5 ms·

What makes this so common in Asia? The vast majority of undocumented people in the US is from illegal immigration. Is that what drives it there too?

rataata_jr 5y ago
For India, yes. There are illegal immigrants from say, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc.
- mangamadaiyan 5y ago
  Not too sure about it being just illegal immigrants. Many of the people who migrate across states are also "invisible" and do not possess identification. This situation is improving, but arguably not by much.
  - rataata_jr 5y ago
    I agree. Lots of legal migrants from the east and Bihar to the south.
FriedrichN 5y ago
The relationship with government is very different from the western model in many countries. People just live and die without much interference from government, in some rural places people don't even know their age. It's hard to imagine for people living in industrialized and urbanized places, but many people still live that way worldwide.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Or it was illegal for them to be born: https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-policy/index.html https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-... (at least illegal for their parents). Westerners think the Chinese murdered female babies, but I remember reading (citation needed?) that the female babies mostly end up being undocumented.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    It still went on to a significant degree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
- pessimizer 5y ago
  It was the same in the US until very recently. The idea that we would all be tracked from birth to death was a horror to most people, and a sign of the apocalypse to a lot of Christians. I think the disappearance (and formalization) of home births started the movement in the other direction, along with Social Security cards inevitably being used as identification numbers. Anti-immigration drives during the Clinton administration and after 9/11 (both resulting in the RealID push) were the nails in the coffin. edit: my grandmother didn't even know her birth name until she was middle-aged. She just got ID with the name she had always gone by, because birth documentation wasn't required.
  - schoen 5y ago
    My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at the state level, or for some purposes county level, while the military draft is handled at the federal level.) Of course, if I hadn't had one, there are tons of things that I wouldn't have been able to do (like official employment, banking, and credit, to start with). Military conscription is a huge impetus for population registration and tracking. In the U.S. there hasn't been conscription since before I was born, but there's still an agency that notionally registers military-aged men and their whereabouts, with intermittent halfheartedness and minimal enforcement. (My recollection is that all of the enforcement actions for the past few decades have been against men who wrote open letters refusing to register, or something, as opposed to those who simply forgot or declined to register.) James Scott has written extensively about how many people in history didn't want to be tracked by (or "legible" to) the state, because this would subject them to conscription and taxation. The idea that conscription or taxation are good and that you should want to be subject to them (either because of a theory of political legitimacy or because of benefits that they will personally bring you or your neighbors) is kind of a historical anomaly, although very widespread today. I do think the idea that you would be better off if you and the state didn't interact than if you did feels most plausible in a rural farming environment, and least plausible in a city in an industrialized society -- not that many people still don't wish to be, or think about being, free of the state, but that it's obviously taken up such an enormous role in life that it feels like a huge sacrifice to be totally invisible to it. A big trend over time all around the world, especially following the industrial revolution, has been higher taxes and more government services. Even if you don't personally feel this was a good trade-off, a whole lot of parts of life would "break" for you if you were outside of it.
renewiltord 5y ago
It's probably poverty and the fact that the government bureaucracy doesn't do an extensive job of tracking its citizens. It's possibly the same in Africa. It just so happens that I know about Asia. Western countries are unbelievably wealthy and they have crazy effective information infrastructure. I suspect this is not common across the globe. Many people may barely have a birth certificate. In many of these countries, the infrastructure is like the UK pre-Domesday-Book. There may be people living in a village that is unmarked on the maps. For the people my friends last worked with, they were in a fishing shanty town in the Indian state of Karnataka that was unnamed (officially) until recently. Strange, eh? People just agglomerate somewhere without incorporating a municipality or anything because they have to survive.

rataata_jr 5y ago

For India, yes. There are illegal immigrants from say, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc.

mangamadaiyan 5y ago
Not too sure about it being just illegal immigrants. Many of the people who migrate across states are also "invisible" and do not possess identification. This situation is improving, but arguably not by much.
- rataata_jr 5y ago
  I agree. Lots of legal migrants from the east and Bihar to the south.

FriedrichN 5y ago

The relationship with government is very different from the western model in many countries. People just live and die without much interference from government, in some rural places people don't even know their age. It's hard to imagine for people living in industrialized and urbanized places, but many people still live that way worldwide.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Or it was illegal for them to be born: https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-policy/index.html https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-... (at least illegal for their parents). Westerners think the Chinese murdered female babies, but I remember reading (citation needed?) that the female babies mostly end up being undocumented.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  It still went on to a significant degree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
pessimizer 5y ago
It was the same in the US until very recently. The idea that we would all be tracked from birth to death was a horror to most people, and a sign of the apocalypse to a lot of Christians. I think the disappearance (and formalization) of home births started the movement in the other direction, along with Social Security cards inevitably being used as identification numbers. Anti-immigration drives during the Clinton administration and after 9/11 (both resulting in the RealID push) were the nails in the coffin. edit: my grandmother didn't even know her birth name until she was middle-aged. She just got ID with the name she had always gone by, because birth documentation wasn't required.
- schoen 5y ago
  My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at the state level, or for some purposes county level, while the military draft is handled at the federal level.) Of course, if I hadn't had one, there are tons of things that I wouldn't have been able to do (like official employment, banking, and credit, to start with). Military conscription is a huge impetus for population registration and tracking. In the U.S. there hasn't been conscription since before I was born, but there's still an agency that notionally registers military-aged men and their whereabouts, with intermittent halfheartedness and minimal enforcement. (My recollection is that all of the enforcement actions for the past few decades have been against men who wrote open letters refusing to register, or something, as opposed to those who simply forgot or declined to register.) James Scott has written extensively about how many people in history didn't want to be tracked by (or "legible" to) the state, because this would subject them to conscription and taxation. The idea that conscription or taxation are good and that you should want to be subject to them (either because of a theory of political legitimacy or because of benefits that they will personally bring you or your neighbors) is kind of a historical anomaly, although very widespread today. I do think the idea that you would be better off if you and the state didn't interact than if you did feels most plausible in a rural farming environment, and least plausible in a city in an industrialized society -- not that many people still don't wish to be, or think about being, free of the state, but that it's obviously taken up such an enormous role in life that it feels like a huge sacrifice to be totally invisible to it. A big trend over time all around the world, especially following the industrial revolution, has been higher taxes and more government services. Even if you don't personally feel this was a good trade-off, a whole lot of parts of life would "break" for you if you were outside of it.

renewiltord 5y ago

It's probably poverty and the fact that the government bureaucracy doesn't do an extensive job of tracking its citizens. It's possibly the same in Africa. It just so happens that I know about Asia. Western countries are unbelievably wealthy and they have crazy effective information infrastructure. I suspect this is not common across the globe. Many people may barely have a birth certificate. In many of these countries, the infrastructure is like the UK pre-Domesday-Book. There may be people living in a village that is unmarked on the maps. For the people my friends last worked with, they were in a fishing shanty town in the Indian state of Karnataka that was unnamed (officially) until recently. Strange, eh? People just agglomerate somewhere without incorporating a municipality or anything because they have to survive.