Forged papers, visas, identity cards and letters of introduction animate the storylines of countless books, TV series and movies. Who we are and what documents we have – or do not have – to prove this, is a topic of enduring fascination to artists, novelists and scholars. In this reflection, I will outline the ways in which my personal and professional identities, and my research interests, have been affected by the need for identity documents. Throughout this research I found myself imbued with the same fascination as the many artists and writers I came across. It also led me to find others who are interested in the narratives, documents, human rights implications and legislative changes that govern these modern bureaucratic systems (more on this in a moment).

This world has always intrigued me, and I see echoes of it in real life and in art, almost everywhere I look. The Netflix series Transatlantic, released in 2023, is one such place, a drama based on real historical actors and events that pivots on the need for documents (passports and visas in this case) to avoid Nazi persecution. The series tells the story of Albert Hirschman (often referred to in the show as Albert Otto Hirschmann), played by actor Lucas Englander, a German-Jewish refugee who becomes involved in the rescue efforts of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), a private American aid organisation.Footnote ¹ The ERC was a real organisation which evolved from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), established in 1933 with the help of Albert Einstein, with the aim of helping people flee Nazi persecution. Einstein was one of dozens of intellectuals who fled Europe, and he urged the founding of an American chapter of the IRC, which duly happened.

The ERC, which operated from August 1940 to September 1941, sent American journalist Varian Fry to Marseilles in Vichy France to help. Fry ultimately saved 2,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees, mostly artists and intellectuals, from persecution by Nazi Germany and has been memorialised by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre for his work. The show blends fictional flair with reality, charting the efforts of Varian Fry and his associates (including wealthy American heiress Mary Jayne Gold another character in the series based on a real life person) who try, through legal and illegal means, to rescue as many people as possible while evading arrest themselves. They were successful in rescuing a host of famous artists and intellectuals, including Jewish artist Marc Chagall, French surrealist author André Breton, German artist Max Ernst and German philosopher Heinrich Blücher and his wife Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish and later became a prominent political theorist, to name just a few. Arendt’s (Reference Arendt1963) observations on the ‘banality of evil’ when observing the actions of the Third Reich have resonated across societies ever since. Being able to identify Jewish people was a hallmark of the Nazi regime, and paperwork could condemn or save someone.

In Episode 1, Albert is rounded up by Vichy police and discovered to be carrying several passports. Asked which one is real and which are fake, or if they were all fake, he has a poignant reply. He had earned a French passport for serving with the French immigrant infantry in the First World War. He had a Spanish passport to fight with the Republicans in Spain and yet another passport (not identified in the scene) which he used to exit Germany in 1933. Asked what his identity was, Albert explains that in his view, the Fascists did not think he deserved any identity as a Jewish man, which softens the attitude of the policeman who arrested him. Albert is released on bail with the response ‘I kept you for falsifying documents, but I see nothing fake about you’. These documents, then, represent true versions of Albert at different moments of his life, concomitantly positing all and no national identities as ‘true’. While we cannot know if this episode is based on any personal experience, the scene reminds us of the passport’s ability to open or close doors and borders, to condemn or free a man.

So then, what’s in a name? What’s in a passport? What import do these have on our lives and our understanding of ourselves? As someone who has two passports and has had two different legal names, despite not changing mine upon marriage, I would say: quite a lot. Possessing passports from two countries with excellent international arrangements for travel (in my case Ireland and Australia), I have the choice of which identity to assert, which passport to bring and display on my travels and which parts of my ethnic origins to emphasise or de-emphasise. For ease, as I live in Europe, I travel on my Irish passport, for while we are not in the Schengen area, this is an ‘easy’ passport still to travel on. It also feels truer to my view of my own identity – as I moved from Australia as a small baby after my parents’ divorce, I have no memory, affiliation or cultural resonance with the land of my birth. If someone told me to ‘go back to where I came from’, I would have no visual clues, memories or feelings of attachment to guide me, similar to many who receive this insult (and I am lucky that I do not, my whiteness earning me the benefit of the doubt). I did nothing to earn these benefits, and I am deeply cognisant of the privileged status they give me, especially when it comes to migration. I am not likely to be arrested like Albert, and I will not likely be assumed by anyone not to be from the place that I live in because I look so similar to the native population. Such is the unearned privilege and good fortune of what Ayelet Shachar (Reference Shachar2009) calls the ‘birthright lottery’, likening it to the advantages of inherited wealth and property. I was also able to exert the right to change my birth name back to my mother’s maiden name, the name I had used in everyday life without realising it was not my ‘official’ name until my late teen years when I was first issued my national insurance card which had my birth name on it, and which clearly indicated my parent’s divorce at a time when it was not legal in Ireland (it would become so a few years later but it still carried much social censure, secrecy and shame at that time). This resolution came after many years of experiencing shock and frustration that I was being asked to use a name that was unfamiliar to me (my name but not my name) that took two different legal processes to settle finally in my twenties. The documents that were officially issued to me simply did not feel like ‘me’, and while I acknowledge the difficulties I experienced do not exactly mirror other groups where the official record does not match the lived experience (such as those who were adopted and had their birth names changed, or trans people who change their name to align with their gender identity), I can feel empathy for trying to navigate complicated bureaucracies to achieve an alignment between a sense of identity and the proof of identity we must all have.

