A few blocks from a South African Refugee Reception Office, asylum applicants first queued in an outdoor area officials called “the Bush.” A 2010 ethnography reports that perhaps 1,000 people might be present on a given day, waiting in nationality-based lines or milling nearby before groups were taken into the building. One day an official announced that anyone without a passport would not receive the folder required for entry. A Pakistani man carrying only a photocopy asked why; his copy was pushed back at him and he was told to return to the queue. The passport rule, the official later said, had been invented that day to stop people joining a shorter nationality line. Order was therefore shaped not only by published law but by lack of indoor space and improvised street-level rules. The queue opened the bureaucracy to applicants while also giving officials a mechanism that could exclude them without warning.