Geographies of migration III: The digital migrant

Abstract

There is a growing focus on digitisation, datafication, automation and artificial intelligence in migration studies. This report reviews accounts of these technological innovations with a particular emphasis on their impacts for how migration is conceived and governed. The discussion overviews research that identifies and describes forms of digitisation and datafication, examines the role of automation and artificial intelligence in migration management, and discusses the links between and ethics of digitally mediated migrations and digital solidarities with mobile people. In closing, the report raises questions about the intellectual and political agenda of a purported sub-field of digital migration studies.

Keywords

migration digital artificial intelligence algorithmic governance migration management borders

I Introduction

Digital technologies for data gathering, processing and analysis and their integration into interoperable systems have taken on a heightened role in the management of populations and mobilities in recent years. In relation to public health, digital techno-political experimentation has become particularly apparent since the onset of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Indeed, since 2020, digital contact tracing, Bluetooth alerts, digital records of testing and vaccine status alongside medical histories, credit card transaction records and CCTV footage have all become publicly known as state practices for the production of Big Data, analytics and modelling to trace and predict disease diffusion and enable quarantine and control (Zeng et al., 2020). The pandemic has also occasioned an intensive process of rebordering and intensified migration control (Moze and Spiegel 2022), bringing transnational movement almost entirely to a halt, containing whole populations and subsequently filtering border crossing to those deemed essential or desirable. There are important links between these developments, not least the digital management of migrant populations, those deemed illegal and irregular whose movement is paused at or before the border (Molnar 2022), the role of technology in quarantining of migrant labour populations seen as disease risks (Das and Zhang 2021) and the digitisation of remittances (Datta and Guermond 2020). Early on in the pandemic, the International Organisation for Migration was quick to advocate a ‘toolkit of standardized border management and migration health tools’ to allow countries to plan for revising mid- and post-pandemic migration policies (IOM 2020). The list of recommendations encompasses a diverse array of technological responses – peer-to-peer information sharing, health screening at multiple pre-departure points, expanding remote visa processing, relying more heavily on advance passenger information, expansion of quarantine facilities, enhanced surveillance and capacity for repatriation.

There is, then, a sense that the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the deployment of new technologies for managing migration, alongside those developed or deployed to manage localised populations and disease diffusion (Calzada 2022). Certainly, the pandemic does seem to have ushered in a heightened surveillance of health in border crossing that appears to have quickly become normalised (McAuliffe et al., 2021), much as the rapid response to fear of terror attacks embedded forms of securitisation in the early 2000s that are now seemingly unquestionable (De Genova 2022). And yet, as geographers and other scholars of borders and migration have highlighted for some time, technological developments of surveillance, biometrics, pre-screening, quarantine, tracing and associated data collection, aggregation and analysis have been emerging over a number of decades (Amoore 2006, 2021; Molnar 2022). Some commentors, however, are now describing a sub-field of ‘digital migration studies’ (Leurs and Smets 2018; Sandberg et al., 2022), focused on ‘critical scrutiny of the conditions - political, socio-economic, historical, cultural, technological and ideological - through which migrants are produced as datafied subjects’ (Leurs and Witteborn 2021: 23).

This final report by me on the geographies of migration explores these digital technologies and their implications for the governance of migration, the mobilities of people and the ethics of solidarity with mobile people. In doing so, I title the report ‘the digital migrant’ to signal the manner in which digitisation of migration, and in particular the introduction of automation and artificial intelligence into migration management produce digital traces that are rendered available to government. As Tazzioli (2019) argues, such traces produced through the gathering, circulation and analysis of data are not mobile people themselves, individuals, their biographies, lives, actions or even often their actual migratory pathways. Instead, the digital migrant manifests a techno-centred fantasy of dividuation where embodied human subjects are endlessly divided and reconstructed via data representations and technologies of control (Bruno and Rodríguez 2022). Despite, indeed through, its abstraction from individuation and mobile people, such digital rendering of the migrant and migration trajectories seemingly enable forms of algorithmic governmentality that not only respond to but express a desire for the preconfiguration migratory futures (Kasapoglu et al., 2021; Rouvroy, Berns and Carey-Libbrecht 2013). Recognising these digitisation effects raises significant questions about the politics of questioning, challenging or subverting border and migration control as well as ethical questions for researchers and activists working in solidarity with mobile people.