The editors of this volume ask, how do migratory experiences shape individual and collective memories? Again, I would say, quite a lot; in my own case, I only stopped being a migrant 12 years ago when I returned from a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States with a baby who, like me, now has two passports. Cordonnier et al. (Reference Cordonnier, Rosoux, Gijs and Luminet2022) have, in this journal, defined collective memories as ‘memories shared by a group that influence their social identity’. Certainly, memories of migration and the experience of producing documents at borders, to institutions and to satisfy bureaucracies create collective experiences, and thus memories, in those navigating these systems. Indeed, one could argue that passports, visas and birth certificates, for example, are transcribed memories, physical manifestations of the collective memory of birth and belonging (and collective memory is again explored in this journal by Erll, Reference Erll2022).

Migration and identity, for me, have gone hand in hand. I have been a migrant in every decade of my life so far up until the most recent one. Migration is both a memory and a marker for me, and while I have no further plans to migrate, it is never out of the question, such is my job but also the possibilities. This element of my own history led me to become a historian of migration, specialising in Irish women’s migration to Britain in a dedicated monograph (Redmond, Reference Redmond2018) and several articles (Redmond, Reference Redmond and Valiulis2009; Redmond et al., Reference Redmond, Farrell and McCormick2022). This also led me, while developing a postdoctoral project, to files that gave me a window into thousands of migration journeys and ultimately led to my current work examining the past, present and future of identity documentation, an intriguing journey of which this piece, and this collection, is a part (Redmond, Reference Redmond2018 and Reference Redmond, Farrell and McCormick2022). More on this in a moment. My research as part of a national postdoctoral fellowship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (now Research Ireland) used identity documents to trace difficult histories that had shame associated with them and thus are not abundant in the historical record – for example, the complicated history of Irish women using migration as an escape from harsh social censure when they became pregnant outside of marriage (Redmond Reference Redmond and Ryan2021, Reference Redmond, Delay and Brophy2015, Reference Redmond and McAuliffe2024) to detailing the histories of those who dared to migrate during the Second World War to work in hospitals and first aid stations (Redmond, Reference Redmond, O’Dowd and Farrell2012, Reference Redmond, Hickman and MacPherson2014). Irish women can be identified through travel permit applications working in many sectors of the British economy before, during and after the Second World War, including in munitions factories (Redmond Reference Redmond2008, Reference Redmond2011).

The ability to travel on an Irish passport, ranked joint fourth in the world by Henley & Partners, is a privilege I will never take for granted.Footnote ² It also led me to question the flip side, to examine the historical ‘back office’ processes that have led us to modern identity documents (physical and digital) and to question the justice of some having so many unearned privileges while others have less and some have none; the United Nations (UN), at the end of June 2025, estimated that there are 4.4 million people globally who are counted as stateless.Footnote ³ According to the UN’s 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, a stateless person is someone ‘who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. This will mean that such a person has no access to any kind of document that will name their nationality and give them the citizenship rights imbued in such documents. It also limits their ability to travel or migrate, a significant issue if lacking documentation also goes in tandem with discrimination based on ethnic minority status as happens with the Rohingya community, for example.

