Writing at the Border

I read a few days ago that Australia has become the latest country to introduce tests for immigrants seeking citizenship. The UK introduced similar tests in 2005 (see here) and the Netherlands has operated for some years a mandatory 'inburgering' course for immigrants with a test of national culture (see here).

Borders are about fences, like the recently erected fence between America and Mexico (see photo above). But they are also about language. Through the device of tests, language is being increasingly used to regulate and control movement across borders.

A lot of the work of controlling borders seems to come down to writing. Borders seem to be marked by written texts even at the time when, in other contexts, borders are becoming less certain and visible.

And like the notorious fence pictured above, these textual borders are both solid and porous, keeping people out but at the same time allowing them to get through.

Texts and Borders

I have my own story to tell about texts and borders. When I first started living in the Netherlands I had to carry with me a rather impersonal residence card with the word 'Vreemdeling' ('alien') in large bold capital letters at the top. Every time I used this card - at the post office, for example - I was reminded of my outsider status.

A few years ago the Dutch government, following an EU initiative, introduced smart new identity cards for EU citizens. Gone is any mention of the 'alien'; now my status here is as 'Brits Burger' (British Citizen) within the community of the European Union ('gemeenschapsonderdaan'). My card is adorned with a rather impressive charging bull, a symbol of EU solidarity.

My card is a text at the border. The way it has changed over the years illustrates political and legal changes in the way EU borders are represented, how they are both enforced and effaced, and how migration is seen.

I feel more comfortable with this card. 'Alien' was only a word; but it was a word I had to carry around with me everywhere, a word that kept reminding me of the border.

Testing Transitions

Tests are used to regulate transitions of all kinds: from one phase of schooling to another, from school to university, from one job to another. It is part of the work of writing, or the work writing has been put to.

In these recent developments, tests are designed to manage transition from one country to another, and to mark the difference between 'immigrant' and 'citizen', 'outsider' and 'insider'.

Tests have a double function: they make transitions possible, and block them too.

The citizenship tests I have seen are nearly all multiple choice. Test-makers generate the test papers from a bank of questions. So, in theory, the test-taker could prepare the right answers.

No surprise that a number of test preparation guides have come on the market with titles like 'Entering the UK: What you Need to Know'. These tend to break down the necessary information into info-bites (number of MPs in the House of Commons, dates of the English Civil War, number of people on a cricket team) which can be stored, memorised and repeated with as little leeway for interpretation as possible, presumably so that they can be machine-scored.

This is testing as the packaging of national identity, a literacy event designed to broker - and control - the movement of identity across borders. As so often before, literacy is charged with the job of policing, but wearing the disguise of empowerment.

Tests are genres, and like all genres have a politics. Those who have taken the UK test probably pick up very quickly that it is not so much about culture and history as much as the English language. The signs of written English are used in the test as vehicles of content, of 'information'; but isn't it those signs that are really under scrutiny, with literacy as the measuring rod?

Testing

The phenomenon of the written test is always caught up in the social ambiguities and give-and-take of language, but nevertheless bears the aura of a transparent event, the risky wager of language as pure content/pure representation. Behind testing lies the assumption that the mark I make in a test has a direct, representational link to what I am thinking. It functions as evidence - of what I know, what I believe, and what I can do. It isolates me, and is outside 'communication'. Miraculously, social context evaporates in the test, before which everyone is apparently equal.

Isn't that the power of tests - to create a sense of neutrality where 'context' disappears? A context without context.

In order for this test to work, words have to be emptied of their power as well as their ambiguity. They must become pure content so that pure form can be assessed. It's 'mastery' of 'the language' (as a system, as an object, as a skill) that is really being tested, and used to regulate both migration and identity.

In this article from The Indepedent newspaper, Pakistan-born novelist Moshe Hamid describes his experience of finishing the UK citizenship test early and seeing other candidates struggle with the wording of the questions, 'barely able even to begin':

It is only then that I realise what surely must be the real purpose of the test: to exclude the illiterate and those with a poor mastery of the English language. That is why it does not ask us the practical questions that might actually be of use to life in the UK - the number to dial for emergency services, for example, or how to register to vote - and instead focuses on arcane trivia unknown even to most native Britons.