The appification of borders: Data,migration and digitalization

Abstract

The intersection of migration, borders, and technology has been extensively studied in critical security studies, science and technology studies, law, and beyond. This article argues for closer attention to smartphone and other apps in the growing focus on the datafication and digitalization of borders. In recent years, states have increasingly made use of apps for customs declarations, visa and residence permit applications, and even claims for asylum. Such technologies are at the core of a tension between facilitation and fast mobility on one side, and the intensive need for data and prediction on the other. We contribute to the literature on datafication of borders and describe the ongoing ‘appification’ of the border in relation to three key logics. The first is the interoperation of the technical and bureaucratic infrastructures of the border and of consumer technology, in which apps are software products dependent on consumer hardware and platforms, as well as technologies of sovereign power. The second is a logic of efficiency, through which apps allow the state to more efficiently target and profile travellers as well as make time and cost savings for a range of stakeholders such as airports and airlines. The third is individualization, with apps benefiting from the wide use of personal devices and enabling more fine-grained control over mobility. To illustrate these trends, the paper draws on the cases of ArriveCAN (Canada), Customs and Border Protection One (USA), and the International Air Transport Association OneID initiative.

This article is a part of special theme on Technopolitics of Interoperability. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/techno-politicsofinteroperability

Introduction

The smartphone's near ubiquity in everyday life has extended to the international border. The digital infrastructures of border control now increasingly rely on the smartphone's hardware capabilities as well as its software applications or ‘apps’ which enable states to surveil and sort people on the move. This paper pays particular attention to apps and calls for closer attention to the ‘appification’ of border controls within work on the datafication and digitalization of borders. ¹ While interactions between people on the move and borders have long marshalled digital technologies to scan identity documents or customs declarations, only recently has a more direct connection into the very software of the border been possible, especially on personal devices. The border is increasingly ‘appified’ in the name of health, efficiency, and consumer-friendliness (see Frowd et al., 2023). Apps extend the polysemic nature of borders along new lines, with data used in assessing one's admissibility for entry into a country now generated, or provided through, in-app interfaces prior to one's arrival at the physical borders. Unlike data that exist in ePassports or passenger name records (PNRs) shared between airlines, individuals are using apps as platforms to become datafiers and curators of their own data, digitizing their identity in ways not only required by state authorities but also through the lens of their own interpretation of what makes them admissible to authorities. Apps, within this changing border architecture, increasingly become the platforms through which state authorities ‘see’ the data of travellers, and how travellers make themselves ‘seen’. Building on the trend of increased use of smartphone-based platforms by corporations, non-governmental organizations, among other non-state entities, states use apps for customs declarations, visa and residence permit applications, vaccine declarations, and even for asylum applications. While ‘trusted traveler’ initiatives such as the NEXUS program between Canada and the United States, or the electronic travel authorization system of Canada have been used for some time to ‘speed up’ border security and customs clearance processes, the introduction of pre-clearance apps such as ArriveCan and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) One as well as the International Air Transport Association's (IATA) One ID initiative signals a trend towards the development of smartphone-based apps for data-driven border and customs pre-clearance.

The intersection of migration, borders, and technology has been extensively researched across the social sciences and humanities, examining the role of practices, discourses, performativities, and technologies of border security. Apps remain a relatively new area in this research, yet are worthy of sustained attention by virtue of their extension of what they do to and for border controls: a greater capacity for individual targeting, legitimizing the border by making it more convenient for some, and enabling more physical and temporal distance between the sovereign decision of (non-)admission and the person moving. By engaging with what we call ‘appification’, we extend these bodies of literature by asking three questions: What is the appification of border security and migration management? What are the logics underpinning it? How are these reflected in contemporary uses of apps?

