Current Phase

A-files are richly complex historical documents—their length varies radically and so does their contents. In addition to standardized U.S. government forms (visas, naturalization certificates, etc.) and non-U.S. government forms (birth certificates, certificates of marriage, etc.) they may contain records of interviews at the moment of entry, personal narratives, records of medical exams, criminal records, evidence of employment and financial history, and photographs. To make files with such diverse contents searchable, we are using a training set of 650 A-files to develop machine learning models that can identify document types and enable the addition of detailed metadata about them. This level of indexing will make the diverse contents of the files searchable and shed new light on immigration history in the U.S., the history of migrants’ home countries, and the often understudied ways in which the two interconnect. For more information on A-files, see below.

What's Next

After the prototype stage is complete, we will begin the process of building a crowdsourced digital archive of A-files that comprises historical as well as recent files (with appropriate privacy protections for the latter), developed to serve the needs of both scholars and members of migrant communities outside of academia.

Interested in Joining the Project? Here is How Can You Help:

1. We need to expand our data base. Building a crowd-sourced digital archive will allow us to train the machine to recognize community-specific patterns and make it searchable in new ways. If you have A-files on hand, we would love to add them to our archive. We can also assist you in retrieving historical A-files.
2. We would love to hear your questions. Imagine you could do a google search on immigration files. What would you like to know about your community’s history? Your immigrant neighborhood? The community where your family came from or that you study, as a scholar or community historian? Hearing your ideas and questions will help us make the machine as smart and responsive to community concerns as it can be. Contact us with your questions, or you can sign up to test a prototype.

Project History

Migrants and the State was conceived in 2019 as an intervention in the increasingly chaotic and confusing landscape surrounding immigration and asylum in the U.S. Under the auspices of NYU’s Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab program, we investigated the record-keeping practices of migrant advocates, attorneys, and the federal government. It became clear to us that the so-called “border crisis” was ultimately inseparable from the long history of migrations and migration restrictions in the hemisphere. This history is amply documented in the rich trove of public domain A-files held by the U.S. National Archives, yet these files are by and large inaccessible to the public and cannot be explored at scale. The Migrants and the State team hopes that by harnessing new digital technologies it will become possible for communities and scholars to tell stories of migration at scale in entirely new ways.

Funders

Migrants and the State received early stage funding from the NYU Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab program, NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Office of the Provost Humanities Mega-Grants Initiative Seed Fund. The Migrants and the State digital prototype has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities* Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program: Democracy Demands Wisdom.