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Short abstract:

This paper theorizes the relationship between so-called “smart border” infrastructures and racial capitalism by analyzing the valorization of data about people on the move for purposes of border and migration policing through databases, language recognition technologies, and data extraction.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I probe how smart border infrastructures have been employed for migration control, border policing, and asylum administration on a planet where global displacement has become a new norm. I analyze three instantiations of media technological border control in Europe; database, voice recognition, and smartphone data extraction; to theorize the relationship between so-called “smart borders” and racial capitalism. When people move, so does their data. However, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and non-citizens, summarily described as people on the move, are especially made vulnerable to the collection, policing, and surveillance of this data. Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, archival research, and critical documents, policy, and discourses analysis, I demonstrate that data-driven projects that are framed as governmental reforms purportedly meant to fix the perceived crises of migration function to deepen racial inequalities and enhance border policing. Specifically, I show how the data of people on the move is valorized in two ways. First, data-driven technologies work to classify people and their origin and thereby rely on the racial, gendered, colonial, and eugenic histories encoded in digital technologies. As a result, conceptions of personhood, humanity, and testimony are reimagined, and the experiences and histories of people on the move are abstracted into data points. Second, borders and migration are often used as incubators and testing grounds for media technologies more generally, and the data extracted from people on the move becomes used for technological and governmental innovation.