This series of booklets and slide projection on translucent windows takes as its starting point the green bathaka pass-books South Asian migrant workers often carry in guest worker programs in the Middle East. A circular narrative leads us from that marker to current tensions between the migration impulse and security panic. This is an excerpt from DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA, a project which looks at the migration impulse, hyphenated national identities and the fissures that appear when these trajectories collide with security panic.
The majority of Muslim migrants racially profiled after 9/11 were from the invisible underclass of our cities. They are the recent arrivals, legal and »illegal«, who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we see their faces is when we glance at the scratched hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor. Already invisible, after detention they become »ghost prisoners.«
http://disappearedinamerica.org