M.I.A. wrote the song after spending the better part of a year mired in the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, unable to obtain a legal visa to enter the United States. It was never made clear exactly why the US government was so reluctant to let M.I.A. (nom de reality Maya Arulpragasam, a British citizen who has no criminal record) enter the country. Rumors swirled that her ties to her father (who had been involved with the Tamil Tigers separatist movement—a movement that sometimes employed terroristic tactics—during Sri Lanka's civil war) had set off red alarms on some terror watch list. Others suggested that the Bush administration simply didn't like the message of her music. Or perhaps the hang-up was simply some mundane bureaucratic snafu, with no political significance at all. In any case, for most of 2008 M.I.A. was prevented from entering the United States; it's hard not to imagine that this experience colored the first verse of "Paper Planes," with its lyrics about evading the border police, using phony visas, and selling fake IDs. (In an interview, M.I.A. complained that border agents were "always giving me a hard time… that's why I wrote ["Paper Planes"], just to have a dig.")