Long abstract:

This paper engages with the relevance of historical perspectives for imagining and building alternative digital futures in migration and border control. Putting current efforts of digitalization of borders into historical perspective, this paper unpacks how techniques of knowledge-production co-produce projects of differentiation and mobility control. Such techniques, constitutive of border regimes, are historical and become rematerialized in digital contexts.

Empirically, I draw on two case studies to demonstrate genealogies of media technological bordering: (1) the example of Ellis Island immigration station and its techno-solutionist modes of decision-making, emerging from contexts of eugenics and scientistic ideals of the Progressive Era; and (2) the history and present of kinship testing by border authorities (such as genetic or blood testing) in the UK and the USA, envisioned and enacted as seemingly neutral and objective techniques of filtering bodies.

Based on the examples, I argue that it matters to understand how border regimes and media technologies are historically entangled. Techno-solutionist ideas of “smartness”, and subsequent practices of digital knowledge-production, are not built on a history-free clean slate, yet emerge from complex symbolical and material recursions of technologies, practices and ideas. The current moment where large-scale digitalization coincides with increasing border build-up is no less historically contingent than earlier iterations of technological innovation, failure or resistance. Any new imaginaries of how migration control is technologically built, practiced and imagined need to grapple with these histories.