We argue that the appification of border security and migration management represent new directions in many of these practices. While appification, in some contexts, present an extension of existing inequities, discrepancies, and ‘exclusionary ontologies’ (Mountz-Galvez, 2024), in other uses, they represent a further stratification and differentiation, as well as opportunities for what Cheeseman (2022) refers to as ‘self-sovereign identity’ (SSI) practices. Along with deepening and widening of sorting at the border, the use of apps contributes to new forms of individualized data collection and tracking, the rising importance of software in security practice, and more public/private partnerships. There is a burgeoning and complex ecology of border and mobility apps, which include but are not limited to: (a) apps that effectively do little more than download perfunctory functions to users, like the United States’ Mobile Passport Control (MPC) that do little more than promote travellers to fill in forms that would otherwise completed by CBP employees; (b) more robust apps that serve as the access point for migrants to the immigration system, such as CBP One; (c) apps used by border agencies and agents themselves to communicate, assess, and manage borders and mobility; and (d) apps that are used by humanitarian NGOs and activists in migration advocacy. Our analysis in this article examines apps that are focused directly at border-crossers and envision them as users and participants of, rather than simply subjected to, border controls.

We analyse the appification of borders through three cases. The first is that of the CBP One app used by US CBP to allocate asylum appointments to migrants in Mexico. The second is ArriveCan, an app used by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) as a means of ensuring travellers provided Covid-19 test results and proof of vaccination alongside their customs declarations. The third case is the IATA OneID, a project seeking to digitize travel documents and make ‘contactless’ travel easier. These cases are a cross-section of the state of the art: apps aimed at a broad set of vulnerable outsiders, citizens, and privileged air travellers. They also centre our attention on how the datafication of the border is happening outside the well-trodden ground of EU border security. Our analysis of these applications is conscious of the connection Light et al. (2018) make between the app as a technical product and its broader cultural context. While not using their ‘walkthrough’ method because we do not principally focus on app interfaces, we concur that ‘analysing an app requires attention to its embedded sociocultural representations as much as its technological features or data outputs, which also have social and cultural influences’ (Light et al., 2018: 885). We glean these through the analysis of key texts including news sources, policy documents such as technical specifications and privacy impact assessments (PIAs), which are supplemented by our ongoing qualitative interviews with policy elites in Canadian, US, and international institutions.

The remainder of the article proceeds in three main sections. The first provides a reflection on the state of the art of the literature on the uses of digital tools and interfaces in border security and migration management practices. The second section of the article looks at what we refer to as the ‘appification’ of border security with emphasis on the driving logics of infrastructure, economy, and individualization. The final section examines the cases of CBP One, ArriveCan, and OneID. The conclusion summarizes the argument and reflects on four areas for further research raised by appification.

Digital tools and interfaces in migration and border studies

Consistent with the digitalization of borders, applications are fundamentally software artefacts. This trend has been widely explored in critical security studies, critical border studies and cognate fields in works related to ‘smart borders’, and the digitalization of borders (e.g. Amoore et al., 2008; Broeders et al., 2017; Dekkers, 2020; Leese et al., 2022; Valdivia et al., 2022). Similarly, within science and technology studies, there is a vibrant literature on digitization and datafication that often relates back to borders, identity, and mobility (Cheeseman, 2022; Madianou, 2019; Masiero and Shakthi, 2020; Masiero, 2023; Micheli et al., 2020; Sadowski, 2019; Weitzberg et al., 2021). Many of the earliest contributions on this theme focused on emerging applications of digital biometric technologies at borders, often alongside a broader concern with the emerging common borders of the European Union. Van der Ploeg's (1999) work on the body/border interaction highlights the role of IT-driven biometrics in this mediation, itself drawing on feminist studies of technology and critiques of humanism in the work of Hayles (1999) and Haraway (1991).

After 9/11, there was growing interest in the so-called ‘smart border’ in Western states. The US-Canada Smart Border Declaration signed in December 2001 (CNN, 2001) explicitly framed smartness as a software-driven endeavour (biometrics such as retina scans were mooted) to balance the restrictiveness of security with free flows of trade. Digitization of biographic and biometric data via the introduction of ePassports ‒ and a global shift away from paper travel documents ‒ created the platform through which new data-based solutions were introduced at the border. Software solutions have since been introduced to help achieve the dual imperatives of flow and filtration that remain a recurring feature of border management. Of course, the smart border catalysed trends already in place well before the turning point represented by 9/11, amplifying differentiation at the border (Muller, 2008), such as the NEXUS trusted traveller program. Scholars focused on this turn to smartness emphasized the role of passports and databases (Salter, 2004) and identity biometrics (Muller, 2004; Pugliese, 2010) as means of filtering travellers at international borders. This phenomenon is deeply imbricated with parallel moves towards European integration in the area of security, and Broeders (2007) identifies the expansion of internal controls within the EU and its growing reliance on databases as intertwined phenomena indicating how the border is ‘shifting from the borders to the societies of the EU’ (73).