This piece, therefore, is a reflection on my interaction with memory, mind and media through the development of a multidisciplinary research network that interrogates the nature of identity as encapsulated by the documents we preserve, carry or digitally access. This network called HIDDEN, standing for the History of Identity Documentation in European Nations, is funded under a European Union (EU) funding stream specifically designed to provoke interaction and curiosity – Cooperation in Science and Technology or COST (CA21120).Footnote ⁴ Though the idea was born through lone scholar work in an archive, poring over the resonance of identity through a collection of travel permits held at the National Archives of Ireland, the network has grown over the past three years to a vibrant collective of scholars, writers, artists, community groups and activists dedicated to shining a light on issues of migration, citizenship and identity and numbering over 200 people.Footnote ⁵ Reaching back through time to trace the origins of identity regimes, the network also examines the present moment and extends to cutting-edge research on the future possibilities and challenges biometrics and artificial intelligence (AI) bring to this arena. There is much to reflect on – as I write we are looking towards the end of our four years of work which sees an explicit engagement with the public via the translation of academic research and approaches to the history of identity to a public audience in a capstone event at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, in September 2026. The network has already produced some collaboratively written and edited articles (including this special collection for Memory, Mind and Media) reflecting on historical and contemporary migration trends (eg to the United States, in Baldacchino et al., Reference Baldacchino, Redmond and Shikova2024) with more to come over the next few years.

How did I get here? During my first postdoctoral fellowship, I focused on the content of the travel permit files, a form of identification document (ID) in lieu of a passport that all citizens travelling between Britain and Ireland or its islands had to obtain. This was a security measure adopted during the Second World War that was the first breach or modification of the Common Travel Area in existence between Ireland and Britain since 1923. This put us outside of the Schengen Area but inside a political and geographical ‘bubble’ that eases travel on the island of Ireland and between the two countries. The archive, held at the National Archives of Ireland, contains the application forms for permits, and each file contains a unique collection of materials – sometimes past permits as they had to be surrendered to obtain new ones, sometimes personal letters asking for the issue of the travel permit quickly or querying the bureaucratic process, photographs and occasionally letters from organisations assisting people with their applications. In this final case, this often revealed difficult, sensitive histories of incarceration, criminal convictions, mental illness or moral transgression. I have written about various aspects of these histories in several publications, from an examination of what I have termed Ireland’s ‘medical diaspora’ at this time (Redmond, Reference Redmond, Durnin and Miller2016b), to the evacuation of children (Redmond, Reference Redmond2016a), the fate of unmarried mothers seeking assistance from moral welfare organisations (Redmond, Reference Redmond, Delay and Brophy2015), the work of Irish women in munitions factories and the wider landscape of wartime contributions of the Irish in Britain.Footnote ⁶ Their existence in Britain is rarely depicted in media, novels or films, such was the power of the Irish neutrality narrative then and subsequently. However, the existence of these files reveals a rich and varied contribution to the British home front and contradicts the bitter assertion by Winston Churchill on 13 May 1945 that neutral Ireland had turned its back on Britain. In collective memory, migration from Ireland is strong, even if that memory has been dimmed by the political importance of asserting a history of neutrality since the foundation of the state in 1922.

While completing this research, other aspects of the collection beyond their content became intriguing: the materiality of the permits, it being a massive visual archive of what people looked like in the late 1930s and early 1940s; the newness of the bureaucratic demands for documenting travel and how suspicious applicants were of this, ranging from mildly annoyed to downright furious; the application of Irish citizenship law to long-term migrants to Britain who found themselves having to prove their citizenship for the first time; the biometric data that could allow for a detailed anthropographical study of the Irish in Britain including height, eye and hair colour and distinguishing features; the privilege these applicants had in being able to escape a war-torn country for a neutral one, either temporarily or permanently as they so desired. The many forms of identifying cards we carry on us at any one time now, let alone the access to further digital forms of identity documents on our phones that are a click or a passcode away is a world away from these people – and yet – it is less than 100 years. Such is the change between the state regulation of our identity and the technological innovations that make it easier and faster every year to identify us, quantify us and control our movements.