I begin with a discussion of forms of digitisation and datafication before addressing artificial intelligence and automated migration management and then a final section addressing research on digitally mediated migrations, solidarities and ethics. As in the previous two reports on platform migration (Collins 2021) and colonialism and migration (Collins 2022), the material reviewed here includes significant contributions by scholars identifying as geographers and material from geographical publications, but also draws on work by those aligning with other disciplinary areas who are addressing migration and digital technology. Departing from those two earlier reports, this final one is more centred on the Global North and in particular Europe. This focus reflects where the majority of English language scholarship on digital technologies and migration has emerged. Even though such technologies are being developed and deployed globally, their development and deployment is being especially driven by political actors and institutions centred in or aligned with western states.

II Digitisation and datafication

Technological responses to migration and border control are hardly recent phenomena. Indeed, read in broad socio-technical terms, the entire apparatus of establishing borders, bordering practices, managing border crossing and migrant status, removal, detention and deportation etc are all built on foundations of technological innovations of various kinds. The passport, for example, even in its earliest iterations, constitutes a critical technological ‘invention’ (Torpey 2000) that made and still makes possible the monopolisation of the control of legitimised forms of movement and the distinction between those identified as citizens in contrast to the construction of non-nationals, foreigners, temporary visitors and illegalised people. Other state practices such as arrival cards and protocols for processing people crossing borders also have deep histories and reflect the introduction of technologies to achieve new forms of control and respond to the ‘problem’ of mobility (Salter 2013). In recent decades migration technologies have shifted towards biometric bordering (Amoore 2006) that entails enscribing bodies with legal, racialised, gendered and social codifications. Borderzones have also over a number of decades incorporated technologies such as aircraft patrols, security cameras and infrared technologies to monitor movements in greater granularity (Pickering and Weber 2006).

As the introductory comments on the Covid-19 pandemic above suggest, however, technological and informational innovation appear to be gaining pace and growing in intensity in relation to migration and border control (Leese et al., 2022; Ponzanesi and Leurs 2022). In particular, growing use of digital technologies, datafication and automation portend not only an extension of earlier technological responses to migration but also a reconfiguration of knowledge of migration and the reconstitution of the migrant as an object of government. Digital innovations recreate migration as ‘a space of abstraction which is consolidated by the imaginary of quantification and automation’ (Witteborn 2022: 158-9). In her account of migration data in the biopolitical management of Europe’s borders, Tazzioli (2019) notes a range of identification measures that have become digitised – fingerprinting, radars, interviews, travel records – producing what she terms ‘virtual multiplicities’. Rather than only being records to manage an individual border crossing, or even resulting from the speech or expression of an individual, such multiplicities entail the extraction of data and digital information from people that can be integrated into datasets and modelling that produce entire populations or sub-groups. Digitisation entails here a split, actual persons are not the key point of correspondence but rather digitised migrant populations that can be (re)labelled, (re)divided and (re)classified continuously (Scheel 2021).