While the discourse of ‘smartness’ is fading in policy and scientific circles, there is now a thriving literature on the ‘datafication’ of international borders. Datafication is both about the enhanced technological and bureaucratic systems for capturing data, and a logic of governance that sees the marshalling of personal data as a necessary condition for effective border and mobility management, not dissimilar from earlier accounts of ‘governing through risk’ (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007). This is reflected in the range of perspectives within this special issue; most contributions refer to the growing use of data processing, algorithms, and device-driven workflows in border security. Datafication refers not only to the practices of states but also the role of the digital more broadly in migration, introducing private, public, and individual citizens as actors into the fold on discussing the role of data in everyday border security and migration management. A considerable body of literature already exists on PNR data (e.g. Duez and Bellanova, 2012) and the uses of data in risk management practices (e.g. Amoore, 2006). Similarly, irregular migrants’ use of smartphones and their centrality to their navigation of border security controls is the subject of considerable scholarly work (e.g. Gough and Gough, 2019), in some cases evoking a ‘digital passage’ which emphasizes the smartphone as a device but also their ‘associated infrastructures’ (Gillespie et al., 2018: 2). Some scholars such as Kocher refer to the ‘Janus-faced nature of smartphones’ (2023: 4) to highlight the ambiguity inherent in the deployment of digital devices and systems around borders, even as forms of resistance, such as the Transborder Immigrant Tool also work to empower migrants and contest the border (Nadir, 2012). The possibilities for care and control in the use of border apps are a key reason why we should pay attention to the drivers and consequences of their deployments.

We find a number of opportunities for further research in this area, mostly around three key poles. First, while there is considerable literature on automation, appification only overlaps partially with work AI and automation in border studies. For example, the American ESTA travel authorization system is almost fully automated but lacks many of the software features of an app. On the other hand, the IATA's One ID project discussed here does not automate most user interactions but is largely intended as a piece of smartphone software. The specificity of the software application, particularly relying on mobile forms of consumer hardware like smartphones, demands analysis of its particular conditions of emergence but also of its similarities to other elements of the datafication of the border security ecosystem. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic has been the catalyst for all forms of ‘touchless’ interactions at the border and a driver of individualization of control through one's own device (which goes beyond one's own biometrics or traveller profile). This form of technical interaction with the border is in continuity with existing forms of datafication but represents a shift in technical form that is worth exploring in greater detail. Finally, mobile applications are not simply individual software packages but also integrate into broader technical infrastructures. This urges us to push existing studies of interoperability in security studies further, to account for the unique mix of public and private actors and techniques they bring into border controls. In the next section, we provide a more systematic view of appification and our analysis of the principal factors in its emergence.

Appification

It is helpful to begin our discussion of appification with defining the ‘app’ as an object, before turning to the process by which this form has gained traction in the world of border security. At the simplest level, we are talking about ‘software applications’ which ‘are a subset of computer programs: they are computer programs that solve particular, often singular, user needs – originally, business needs’ (Pressman 2005, in Light et al., 2018). Ranging from word processors to games, ‘apps’ have become a household staple of everyday life. The app as a phenomenon, as Light et al. (2018) note, has come to greater prominence with the rise of ‘app stores’ for mobile phones, but software applications are much longer established. They speak of ‘appification of the digital media environment and the decline of the open web’ (2018: 884) operating simultaneously, emphasizing that while apps are just software, they are often closed, self-contained bundles of code that are ‘a kind of infrastructure’ (887). Apps are also a membrane between the Cloud and the User (Bratton, 2015: 237) and for others, an uneasy intersection between transparency and opacity of interfaces and algorithms (Valdivia et al., 2022).