The editors have also referenced the issue of memory and migration, and this project was born from an analysis of memory objects – official forms and permits issued to Irish people in Britain during the Second World War. This was a project undertaken on the basis of content within the files, a chance to sketch a picture of a cohort that was otherwise hard to study – the Irish in Britain being what Walter (Reference Walter2001) has so aptly described as ‘outsiders inside’. However, as I examined the stories that emerged from bureaucratic files, the happy, sad, tragic and ordinary journeys undertaken in the extreme context of war, I began to see these objects as very much alive, with tendrils that reached deep into that present moment and concomitantly back and forward in time: back to the post-Famine period in Irish history when millions left and the population halved over a 100-year period; in the moment, when the need for work sent economically desperate Irish workers to the home front in Britain, or others impelled by the desire to fight Nazism; forward, to the mute acceptance of identity regimes that datafy us on a daily basis. The modern processes of datafication are defined by Mejias and Couldry (Reference Mejias and Couldry2019) as ‘a contemporary phenomenon which refers to the quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value’ although many researchers in our network work on identity regimes that go back centuries. Indeed in my own research, I have participated in the datafication of historical migrants to gain greater insights into historical processes of migration (who, what and where?), but this is in tension with the incredulous annoyance and scepticism that many demonstrated in frustrated letters to the Irish authorities on why they needed travel permits when, before, they had always travelled without them.

The editors of this special collection, ‘Navigating migration, memory and media’, have asked in their Introduction: ‘What then is our role as researchers interested in identity and how identities are produced, enacted and contested, when navigating migration, memory and media?’. As Chair of the network that produced this collection of scholars, I can answer simply that my role has been to gather together as many different disciplinary experts as I could find and bring in those with lived experience of migration or discrimination with regard to their identity to harness that expertise in answering this question and more. The random nature of birth right to citizenship and the rights that flow from it have been addressed by many scholars, but one whose work chimed exactly with my own thoughts as I was preparing the COST Action bid was Ayelet Schahar, specifically her book The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (2009). While I did not know of Schahar’s work when I started working on the proposal, a colleague I was speaking to drew my attention to it as I explained my ideas, and I immediately saw parallels in our thinking. The analogy she draws between access to citizenship and inherited property struck a chord. As I wrote the grant and then pursued the programme of events laid out once the application had been successful, I continued to see the issue of identity, citizenship, passports and other documents everywhere I looked, whether I was trying to find those themes or not.

The award-winning novel by Dimitri Verhulst Christ’s Entry into Brussels (Reference Verhulst2014) was a random book I picked up in a library in Dublin city on a visit with my son. Based on a storyline of the announcement that Christ would be visiting the city (spoiler: he does not actually!) the words in the chapter ‘Tenth Station’ leapt off the page to me: ‘One can safely assume that not a single embryo has a say in its place of birth. My hailing from Brussels and Belgium is no achievement and if I’m honest there’s never been any love lost between me and those who flaunt their nationality as a mark of distinction, a status they obtained simply by being lucky enough to see the light of day in a place with superior geographical coordinates. I’m the harmless loon who dreams quietly of a world without nationalities, without flags. Of a world without passports, like the one that existed before the First World War’. It is safe to say that we are never going back to a world without passports or identity cards, but it is interesting to trace this fondness for a ’simpler’ time in the context of contemporary travel and migration which requires an increasing array of biometrical and data checks on us as we cross borders.

Media and cultural representations of identity and documentation play a key role throughout our societies. The documented global rise of the political right has manifested in a concentration on identity politics, particularly in defining the norm, the collective, the national and the ‘other’. Who is in and who is out have become questions beyond the theoretical, guiding protests and counter-protests across Europe. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is a set of new rules managing migration and establishing a common asylum system that is described by the Migration and Home Affairs Directorate of the European Commission as being able to ‘deliver results while remaining grounded in our European values’.Footnote ⁷ The tension between European mobility and the security of European borders has heightened, and is likely to increase as the Pact has come into force on 12 June 2026. What borders will look like and how they will be experienced by migrants and refugees from countries outside the EU are yet to be seen.

The ideas that led me to initiate this network in 2021 had been circulating in my mind for a decade at that point. How did we get from a point in time where people routinely did not carry any form of identity document with them, even for travel across the Irish Sea, to a point where we have multiple forms of this on our person, in our person, at any one time? These questions do not simply pertain to Ireland of course, they are in fact global challenges, the urgency of which is highlighted in the UN Sustainable Development Goal Target 16.9 that by 2030, all countries should provide a legal identity for all, including birth registration. While global rates of undocumented people have improved over time, this seems like an impossible goal to reach in just four years’ time. According to the most recent data at least 1 in 4 children worldwide are not registered, predominantly in Africa and South Asia. There have also been improvements in providing legal identity, but an estimated 850 million persons worldwide do not have any official record of their legal identity. The problem could be higher than this as the Transparency, Accountability and Participation for 2030 Agenda Network (TAP) highlights that one in four countries do not have the capacity to monitor progress on UN SDG 16.9.Footnote ⁸ TAP also highlights the multiple consequences not having access to identity documents can have:

No one left behind – a laudable ambition but one that will be difficult to achieve.