In relation to border control technologies, Gonzalez (2019: n.p.) refers to a range of ‘technologies such as identification cards, license plate readers, facial recognition software, drone surveillance, video cameras, motion sensors, lidar and radars systems are forming a new hi-tech border’ that actually alters the ways in which migrants appear to authorities and are able to negotiate mobility and place (see also Mattern 2018). This focus on the border as ‘logistical infrastructure’ (Gonzalez 2019) extends established readings of the border as dispersed apparatus, infrastructure or network rather than a line on a map, constituted in practices of bordering across territories (Popescu 2011). Koca (2022) traces related developments on the borders of Turkey with Syria and Greece where the incorporation of advanced security technology hinges on establishing, detecting and preventing illegalised migration while also asserting a humanitarian objective of saving lives. In the context of Europe, media scholars Chouliaraki and Georgiou (2022) describe The Digital Border that emerged following the 2015 migration ‘crisis’, an assemblage of infrastructures and imaginaries including surveillance cameras, smart phones, social media posts, media narratives, imagery and more that tell the story of migration at the edges of Europe while also seeking to govern it (similarly, Pötzsch 2015 uses the term iBorder/iBordering; Metcalfe and Dencik 2019 ‘big border’ and Amelung and Machado 2019 ‘bio-bordering’). Recent digitisation in border control is not entirely new. It does, however, represent novel shifts in the integration of informational and technological responses to border exclusion and inclusion (Amoore 2006, 2021). Rather than primarily being configured around singular technologies that intercept individuals or groups of borders crossers, digitisation of the border manifests an increasing desire towards integration and interoperability of technological and informational solutions to achieve preemptive and predictive forms of control.

Experiments with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are at the forefront of the digitisation and datafication of migration. While the desire for automation in general has been in emergence for some time (Torpey 2000), technology legal scholar Beduschi (2021) observes a growing interest amongst state authorities to use enhanced computational power to streamline repetitive tasks in migration management, look at data patterns that cannot be observed in manual analysis and undertake decision making processes. AI is being deployed, or considered as a tool for: algorithmic decision making in asylum cases in Canada, Germany and more widely in the EU through the Schengen Information System; as a tool to improve integration of refugees in Switzerland; to automate migration systems in Bangladesh, Nepal and Malaysia; and as a basis for predicting the next ‘migration crisis’ by Swedish authorities through machine learning and forecasting (see Beduschi 2021 for other examples).

Casagran et al. (2021), who are also technology legal scholars, identified 18 predictive tools for migration in development between 2010 and 2020 in the EU alone. They explore three such tools in depth that are being used to develop predictions of ‘mixed’ or irregular migratory movements into the EU.¹ The tools incorporate variables of analysis that are derived from policy spheres and mainstream theory in migration studies alongside a wide range of data sources: conflict, food security, border monitoring, google trends, development levels, political stability and so on. Such data sources then bring theoretical insights from some elements of migration studies into connection with purportedly real-time data on contextual changes in places irregular migration emerges from to generate automated predictions for future patterns. Algorithmic governance is also observed by Laupman et al. (2022) and Nalbandian (2022) in relation to visa decision making processes and removal in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand; such systems focus on excluding those deemed unwanted, often in racist nationality risk hierarchies, and simultaneously speeding up the mobility of people considered legitimately mobile. Migrant labour is also interlinked into the digitisation of work associated with platform economies that, as Altenried (2021) argues, are especially open to migrants thus heightening vulnerability to exploitation already generated in migration regimes. Indeed, Gebrial (2022: 2) notes not only the disprorportionate representation of racialised minorities in digitised platform work but also highlights how work on-demand apps are shaped around forms of (mis)classification and algorithmic management targetting migrants in a way that ‘is “coded” into the legal, technological and social dynamics of the platform’s model’ (see also Lata et al., 2023).

III Artificial intelligence and automated migration management

Technological and informational innovations of the kind described above have typically emerged in responses to the framing of migration as a ‘crisis’, or particular events that are deemed by states and public figures as representing the ‘problem’ of migration. Much of the shift towards militarised and digital border technologies on the US-Mexico border, which are then being extended and adapted internationally (Miller 2019), have their origins in the confluence of crises around securitisation following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC in September 2001 with ongoing colonial border discourse and practices in relation to Mexico and countries in Central and South America (De Genova 2022; Jones and Johnson 2016). Here a national security discourse articulates with new means of identification, prediction and preemption that make mobile people legible and enable the extension of racialised, militarised and marketised governmentality. Similarly, the purported ‘migration crisis’ in 2015-16 in Europe has been the springboard for a whole range of innovations in information and tecnology responses to migration, including the introduction of AI and automation technologies (Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2022). As Taylor and Meissner (2020) note, the frequent desire expressed by state actors to respond to migration events also cultivates a kind of technological ‘solutionism,’ where technological innovators create new systems that set out migration problems to be solved. Take for example the promotion of debit cards in humanitarian aid that provide asylum-seekers and refugees with direct, prompt and efficient livelihood support but at the same time produce transaction data that generate new information to analyse patterns of movement and consumption practices that can be used to identify deviance and police migrants (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020; Coddington 2019).

