In Documenting Americans, Magdalena Krajewska sets out to provide a “comprehensive political history of national ID card proposals and identity policing developments in the United States” for the years 1915–2016 (p. 40). Krajewska defines “identity policing” to include state efforts to gather information on citizens, other residents, and visitors, and to issue documents confirming this information. She finds that national ID systems were seriously considered within US presidential administrations and by legislators during the first and second world wars. More recently, a national ID system has been proposed as a response to terrorism and to irregular (or, as the author insists, “illegal”) immigration. However, whereas most countries do have a national ID system, in the United States these proposals were never implemented. One result is that government agencies now take a piecemeal approach to identity policing that relies on data and documents originally intended for other uses, especially Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses.

As Krajewska explains, state-issued IDs can be used for a range of purposes, from convenience to surveillance. Worldwide, national ID cards are often but not always linked to databases that allow individualized government assistance or monitoring. These systems may cover the entire population or just a subset such as the foreign born. Some Americans are worried about the potential for the misuse of surveillance powers, which have expanded with the digitization of databases. Krajewska finds, however, that US public opinion polls have quite often shown majority support for a national ID system and argues that this cuts against the conventional wisdom that Americans are especially hostile to ID programs, although she concedes that the level of support depends heavily on the details of question wording. In place of an explanation based on public opinion, Krajewska makes a plausible case that the many veto points in the US political system have allowed small sets of intense opponents—including civil rights groups, the NRA, and even some evangelical Christian groups that fear ID numbers as a sign of the end of times—to block national ID proposals (pp. 234–37). The book includes brief comparisons to the United Kingdom, a parliamentary system with no veto points, where national ID cards were introduced during the first and second world wars and briefly in the late 2000s, but were subsequently withdrawn each time. In this, the United Kingdom is an unusual point of comparison, because in most countries national ID systems, once introduced, are retained.

Krajewska explains that the book “is not intended as a theoretical contribution to citizenship theory, American political development, or a particular theoretical argument in political science” (p. 37). Instead, it is cast as a “detailed and practical narrative” by an “objective scholar” (p. 40). Evidence is drawn from “archival research; interviews with politicians, policymakers, and ID card technology experts; and public opinion data” (p. 245).

I think the book would have benefited from more theoretical reflection. As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper put it, researchers who neglect theory run the risk of uncritically accepting the “categories of practice” used by advocates as the “categories of analysis” for scholarship (“Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29 [1], 2000). Krajewska is uncritical, for instance, in using the official language of programs targeting “enemy aliens” during World War II, failing to mention that in many cases the people affected were neither “enemies” nor “aliens.” Very few of those surveilled through those programs proved to be disloyal to the United States. Two-thirds of the 117,000 people held in camps in the early 1940s on the basis of Japanese ancestry were in fact US citizens. Krajewska refers briefly to this episode but does not mention the fact that thousands of those interned renounced their US citizenship, often under duress, nor that US citizenship was later restored in most cases (Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2014).

Other episodes that fit within the author’s concept of identity policing are neglected. For instance, there is no discussion of the “bracero” program arranged by the US and Mexican governments to bring farm laborers for temporary work on non-negotiable contracts to the US Southwest from the 1940s to the 1960s, in a program administered by the Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In that case, the INS provided permits and ID cards to 4.6 million workers, deported many others, and even aided some US employers in moving their workers from illegal to legal status—an ambivalent pattern of behavior that set the mold for the marginal economic and racial position of many Mexican Americans in later years. Nor does Krajewska discuss the periodic forced repatriation of migrant workers—often along with their US-born children—whose identity as Americans may be negated by this expulsion. In short, Krajewska misses some crucial episodes of identity policing and has little to say about the fact that identity policing projects in the United States tend to focus on racialized minorities. A clearer theoretical lens might have helped Krajewska see the relevance of these acts of identification and misidentification (for a more theoretical account of the history of the passport as a tool of state-building, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2000).

Although not so comprehensive as claimed, this book will nevertheless be of value to students and scholars who already have the historical and theoretical background to fill in the gaps left by Krajewska. For instance, the book provides a detailed account of the REAL ID Act, passed in 2005 and now in the final stages of implementation, through which the federal government is pushing states to harmonize the security features of driver’s licenses and to create state-level databases that can be searched by other states and federal agencies. Under this act, states must keep copies of documents used to corroborate identity, and driver’s licenses must use photos that meet biometric standards for identification, although the cards and databases do not include fingerprints or retinal scans (p. 168). Krawjewska makes a convincing case that US policy makers will continue to debate identity policing, especially in response to shocks such as war or terrorism, while acknowledging that attempting to use the technologies of identity policing to predict which individuals are prone to violence may well cause privacy problems without yielding much security benefit. Krajewska also argues that the use of biometric data will be increasingly relevant. To this I would add that scholars who seek to build on Krajewska’s research should also study government access to the troves of data collected by information technology companies on our phone movements and our online habits. Surely, the concept of identity policing will only become more relevant as data accumulate and computing power grows.