apprehended in Samos, when he came from Turkey in a small boat, and he was detained for three months. A UNHCR committee came a few times—people with lots of different nationalities. A lawyer also visited a few times … and asked if he had any particular requests or demands, and a guy from Algeria translated.
I ask if he applied for asylum there.
He answers that the lawyer had asked if anyone wanted to apply for asylum in Greece. But he did not understand what asylum was. Five men from Africa said they wanted to apply for asylum and they were taken away, but something must have gone wrong, because they were returned, and remained all together. When he was released he was given a deportation letter that was good for 30 days. He came to Athens. A lawyer helped him get “a paper valid for one month,” and he paid 50 euros. Four days after the expiration of his deportation order, he was stopped by the police and detained again for three months. He was then released with another deportation order. When he was released people he knew told him that he must go to “Allodhapon” to get a pink card.
How did he get the pink card, I ask.
He went to a private office near “Allodhapon” which helped him fill in the application. He waited in the queue. A translator asked him his name, and why he came to Greece. He explained that he came to find a job. They took his fingerprints. He got another appointment, and he went to collect his pink card. When the first card expired, he went to renew it, and they took it and gave him this paper (he shows me a rejection of his asylum claim). At that point he came to the ARS, where they helped him file an appeal, and he got his pink card back. (Cabot fieldnotes, March 7, 2008)
On a routine morning at the ARS, I met with a Syrian client, a middle-aged, wiry man with a trim gray mustache, whose direct delivery style sparked the interpreter, Omar, to describe him as a “very matter of fact man,” which is evident in the no-frills summary of our meeting reproduced in my fieldnotes. (This was, of course, a few years before the refugee crisis in Syria incited in 2011.) Despite the significant time he had spent in detention, he recounted his experiences succinctly but in detail, and with a face seemingly clear of emotion. He had entered Greece at an Aegean island border, Samos, but he had received a pink card only many months later, when he came to Athens. His account underscores the circuitous, far-flung, and often shrouded bureaucratic web in which the pink card was entangled.
This loosely articulated web of bureaucracy and policing procedures is, in turn, enmeshed in broader maps of this man’s movements in Greece, encompassing border and transit sites, detention facilities, and police stations. He acquired a pink card not upon his initial entry, but after multiple detentions, and after he had received a number of different documents. In his account, these bureaucratic processes are often obscured or mediated by the corollary presence of other state and nonstate actors: the “guy from Algeria,” the lawyer on Samos, the lawyer in Athens, the “private office” near the police (also very likely a lawyer or notary), the ARS, and the police interpreter. The pink card is similarly mysterious and unpredictable: once he acquired the document, he did not retain it, but it was taken away, and he needed a lawyer’s help to reclaim it.
The asylum application, the structuring event of the asylum process within the host country, implies intentionality and active diligence on the part of applicants. While the events that drive persons to flee, cross borders, and seek protection from persecution are framed in asylum legislation as forms of compulsion, one must, nonetheless, request asylum. The asylum claim thus has a strongly directional, intentional quality, and the pink card, as a documentation of this claim, implied specific pathways of law and bureaucracy, with predictable patterns of connection. Yet when I first started tracking the lives of the pink card through the accounts of asylum seekers, I had incredible difficulty identifying its trajectories. The origins of the document—how someone actually acquired it—were particularly confusing. I met many who spoke of acquiring the pink card only through active and extensive effort, but others seemed to have become asylum seekers almost accidentally, receiving a pink card without asking explicitly for asylum. “Asylum” does not play a significant role in this man’s account, but rather, I myself asked him if he tried to apply for asylum on Samos, thus introducing the category into our conversation. He even went on to clarify that he did not know what asylum meant. When he finally acquired a pink card, it was not because he “applied for asylum,” but because his acquaintances told him he needed a “pink card.”
During the period of my primary fieldwork, asylum seekers could officially make asylum applications at any police authority at the border or within Greek territory, whether they had entered with or without documents. Further, police were formally obligated to accept asylum claims, regardless of the apparent credibility of the case, and issue pink cards upon receipt of the application. As we see in this man’s account, however, the procedure rarely unfolded with such openness, and in fact, efforts to make an asylum application did not necessarily entail acquisition of a pink card. Only police officers trained to hear and examine asylum claims could issue pink cards, the vast majority stationed at Allodhapon in Athens. This meant that border sites were rarely locations where a pink card could be obtained, even though they are prime sites for asylum requests. To lodge an asylum claim on the border, a lawyer most often needed to intervene, as in the man’s account of the five Africans on Samos; and even if one succeeded in making an asylum claim at the border, it was often accepted but not examined, owing again to a lack of competent officers.2 This often necessitated that the applicant go to the central police station in Athens to complete the process. Just as one could acquire a pink card without actively asking for asylum, an active attempt to request asylum often did not result in the acquisition of a pink card.
Analytically, the card cannot be easily located in zones of legality or illegality, but rather, moves unpredictably through the shifting spectrum or “continuum” between illegal and legal status and practice (Calavita 2005; Cohen 1991; Coutin 2000). This Syrian asylum seeker repeatedly traveled in and out of partial il/legality, always positioned precariously in sites of limbo contingent on documents that he might, or might not, possess for long. In particular, his two deportation orders highlight the intimate entwinement of legality and illegality in the culture of documentation surrounding migration and asylum in Greece. Stapled to a memo that included the individual’s photograph, name, and country of