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Short abstract:

This paper challenges innovation narratives present in UK border strategies. By examining practices undertaken to digitally operationalise the EUSS, it traces complex entanglements and digital materialities with performative effects that produce tensions with the government's innovation narratives.

Long abstract:

This paper critically engages with the innovation and transformation narratives present in the UK government’s digital border and migration strategies. Through empirical research that examines the digital operationalisation of the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) – a scheme which settled EU citizens in the UK after Brexit – this paper traces the complex entanglements that produce EU citizens as (il)legible to the system in unexpected ways, contradicting some of the aims of the UK government’s digital innovation narratives.

Academic and civil society critics of digital bordering have highlighted the various ways in which these forms of digital innovation have created specific types of vulnerability and precarity. However, this paper goes further. By focusing on practices of innovation and examining the ways in which the political context, commercial relationships, civil service practices and IT materialities are entangled within the digitalisation process, it demonstrates how new types of vulnerabilities are produced as some individuals become incomprehensible to the digital system.

This paper argues that exploring the practices of innovation helps us to understand their consequences and allows us to critically engage with pro-innovation strategies. Further, by intricately tracing the entanglements and the tensions they produce, the paper highlights how digital innovation processes could be done differently.