Datafication of border management is an ongoing process changing most aspects of human mobility, from the way travel documents function to how travel tickets are purchased, and the proliferation of apps is moving this dependence on data even further. Therefore, appification is well within the broader turn towards datafication in governing or managing people on the move. Scholarship in critical border studies tends to emphasize the border as a space of exception where sovereign power's effects are particularly sharp, a line of argument that is often in relation to or critique of Agamben's work on biopolitics (see Salter, 2008; Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Johnson, 2013). Here, appification of the border refers to an evolution in technical and practical terms of this larger logic of the border, which it can conceal, amplify, and extend through digital technologies and private providers, impacting the user experience (UX), while preserving the decisionist power of sovereignty. Recent attention to the use of applications for the extension of sovereign power have largely focused on digital responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on how they enact stratified forms of control (Goggin and Zhuang, 2023), blur the boundaries of care and control (Kim et al., 2023), and lead to a ‘co-production’ of security across public and private (Markussen, 2023). These trends are all present in the forms of digital computation now ensconced throughout the spectrum of borderwork, whether in infrastructures at airports, the transformation of travel documents, and the pre- (clearance) and post- (e.g. quarantine) crossing phases of movement. In the case of borders, we argue that there are three main logics of appification: infrastructure, efficiency, and individualization. By logics, we refer to a framework akin to Cheesman's (2022) use of ‘competing logics’ to show how ‘countervailing social processes can operate simultaneously’ (142). We note the obligatory caveat that there cannot be a perfect isolation of drivers and impacts, or causes and consequences, but there is a significant mutual constitution and reconstitution of these elements, often through the ‘app’ discourse of the ‘patch’.

Infrastructure

Firstly, appification is a product of a shifting infrastructure of border technology. By infrastructure, we refer to the fundamental physical and organizational structures, facilities, and systems necessary for the operation of a society, in this case the backbone of border security technologies. Infrastructure serves as the framework and foundation upon which various activities, functions, and services depend. Mobile applications exist at the intersection of software, infrastructure, and are at once technical bundles (of code and much else) as well as representations of broader sets of social and technical relations. Dieter et al. (2019) propose that apps be understood through the stores, interfaces, packages, and connections they bring to bear, noting that ‘the notion of apps as entirely self-contained also belies their involvement in the data flows of multi-sided platforms and their necessary entanglement with varying hardware devices and digital infrastructures that make their operations at once possible and, indeed, valuable’ (2019: 2). Mobile apps have a clear ‘situatedness’ within infrastructures be they technical, social, economic, and so on (see Gerlitz et al., 2019). What we call ‘appification’ is dependent on a data infrastructure one might refer to as a platform, which Masiero (2023)–referring to digital identity systems–describes as consisting of a set of core and complementary functions. While we do not consider infrastructures and platforms to be identical, they share an emphasis on technical components and linkages. Apps are inseparable from platforms as they are in many ways the complements (software code from developers) dependent on certain core functions into which they connect (app stores, operating systems, or social networks). This infrastructure ranges from ePassports, to biometric databases, to PNR data. We discuss the significance of data to border security and the rise to prominence of data infrastructure actors in relation to the appification in more detail below. The infrastructure of border technology vis-a-vis appification forms the backbone of data-driven processes that are essential for collecting, storing, and making data accessible and usable.

The infrastructural elements of technology and its interoperability have been understood in various ways including through the metaphor of the ‘stack’. This situates border control tools at the intersection of various platforms whether they are corporate app stores (e.g. iOS and Android devices) and their various policies, but also tools such as APIs (application programming interfaces) which enable interconnection and modularity. App stores regularly have strict curation standards that can be political, and/or socio-technical, as evidenced by Apple's rejection, acceptance, and rejection of an app that sent users push notifications of US drone strikes (Matsakis, 2017). Josh Begley, the designer of the thrice rejected Drone+ app, asked when defending his thesis at NYU: ‘Do we really want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our smartphones?’ (Gregory, 2014). We may ask similar questions of the appification of borders, as analysing these apps helps to unravel the complex interrelationship between the securitizing and militarizing trends in contemporary border and mobility management and the alleged contradictory forces of neoliberalism. Here, we see the infrastructure of border technology shifting towards greater integration of personal devices (mostly smartphones) and bringing in the software infrastructure that follows from it. This moves the border to our pockets, and with it, exclusionary and securitizing tactics in contemporary border and mobility management. Cheesman describes this as ‘self-sovereign identity: user-controlled, decentralised forms of digital identification’ (Cheesman, 2022: 135).