There is significant techno-optimism amongst some researchers, and widely amongst political and policy actors, that digitisation, datafication and automation can generate enhanced approaches to governing migration. The aforementioned discussions by Beduschi (2021) and Casagran et al. (2021), for example, ponder the potential for the innovations they observe to lead to more effective approaches to managing migration. Casagran et al. (2021: 142) in particular, hopefully assert that ‘these tools boast the capacity to incorporate a broad and diverse range of actors – individual states, intergovernmental organisations, civil society, interdisciplinary researchers, and technical experts, as well as migrants themselves – that can offer the most comprehensive data and insight for effective governance.’ While Beduschi (2021: 584) acknowledges a range of problematic implications to AI, she also advocates for extending them by moving beyond quantification to incorporate the insights of the large body of scholarly qualitative migration research so that ‘qualitative datasets, such as those collected by independently funded academic research projects, are used to train AI algorithms for use in migration management’, a development that would likely horrify many researchers and mobile people who share their stories in research. As Casagran et al.’s (2021) analysis of predictive tools reveals, however, migration theory, which itself is at least partly drawn from insights generated in the field, including by critical scholars, is already being deployed in order to shape the contours of automated predictions of and responses to migration. While those authors note risks around ‘intensifying global or regional asymmetries, and curtailing human rights’ their commitment to developing ‘the most comprehensive data and insight for effective governance’ (Casagran et al., 2021: 142) echoes a techno-optimism that does little to question the way migration management is premised on dehumanisation and differential forms of inclusion and exclusion.

The data driven fantasy expressed here is an extension of optimism associated with migration management as a generalised political rationality for responding to migration. Initially framed as a form of ‘regulated openness’, migration management has planetary and decidedly utopian characteristics that asserts mutual beneficence for ‘sending, receiving and transit countries and the migrants themselves’ (Ghosh 2007: 107). As one of the original architects of migration management suggests: ‘Central to managed migration is the establishment of a regime that is capable of ensuring that movement of people becomes more orderly, predictable and productive, and thus more manageable’ (Ghosh 2007: 107). While not necessarily conceived in relation to digital technological affordances, big data and automation, objectives of orderliness, predictability and productivity are significantly advanced by these innovations. Indeed, as Taylor and Meissner (2020: 271) note, the ‘assumption behind policy demands for more and better data is that if human mobility can be made more predictable, it also becomes more controllable’. The innovations discussed in the previous section promise exactly these possibilities, although we should critically question their ability to achieve it, and in doing so speak to a desire to ‘preconfigure’ rather than only respond to migration (Leese et al., 2022).

In the annual Political Geography Lecture at the 2021 RGS-IBG, Louise Amoore examines exactly these technological emergences and their consequences for borders and migration. Subsequently published in the eponymous journal, this argument outlines ‘the deep border’, ‘a machine learning border that learns representations from data, and generates meaning from its exposures to the world’ (Amoore 2021: 2). The implication is the generation of people as recognisable to the state, not through individualised encounters and assessments but rather ‘knowable as a cluster of attributes’, nationality, religion, gender, online activities, social media postings, movements within and across territories, associations with others amongst much more (see also Leese et al., 2022). Notable here is the departure from Amoore’s (2006) much earlier account of biometric bordering that highlighted the way in which the border becomes embodied and mobile through digital technologies pervading space at and beyond any territorial lines that are given to signify borders (Amoore 2021). Digitisation, datafication and automation have different implications, generating ‘data doubles,’ ‘aggregations of people’s digital traces that then come to represent those people for purposes of policy intervention’ (Taylor and Meissner 2020: 272). The migration management that manifests through these technologies represent a form of what Rouvroy and Berns (2013: X) call ‘algorithmic governmentality,’ wherein aggregation, analysis and automation of data is underpinned by ‘a certain type of (a)normative or (a)political rationality’ for anticipating and pre-emptively controlling behaviours including migration. If such moves open space for ‘effective governance’ (Casagran et al., 2021) they do so when the ‘political suspicion of migrants is being hardwired’ (Taylor and Meissner 2020: 275) as an indisputable reality of migratory processes.

