They All Look Alike: How Fear Gave Us Powerful Presidents, Passport Photos, and 21st-Century Biomarkers

Fear of an undifferentiated and legally unassimilable other has often spurred both American advances in technologies of identification and the development of unchecked executive powers needed to keep out the targets of those technologies. The first passports with accompanying photographs issued by the US government were created to enforce the provisions of America’s first national immigration law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, whose authors and implementors believed it was otherwise impossible to tell Chinese people apart. Moreover, they claimed that Chinese people could never assimilate into “republican culture,” thus representing an immutable threat to American democracy. Nevertheless, the US needed some way of regulating the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers who had already been living in the country for decades. The inherent contradiction in the legal category of people who were simultaneously subject to American law and unable to claim its protections created a need for a kind of power that the executive branch could exercise without the oversight of the federal judiciary, increasingly if haphazardly concerned with civil liberties after the Civil War. The so-called “plenary power”—the president’s largely unreviewable authority over matters of immigration—was the solution to this puzzle, and it was wielded in the War on Terror to keep prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in US custody while hugely restricting their ability to invoke US law in their own defense, or even to enter the US mainland. Just as in the 19th century, fear of the potential importation of an ostensibly anti-democratic culture led to the strengthening of clearly anti-democratic legal powers at home, along with the mainstreaming of the increasingly sophisticated identification technologies (such as fingerprints, DNA, retinal scans) necessary to enable the enforcement of those powers against 'indistinguishable' 'ethnic' adversaries.