Chinese laborers, making the system class-based as well as racialized.495 Women were overlooked entirely in this regime, and only through litigation would a solution be worked out: Chinese immigrant women and children would have no independent status and, at least on paper, were subsumed under the husband/father’s case.496 In debates surrounding the registration requirements instituted to administer the exclusion laws, one member of Congress justified these measures as “merely a passport system” because “it was impossible to identify Chinamen.”497 The bureaucratic approach developed in order to administer Chinese exclusion laws of the 1880s remained in place for decades.498 Many of the basic conceits of modern human migration governance emerged through this particular experimentation with a sweeping travel ban against a human-made social classification: robust state sovereignty to administer borders,499 externalization of state migration controls,500 and deployment of new technologies in the service of systematic registration and documentation of race-based population groups.501 To obtain a passport beginning in 1896, all applicants, regardless of race, furnished detailed information about their physical appearance for the records of the U.S. passport office. From the very beginning, U.S. bureaucracy avidly pursued data on the biographical and physical characteristics of the population. As historian Jill Lepore writes, “In the unruly aftermath of the Civil War, the citizen was defined, described, measured, and documented. And the modern administrative state was born.”502 The blending of immigration law and eugenics fostered a rapid expansion of categories of people deemed inadmissible to the United States as a means of “population management.”503 This “proliferation of the categories of excludables”504 led to increased centralization of state control over migration into the country. By the early 1900s, “the separate administration of Asian and European immigrant streams disappeared as the drift toward ‘nationalization’ of immigration regulation became consolidated institutionally.”505 A Documentation-Driven New Deal With the introduction of the Social Security Act in 1935, life “with a paper trail” emerged as an everyday reality for American citizens for the first time.506 “[B]eing known to the government would become increasingly constitutive of citizenship itself: a necessary exchange for steady employment, increased economic security, and free movement across borders.”507 In the New Deal era following the Great Depression, among many other revolutionary developments in the country, governance by registry emerged.508 Prior to this time, aside from the decennial census, efforts to document the public were sparse and targeted toward actual or perceived threats to public order. During World War II, officials tasked with administering the defense industry discovered that one-third of Americans had no proof of birth.509 When efforts to expand access to proof of birth geared up in the early 20th century, massive resistance to the introduction of biometrics shut down efforts to build a fingerprint registry. Americans associated fingerprinting with criminality and “those with their prints on record were much more likely to be poor, foreign, or nonwhite.”510 III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 117