Automated Migration Management also entails new technological economies that reveal the growing indispensability of private actors in state management of migration and enforcement of border control. Martin (2021) draws datafication techniques into a broader analysis of the emergence of loosely coordinated ‘carceral economies of migration control’. In her account, migration control has become subject to increasing privatisation – not so much relocation of ownership but rather a reorganisation of authority that involves multiple layers of outsourcing and contracting. The generation of ‘status value’ is at the heart of these economies, valuing people on the move (who is to be included or excluded) as well as creating value around migration control itself, industries for detention, deportation, asylum management, finance, security, monitoring etc. Making migrant life available to datafication, automation and commodification creates economic value through the income available to the providers of technological solutions for migration management as well as the value of data extracted through these solutions and wider economic development potential (Conlon and Hiemstra 2022). Tazzioli (2022a) has advanced the notion of ‘extractive humanitariansim’ that highlights the generation of value in relation to data extraction from asylum seekers and coercion into unpaid labour described as volunteering. Engagement with technology becomes unavoidable when asylum systems are reconfigured through technological intermediations, apps to access support services, monitored debit cards, amongst other innovations, that advance securitisation while reinforcing asylum seekers’ (and other migrants’) dependence on humanitarian and other state and state-sanctioned actors (Tazzioli 2022b).

IV Digitally mediated migrations, solidarities and ethics

In parallel with the erection and intensification of digital borders in the last decade, another body of geographical and related scholarship has emerged on the digital mediation of migration. Like state actors and technology providers, researchers quickly noted the ways in which mobile people were using technologies in order to mediate and navigate migration journeys during the European migration ‘crisis’ of 2015-2016 (Nedelcu and Soysüren 2022). Much of this research involved recognition that technologies such as smartphones, GPS, online functionality and various software arrangements play a pivotal role in mobile people’s efforts to navigate terrain and connect with migration industry actors (Gough and Gough 2019; Enaji and Bignami 2019). Gillespe et al. (2018), for example, describe the articulation of digital and physical mobilities as a ‘digital passage’ wherein Syrian refugees utilise smartphone and associated infrastructures to: plan, navigate and document their journeys; maintain contact with family and friends; communicate with smugglers when other options are unavailable; and as a tool for visibility to ensure survival at sea. Even after traversing vast distances and dangerous maritime or land terrain, arrival does not signal the end of migration and its challenges – for Galis and Makrygianni (2022) digital technologies are observed as critical to practical navigation and negotiation, access to translation tools, GPS and digital maps in cities, and avoiding border control spaces in cities; practices which the authors describe as forms of ‘unbordering’.

There is a considerable focus in this research on the ways in which digital technologies enable or empower migrations and mobile people’s lives, especially in relation to precarious situations and dangerous routes. Yuksel (2022: 1838), argues that ‘the digital space of flows accommodates affordances to overcome information precarity, […] a condition of information instability and insecurity’. Moreover, echoing well established scholarship on media, communication and transnationalism (for recent reviews see Sinanan and Horst 2022; Baldassar and Wilding 2022), technology provides scope for strengthening transnational ties, working on social and cultural capital, and engaging in political action (Almenara-Niebla 2022; Labayen and Gutierrez 2021; Marlowe 2019). In relation to the latter, Yuksel (2022) notes examples of social media campaigns that emerged in 2015-16 migration situation in Europe that were instigated initially by mobile people and then subsequently supported by local communities. For Noori (2022), digital mediation can transform migrations into transnational events, especially through linkages to activist networks. In his research, the focus is on the connections between mobile people using digital technologies for navigation and invisibility to migration controls while also providing critical support through activist groups like WatchTheMed Alarm Phone project in life threatening situations. Digital activism and digitally mediated mobilities therein become articulated in practices that seemingly challenge border control.

