Unauthorized Identity Craft: Rethinking “Fraud” in the Study of Migration

Abstract

Crafting identity is integral to the struggle of aspiring migrants to access the territory, labor market, and citizenship of desired destinations. Such practices are at times classified as “fraud.” Migration scholars should approach this state-centered category with caution. Such framing naturalizes the state's monopolistic claim to the truth of individual identities. It obscures the complex moral terrain migrants navigate. We propose “unauthorized identity craft” (UIC) as an alternative concept. UIC shifts our attention from migrants’ deception to their agency in the absence of state authorization — their learned craft to navigate, and at times subvert, restrictive mobility regimes. Drawing on long-term, multisited ethnographic research with Korean Chinese and West African migrants, we show that UIC is sustained by a complex web of relations, connecting documents, organizations, and people — state and non-state actors alike. The effectiveness of UIC depends on migrants’ intricate and intensive labor to create, maintain, and reshape this relational matrix. Our emphasis on UIC's relationality enables us to examine how migrants and other actors involved classify their relationships and the various forms of exchange that sustain them. Mismatches in these framings give rise to contestation and negotiation — important elements of the craft migrants must perform. Our relational perspective further helps explain UIC's temporal dynamic. For some migrants, UIC remains ephemeral, a form of strategic masking; for others, it generates lasting entanglements, moral dilemmas, and enduring identity shifts. We show that UIC's long-term ramifications are shaped by the breadth, density, durability, and consequentiality of the relational matrix that sustains UIC.