Digital border tools are reshaping migration—with unequal consequences
A new analysis shows that biometrics, algorithms, and surveillance systems have become core to how governments manage migration, not just add-ons to existing controls. The shift raises urgent questions for policymakers and businesses about data rights, algorithmic bias, and who bears the risk when automated systems make high-stakes decisions about people's lives.
Originaltitel: Introduction: Entangled and Uneven Landscapes of Digitised Migration
<p>Digital technologies have become inextricably linked to the infrastructures, experiences and governance of interna-tional migration (Leurs 2023; McAuliffe 2021; Nedelcu andSoysüren 2022). The use of new technologies of surveillance thatidentify, track and control people crossing borders, results in theincreasing digitalisation of borders, migrants and their manage-ment (Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2022; Doná and Godin 2024;Everuss 2024). Biometrics and automated decision-makingtools, as well as surveillance of social media, have become in-creasingly central to migration management technologies.These border security technologies are not simply technological improvements of existing forms of border control or governance.Whether through biometric databases, WhatsApp groups, al-gorithmic risk assessments, or remote asylum interviews, thedigital has emerged not as a separate domain but as a consti-tutive dimension of migration itself. The digital, we contend,reveals, reproduces and sometimes helps contest existing hier-archies and exclusions. The militarisation and computerisationof borders raise important questions about the politics of data,data subjects, biopolitics, (scales of) sovereignty, regulation anddifferent forms of sovereign, regulatory and disciplinary power(McAuliffe 2021; Witteborn 2022). We are yet to fully grasp thesocial implications of this new regime of automated truth re-cords. Does it create new inequalities and/or reinforce old ones?Is it only a tool of oppression, appropriation and exclusion, ordoes it offer novel opportunities for resistance and solidarity?How can we critically engage with governance, while also re-flecting on agency and solidarity in a digital world?</p>