Documenting Difference: Standardizing Foreign Physicians

Abstract:This essay traces the transformation and standardization of the first cohort of Asian physicians trained outside the United States into Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) within the United States through documentary regimes. Congress solicited foreign physicians under the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 to address doctor shortages in inner-city and rural communities throughout the country—a trend that continues today. Central to their migratory journey was an archive of expertise, a compilation of documents intended to verify identity, skill, and competence. Through the analysis of a physician's case file, new relations to documentation emerge that reveal how claims of underdocumentation, incorrect documentation, and overdocumentation regulate immigrant possibilities. In adopting this approach, this case study moves away from the unskilled / model minority dichotomy to show how documentary proceduralism operates as a racializing, disciplinary strategy across categories of immigrant labor.