Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication: The "Three D" Transformation of Forced Migration Management (original) (raw)
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Third World Quarterly, 2020
This article is concerned with the digitisation of border security and migration management. Illustrated through an encounter between a migrant and the Visa Information System (VIS) – one of the largest migration-related biometric databases worldwide – the article’s first part outlines three implications of digitisation. We argue that the VIS assembles a set of previously unconnected state authorities into a group of end users who enact border security and migration management through the gathering, processing and sharing of data; facilitates the practice of traceability, understood as a rationality of mobility control; and has restrictive effects on migrants’ capacity to manoeuvre and resist control. Given these implications, the article’s second part introduces three analytical sensitivities that help to avoid some analytical traps when studying digitisation processes. These sensitivities take their cue from insights and concepts in science and technology studies (STS), specifically material semiotics/ANT approaches. They concern, firstly, the ways that data-based security practices perform the identities of the individuals that they target; secondly, the need to consider possible practices of subversion by migrants to avoid control-biased analyses; and finally, the challenge to study the design and development of border security technologies without falling into either technological or socio-political determinism.
This Special Collection “Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe” historicizes, contextualizes, empirically grounds, and conceptually reflects on the impact of digital technologies on forced migration. In this introductory essay, we elaborate digital migration as a developing field of research. Taking the exceptional attention for digital mediation within the recent so-called “European refugee crisis” as a starting point, we reflect on the main conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges for this emerging field and how it is taking shape through interdisciplinary dialogues and in interaction with policy and public debate. Our discussion is organized around five central questions: (1) Why Europe? (2) Where are the field and focus of digital migration studies? (3) Where is the human in digital migration? (4) Where is the political in digital migration? and (5) How can we de-center Europe in digital migration studies? Alongside establishing common ground between various communities of scholarship, we plea for non-digital-media-centric-ness and foreground a commitment toward social change, equity and social justice.
Precarious migrants, migration regimes and digital technologies: the empowerment-control nexus
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020
This special issue makes an in depth analysis of the various and complex interactions between precarious (i.e. forced, vulnerable, undocumented or deported) migrants’ emancipatory practices enabled by information and communication technologies, and the constraints created by technological tools used for surveillance and migration control. It explores the empowerment-control nexus by articulating the use of digital technologies – whether by migrants themselves, by civil society actors, or by institutions – with their mediating role in the processes of empowerment, surveillance and migration control. It gathers together seven articles that draw on original empirical studies conducted across various geographical zones (European Union, Switzerland, France, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Mexico and the United States), and different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, law, and deportation studies). Building on this diversity, this collection of papers embraces the richness of several theoretical lenses and reflects the varying degrees of (dis)entanglement between individual and institutional practices, at micro and macro scales, as well as local, national and supranational levels.
To be published as: Broeders, D. and H. Dijstelbloem (2016) 'The Datafication of Mobility and Migration Management: the Mediating State and its Consequences', pp. 242-260 in: I. Van der Ploeg and J. Pridmore (eds.) Digitizing Identities: Doing Identity in a Networked World. London: Routledge 12 The datafication of mobility and migration management: the mediating state and its consequences Dennis Broeders and Huub Dijstelbloem MONITORING AND DATAFYING HUMAN MOBILITY Modern technologies have increased the possibilities of governments to gather and process data and this has increased the variety and the depth of governmental observation and monitoring. This variety includes the data from new technologies such as radar, infrared and satellite technology ('the eye in the sky') that allow for different forms of observation and detection, while depth can be added through technologies such as ICT, biometrics, GIS technology and statistical risk calculation. The more recent development of big data analysis is now also finding its way into public policy making. The state's perception of reality thus becomes more technologically and statistically mediated and 'datafied'. Data of various types and sources are processed, combined and connected though networked databases. Even though policymakers often claim that technology merely does the same job faster and better, technology also changes both the substance and the nature of policy. For one thing, it brings new actors to the scene. Baker (2008) described the work of what he calls a new class of 'Numerati' that data mine vast databases for correlations and use these to plan for the future. He primarily emphasized the commercial brand of this class, but there are public counterparts in ever larger numbers in, for example, counterterrorism (Balzacq 2008; Monahan and Palmer 2009) and youth care (Schinkel 2011; Keymolen and Broeders 2013), international development (Taylor 2015; Taylor and Broeders 2015) and crisis management (see Adey in this volume) . For another, the use of ever bigger datasets necessitates policy thinking in terms of risks and increasingly favours correlations over causalities (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013).