Turning to yet another aspect of identity, identity fraud, theft and manipulation are themes regularly deployed in creative media to tell stories of conspiracy, trauma, theft, discrimination, opportunity and more. Popular movies such as Catch Me If You Can (2002) is a dramatic rendition of a real-life case of identity fraud perpetrated in spectacular fashion by Frank Abagnale Jr. Although the veracity of the film has been called into question in recent years, the film was a huge success, drawing two Oscar nominations and a gross worldwide income of US$352,114,312.Footnote ¹⁰ The light-hearted fascination with stories of (semi)-real fraudulent activities by a precocious and intelligent white American man stand in the starkest contrast to contemporary othering discourses on migrants in the Global North in particular, and in Europe specifically where the rise of the far right in many countries relies heavily on notions of an ‘us’ that needs to be preserved from a ‘them’ who will take not only resources from native populations but alter the fundamental character of the societies they will live among but not with. Mistrust has become a defining feature of contemporary memory about migrants, perpetuated by diverse forms of media in which journalistic standards of integrity or objective reporting are absent or diminished due to desires to appease.

This is all to blatantly ignore the historical global migration trends, fuelled by imperialism or poverty, which has shaped most populations across the world. As has been emblazoned on many protest placards across the world, ‘We came here because you went there’, echoed in the book by Ian Sanjay Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Patel, Reference Patel2021), past migrations have deep connections to the present flows of migration perceived globally as a crisis.

The eponymous ‘Windrush scandal’, referring to the ‘people who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971, predominantly from the Caribbean’ on the ‘HMT Empire Windrush’ and similar vessels (Praxis, Reference Praxis2025) occurred in 2018 as I was still considering what to do with the ideas left circulating after completing my first postdoctoral fellowship. The United Kingdom-based Praxis advocacy group explains the core issues that emerged after surprise requests for documentation from the British Home Office:

These compounding and multiple consequences are still being experienced by those affected by the scandal, which also serves as a warning to what could happen elsewhere in similar circumstances. The episode also reveals a distinct contrast between these colonial migrants and the passport opportunities that exist for those who can pay for them. Passports for wealthy investors are available in several countries, often referred to as ‘golden’ passports (known formally as Citizenship by Investment [CBI]) or ‘golden visas’ (Residency by Investment or RBI), schemes have been operated by several countries. In 2024, the European Parliament issued a briefing condemning these practices:

Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in Cyprus and Malta Russian nationals accounted for over 50 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively, of the people who had been granted citizenship through CBI schemes (de Groot, Reference de Groot2024). While Cyprus ended its CBI scheme at the end of 2020, Malta did not. This led to a landmark legal case, and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme was unlawful.Footnote ¹² As a result, the few remaining European pathways for investment migration have transitioned exclusively into residency by investment (Golden Visas) rather than direct citizenship. To many, this is a positive outcome for ideas of justice – the rich cannot simply buy their way into citizenship of EU countries any more.

As we reach a new era of migration governance in the EU, it is important that we reflect on and share insights into the issues surrounding identity documentation, citizenship and migration, as it affects us in our ordinary lives, on journeys or in our migrations. The examples I have given here, from the media, art and life, highlight the fact that we do not have to search far for explorations of this issue. As a group, HIDDEN will have produced new scholarly publications, created a bibliography, an archive map and a repository of art resources on our website, provided training and support to a new generation of researchers across Europe, established links with practitioners, activists, policy makers and artists, and created a handbook on the history of identity documentation throughout time. In some small way, I hope this work shifts the conversation when considering who has the right to bear a passport, from one of unearned and often unexamined privilege to a more nuanced and expansive acceptance of difference.

As someone who has navigated difficult identity issues and often been the ‘other’ through migration, I find it to be an intimate exercise to reflect on this. I have two passports – one for a country that I was born in but moved from before I have any memory (Australia) and another that I possess some ethnic trace to and have spent most of my life, a place that defines my identity, my sense of self and my memories (Ireland). I have had the luck to choose which passport to brandish – I wish others were so lucky.