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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how migrants in post-2015 Italy navigate digitalized border practices, exploring the impact of technology on their lives, identity, access to services and processes of integration.

Paper long abstract:

Digital technologies have become ubiquitous gateways and essential tools for accessing key aspects of socio-economic life, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The management of human mobility is a central area where this transformation is occurring. This paper explores how migrants understand, experience, and navigate these processes in contemporary European settings. Specifically, the study analyzes data collected in multiple sites across Italy in 2023-2024 through interviews with migrants, NGO workers, legal advisors, and other border stakeholders. It focuses on post-2015 Italy, a key migratory route at Europe’s southern border, which has become a site for experimenting with new border practices, particularly after the 2015 refugee crisis. In its complex mix of long-established paper-based procedures and newer data-driven practices, the digitalized bureaucracy of the 21st-century frontier has profound effects on migrants’ lives, their sense of identity and belonging, and processes of integration. Drawing from the fields of STS, data justice, and the biopolitics of biometrics, this paper expands the theoretical understanding of the migration-technology nexus, moving beyond the focus on data protection and surveillance to encompass migrants' embodied experiences of the new, dispersed, and datafied frontier.