Research Methodologies and Ethical Challenges in Digital Migration Studies
Digital technologies present new methodological and ethical challenges for migration studies: from ensuring data access in ethically viable ways to privacy protection, ensuring autonomy, and security of research participants. This Introductory chapter argues that the growing field of digital migration research requires new modes of caring for (big) data. Besides from methodological and ethical reflexivity such care work implies the establishing of analytically sustainable and viable environments for the respective data sets—from large-scale data sets (“big data”) to ethnographic materials. Further, it is argued that approaching migrants’ digital data “with care” means pursuing a critical approach to the use of big data in migration research where the data is not an unquestionable proxy for social activity but rather a complex construct of which the underlying social practices (and vulnerabilities) need to be fully understood. Finally, it is presented how the contributions of this bo...
Processing Citizenship : Digital registration of migrants as co-production of individuals and Europe
2017
LEAVE A COMMENT The "Processing Citizenship" project was funded in late 2016 as a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Launched in March 2017, it is interested in how migration enacts Europe. As the project's homepage goes (http://processingcitizenship.eu), this question can be legally and politically answered, as most policy-makers, sociologists and journalists do, or technically. How do data infrastructures for processing migrants and refugees co-produce individuals and Europe? The project aims to extend to non-European citizens the study of how the digital circulation of data assets about populations and territory is re-enacting European governance along new boundaries (Pelizza, 2016). Historically, data infrastructures on populations and territories have contributed to the formation of the most powerful techno-social assemblage for knowledge handlingthe nation-state (Agar, 2003; Foucault, 2007; Mitchell, 1991; Mukerji, 2011). The project asks how contemporary data infrastructures for processing migrants and refugees at the border, as well as inside Europe, shape the European order. As such, the project aspires to contribute to technology studies on the infrastructural construction of Europe (Misa and Schot, 2005).
Doing Digital Migration Studies: Methodological Considerations for an Emerging Research Focus
Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies , 2018
This chapter offers reflection on doing digital migration studies. Digital migration studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field focussed on studying migration in, through and by means of the internet. As the so-called European refugee crisis demonstrates, the scale, intensities and types of transnational migration and digital networking have drastically changed in recent years. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally transformed migration processes and vice versa. Top-down management of migration flows and border control is increasingly dependent on digital technologies and datafication, while from the bottom-up migrants use smart phones and apps to access information, maintain transnational relations, establish local connections and send remittances. In the first half of the chapter, drawing on (Candidatu et al., 2018) we distinguish between three paradigms of digital migration studies: (1) migrants in cyberspace; (2) everyday digital migrant life; (3) migrants as data. In the second half of the chapter, we offer the methodological research principles of relationality, adaptability and ethics-of-care to operationalize digital migration studies with a commitment to social justice. Challenging unjust power relations is important both when studying vulnerable groups as well as studying elites. The many experiences, obstacles and opportunities we found in the literature reveal that the future of digital migration studies lies at the intersection of big and small data, there is great urgency in triangulating quantified patterns with in-depth narrative accounts and situated experiences.
Big data for whose sake? Governing migration through artificial intelligence
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Although human activity constantly generates massive amounts of data, these data can only be analysed by mainly the private sector and governmental institutes due to data accessibility restrictions. However, neither migrants (as the producers of this data) nor migration scholars (as scientific experts on the topic) are in a position to monitor or control how governments and corporations use such data. Big Data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are promoted as cutting-edge solutions to ongoing and emerging social, economic and governance challenges. Meanwhile, states increasingly rely on digital and frontier technologies to manage borders and control migratory movements, and the defence industry and military–intelligence sectors provide high-tech tools to support these efforts. Worryingly, during the design and testing of algorithmic tools, migrants are often portrayed as a security threat instead of human beings with fundamental rights and liberties. Thus, priv...
The New Digital Borders of EuropeEU Databases and the Surveillance of Irregular Migrants
International Sociology, 2007
This article analyses the development of three EU migration databases and their significance for the internal control of irregular migrants. Because borders and immigration policy alone cannot stop irregular migration, many governments turn to internal migration control on settled irregular migrants. Surveillance of this group is aimed at their exclusion from key societal institutions, discouraging their stay and ultimately, the deportation of apprehended irregular migrants. These are policies in which identification of irregular migrants is crucial. In this age, registration and identification mean computerized and networked databases. The member states of the EU are currently developing a network of databases in the field of (irregular) immigration. The Schengen Information System (II), the Eurodac database and the Visa Information System are vast databases, often including biometric data, aimed at controlling migration flows and identifying and sorting legal and irregular migrants. These systems are able to ‘re-identify’ parts of the population of irregular migrants on the basis of digital traces of their migration history. It is argued that the digital infrastructure that is now growing past its infancy is developing into a formidable tool for the surveillance of irregular migrants in Europe.