For critical researchers of migration, there is also an impetus to undertake or amplify alternative political projects that challenge the digital control and dehumanisation of migrants. Counter-mapping and counter evidencing are examples of such work that is undertaken by researchers, mobile people and activist groups to undermine, challenge and re-vision border zones and migration routes and outcomes. Garreli and Tazzioli (2017: 11) describe counter-mapping as “a radical geography methodology which mobilizes geocoding tools to “break through” so to speak, the “silences of maps” showing what remains unrepresented in official and state cartographies”. It is thus not merely deconstruction but also reconstruction of knowledge through various technology that gives rise to ‘cartography otherwise’ (Oslender 2021). Examples include the work of the Spanish Hackitectura collective that remaps the Straits of Gibralter cross-border region and strengthens digital infrastructures for border-crossing (Oslender 2021); Anarchitekturs visualisation of European deportation procedures and tools to navigate bureaucratic steps (Casas-Cortes et al., 2017); or detailed maps of border-zones and security infrastructures that direct mobile people towards safe routes for journeying (Ellison and Van Isacker 2021). For others, the focus is on revealing the violence involved in migration management and border control, such as the production of maps of the deaths or deportation of mobile people (Mountz 2020). Grinceri (2022), in this regard, discusses the way that the ‘Against Erasure: Manus Island’ project reconstructed an interactive 3D Model of the Manus Island prison, which was used by Australian authorities for over a decade to imprison refugees in Papua New Guinea. Having been dismantled and effectively erased in 2017, the project drew on materials from archives, Google Maps, film images, interviews with survivors and other recordings to reconstruct a digital model that reveals the extreme brutality of this installation.²

The growing significance of digital technologies in migration, and in activist and researcher solidarities with mobile people, raises ethical questions. Indeed, as the previous discussion of new technologies highlights, digital forms of border control and pre-emptive migration management often use the digital traces generated in social media, amongst other sources, as key data towards governing migrations. Latonero and Kift (2018) thus assert that ‘digital passages’ may heighten risks of detection and can be leveraged as a means of surveillance and control. Marino (2022) similarly raises questions about the growth of mobile applications produced by activists and designed to help refugees navigate Fortress Europe. Like the techno-optimists of migration governance, Marino (2022) suggests many such activists are guided by an overwhelming faith in the liberating potential of technology without taking adequate account of the ways in which data collection through these same technologies can affect mobile peoples. For these reasons, Nedelcu and Soysüren (2022: 1828) suggest that digital technologies are situated in an ‘empowerment-control nexus,’ ‘the use of digital technologies – whether by the migrants themselves, by civil society actors, or by institutions – with their mediating role in processes of empowerment, surveillance and migration control.’ There is no doubt that digital technologies are used creatively by mobile people, including those peoples subject to the harshest forms of border control and migration management, but in the ‘deep border’ that Amoore (2021) describes these technologies also operate as data sources that can support the enhancement of states’ control and surveillance abilities.

For activists and researchers, then, careful thought is needed on figuring the effects of digitally mediated activities and accounts of migration. In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin (2019) places emphasis on the hotwiring of digital technologies, especially by activists who seek to subvert the technological reproduction of oppression. For researchers, she cautions against accounts that naïvely detail the creative and subversive practices of oppressed peoples and solidarity groups, advocating instead for forms of ‘thin description’. Unlike the much lauded ‘thick description’ that aims for rich in-depth accounts that can create visibility that are available to automated and AI systems of surveillance and control, thin description involves careful respect for boundaries and secrecy. If digital migration management seeks to penetrate all facets of mobility and being, ‘extracting data, producing hierarchies, and predicting futures’ (in a manner related to the ‘the New Jim Code’ Benjamin discusses), ‘thin description exercises a much needed discretion, pushing back against the all-knowing, extractive, monopolizing practices of coded inequity’ (Benjamin 2019: 46). In a similar manner, Marino (2022) cautions activists against simply developing more and more technological responses or supports for mobile people, arguing instead for a greater focus on care that protects the strategic invisibility of people on the move. These interventions differ notably from accounts that focus on revealing digital migrations in ever greater detail, even if from a critical perspective, or even more so the idea that all migration accounts (including migrants’ stories) should be digitally rendered to achieve more orderly governance (such as Beduschi 2021). Instead, the ethics of digital solidarity expressed here interrupt or disrupt the incoporation of migration knowledge into digital forms and thus challenge the authoritarian fantasy of all encompassing digital governance.

