In the "Service" of Migrants: The Temporary Resident Biometrics Project and the Economization of Migrant Labor in Canada (original) (raw)
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What Alternative?: biometric surveillance of immigrants and the new crimmigration continuum
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Alternatives to Detention ('ATDs') have been successfully marketed as human-rights-compliant substitutes for the mass incarceration of migrants. President Biden's administration has made ATDs the focus of immigration enforcement. ATDs adopted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ('ICE') are a powerful system of bio-indexed forms of surveillance and mobility control of criminalized migrants. This paper provides a mixed-methods analysis of ATDs that includes data and policy analysis, and participatory observation within communities of asylum-seekers in the United States. The first part describes kinds of ATDs, from family-unit accommodations to harvesting biometric data and ankle monitors. Then, I analyze the algorithmic and biometric technologies that undergird ATDs to show how this algorithmic reasoning subtends racial profiling and perpetuates algorithmic racism. ATDs create a pervasive biopolitical bordering regime and expand the crimmigration continuum. Within these conditions, immigrant resistance has been the central democratic force in sustaining diverse communities.
The Biometric Lives of Migrants: Borders, Discrimination and (In)Justice
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Biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. This panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees. It asks how biometric data are constituted, what their limitations and biases are, how biometric technologies challenge traditional notions of the physical border, in whose interest and with what implications for migrants and refugees. In particular, in bringing together a multidisciplinary group of international experts to develop a critical, comparative and empirically grounded dialogue, the panel explores the consequences of this ‘machinic life’ for the lives of actual people, migrants and refugees who navigate actual and digital borders in the quest of a better life. As such, the panel engages with crucial themes of processes of borde...
Whose biopolitics is it anyway? Power and potentiality in biometric border security
in-spire.org
This article examines how biopolitics can be used as a conceptual resource to understand contemporary border security. Through a combination of risk profiling technology and biometric surveillance, these controls challenge our modern geopolitical assumptions of how power is exerted at the border, whilst proponents suggest that the technology can preemptively halt harmful travellers. Yet the identities created by risk profiling may be fallible, suggesting opportunities to contest the biometric border and the power it exerts. Drawing and elaborating upon the case studies of biometric border projects within the United States and United Kingdom that have garnered sustained scholarly attention, this article draws on Hardt and Negri, and Agamben, to
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocent—classic categories of sovereignty—find decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the “destructive body” for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies.
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Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2015
Surveillance systems are an element of everyday life in Canada, implemented through a variety of strategies for a multitude of reasons. Regardless of differences in orientation and purpose, surveillance systems wield considerable influence over individuals and groups. Given this influence, surveillance studies are an important area of sociological inquiry that have garnered substantial theoretical development. However, relatively little theorizing has approached experiences with surveillance from a diasporic perspective. In order to support such inquiries, a theoretical model is constructed that examines experiences during Canadian border crossing in relation to race, invasive surveillance practices, and diaspora development. Based on the model presented, I maintain that perceptions of treatment during border crossing experiences are a means by which individuals structurally position themselves based on identity characteristics such as race and religious orientation within the broader cultural identity. Specifically, in the post 9/11 era of intensifying border surveillance, persons of particular racial heritage have been targeted by surveillance efforts at the Canadian border and this differential treatment is more likely to produce problematic diasporas. Negative experiences with actual or perceived omnipresent and oppressive surveillance systems may foster the development of problematic diasporas by accentuating difference. The model draws together existing theoretical frameworks to call attention to central components associated with the application of discriminatory surveillance systems and provides a foundation for future research. This area of inquiry is particularly relevant given the changing face of Canadian immigration and, as such, the Canadian population as a whole
Issue Introduction: IDentities and Identity: Biometric Technologies, Borders and Migration
Ethnos - Journal of Anthropology, 2022
Biometric technologies using digital representations of bodily characteristics to identify individuals have become an institutionalized method of registering and recognizing persons, thereby establishing their right to cross borders. Based on situated ethnographic fieldwork among tech-developers, border police, forensics, IT hacktivists and migrants, this special issue illuminates how biometric technologies are put to use and experienced by the diverse social actors who imagine and promote, develop, employ, are subjected to and attempt to circumvent such identification. In this introduction biometric identification (or IDentification) is presented as a relatively new area of investigation that has been subjected to little ethnographic scrutiny. It is argued that, while biometric technologies are promoted as enabling objective and incontestable IDentification of individuals, they are in practice embedded in specific social contexts, fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, and dependent on substantial human interpretation and social identification. They are therefore of considerable interest and concern to anthropology.
Security, Securitization And Human Capital: The New Wave Of Canadian Immigration Laws
2008
This paper analyzes the linkage between migration, economic globalization and terrorism concerns. On a broad level, I analyze Canadian economic and political considerations, searching for causal relationships between political and economic actors on the one hand, and Canadian immigration law on the other. Specifically, the paper argues that there are contradictory impulses affecting state sovereignty. These impulses are are currently being played out in the field of Canadian immigration law through several proposed changes to Canada-s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). These changes reflect an ideological conception of sovereignty that is intrinsically connected with decision-making capacity centered on an individual. This conception of sovereign decision-making views Parliamentary debate and bureaucratic inefficiencies as both equally responsible for delaying essential decisions relating to the protection of state sovereignty, economic benefits and immigration control T...