V Conclusion

Migration researchers are increasingly grappling with the role of digitisation, datafication, automation and artificial intelligence in border control and migration management. Such innovations, and their observation by geographers and others, build on the use of diverse technologies in controlling mobility that have been established and become normalised over many decades. What distinguishes recent developments in digitisation of migration, however, is the emphasis on the interoperability of different technologies and systems, on the harnessing of advanced computational power in analysis and decision making and their deployment to not only respond to but also to pre-empt and preconfigure migration. This final progress report has provided an overview of research on these trends while also highlighting their emergence in political responses to perceived migration crises, their articulation through new economies and their relationship to the politics and ethics of mobility and solidarity with mobile people.

This discussion has important links to the preceding two progress reports on infrastructures and migration industries (Collins 2021) and colonialism and migration studies (Collins 2022). Digitisation and datafication of migration manifest technological infrastructures that articulate with the elaboration of regulatory designs for migration management. So too are digital platforms evidentially becoming part of the intermediated negotiation and circumvention of migration and border control. Reinforcing points made about the links between coloniality and migration, this report has similarly highlighted how digital technologies are erected especially at the borders of Europe and North America and surveillance and data collection targeted at mobile people in or from the majority world. Epistemic coloniality is deeply evident in the material discussed in this report, as are solidarity movements that seek to interrupt or subvert those knowledge formations.

It seems likely that a focus on the digital will become a significant feature of migration studies over the coming decade. The heralding of a new sub-field of ‘digital migration studies,’ however, raises important questions for the intellectual and political agenda that the work discussed here offers, and indeed for the wider field of migration studies. Even though technologies, such as particular algorithms deployed for visa decision making, are clearly not neutral, the agency they exercise are being generated by human actors and systems (a point asserted by Renée Sieber in a recent debate in Janowicz et al., 2022). Critical work in digital migration studies cannot then be limited to a critique of technology. In some arenas, progressive work aims for participatory inclusion in technology, movements for responsible AI for example that has the objective of ‘implementing ethical and unbiased algorithms’ (Agarwal and Mishra 2021). This seems unlikely in the space of migration, however, because the authoritarianism of migration management eradicates even a pretence of participatory techno-governance. For critically oriented geographers and other migration scholars, then, the focus is likely to be on these regimes and their use of technologies, on the new economies they are constituted through, on political implications and on activist opportunities.

Additionally, the emergence of digital technologies in migration management raises again questions about the role of migration researchers as experts and as intentional or unintentional collaborators in digitally-inflected migration management. Certainly migration knowledge and theory is already part of the operation of migration governance in general terms and is, as I have highlighted here, becoming incorporated into forms of automated migration management. The risk is that migration theories that remain contested amongst researchers, and are often expressions of epistemic coloniality, become hard-wired through digitisation, reinforcing the factuality of what generates migration through a technologically valorised science of migration. Digitisation and automation carry with them a potential foreclosure of debate about the terms of migration, the differential control of mobile people and enactments of border violence. Any turn towards the digital in migration studies then, not only demands sophisticated technological literacy and assessments of the regimes technologies are deployed within, but also critical attention to the epistemic effects of digitisation alongside a recognition of the impacts of digital migration research on the lives and futures of mobile people.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Francis L Collins

Notes

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