Efficiency

Secondly, appification is often underpinned by a logic of efficiency in the management of travellers flows and limited resources. This is at once about managing limited public sector resources but also about the long-standing desire of border agencies to process growing numbers of travellers within existing border and airport transit spaces which operate as global mobility choke-points. In her analysis of Canadian border officers’ work at commercial customs facilities, Côté-Boucher (2014) describes how tight budgetary conditions have made border agencies ‘concentrate resources on interdicting high risk mobilities’ (18). This is certainly the logic behind trusted traveller programs which seek to speed up mobility and reduce the resources spent on people considered to be a relatively lower risk, modelled on the multi-lane or multi-speed management of border mobility. In other ways, however, the diminishing cost of computing has made it possible for all travellers, risky or not, to be subject to some form of datafied surveillance. In this way, the smartphone app operates as a means of ensuring low-cost, self-service modes of digital interaction with the border that belies the conventional differentiations of border mobility management that emerged post-9/11, in favour of a consumer-centric, equal suspicion model.

The app's promise of efficiency is rooted in its ability to marshall diverse resources into one point of interaction. Recent studies of interoperability in the context of mobility/borders have highlighted its role beyond the technical realm, as a policy formation device (Trautmansdorff, 2023), but also the efficiency arguments that buttress claims to interoperability in its relation to border databases deployed both inside and outside the EU (Oliveira Martins et al., 2022). Bellanova and Glouftsios (2022) further the task of highlighting the political aspects of interoperability, also in the context of EU security databases, and show how ‘formatting’ as well as tinkering are reflective of broader normative commitments about security as well as ideas about efficiency. Beyond the much-studied EU databases, interoperability is the harbinger of efficiency in some work on digital identity, where it is seen as an antidote to siloing and platform lock-in not only from a resource standpoint but also to ensure that a digital identity is ‘fully portable, user-controlled and secure’ (Lim, 2020: 102). The rise of border apps is in part due to the strictly financial benefits they are said to (but often do not) provide, as well as a broader purpose of optimization through technical efficiencies and interconnections. Apps facilitate downloading functions to the user, both for financial parsimony and deeper biopolitical performance of state power. This is closely related to the question of circulation in the Foucauldian sense, which he ties in Security, Territory, Population to the emergence and functioning of free markets. Salter draws on the idea of circulation in mobilities research to argue that movement and blockage are both part of the logic of circulation, in the absence of coordination and intentionality (2013: 5).

Individualization

Thirdly, border apps rely on and accentuate the growing individualization of the border experience, spurring a consumer-driven understanding of the border that offloads and individualizes responsibility. This reinforces the segmentation identified in earlier literature on trusted traveller programs (e.g. Muller, 2010). The smartphone's sheer proximity and connection to the human body it accompanies makes it a unique vector of surveillance, with the device effectively ‘appropriated’ into security practices (Markusson, 2023). This is a marked departure from other forms of intelligence gathering such as PNR or the analysis of advanced passenger data, which are widespread even in relatively lower-tech or resource-poor environments. This tailor-made, individualized experience of the border, however, diverges from a simple intelligence-led approach to targeting passengers and is part of a more obvious and declared ambition of border agencies to give (some) people on the move: (a) greater control over their data and documentation and; (b) integrate border formalities and other aspects of the travel experience. The individualization of the border experience is double-edged, along lines of desirability as defined by class and citizenship. For some, this means more specific targeting and exclusion, while for others a more autonomous travel experience, amplifying earlier attempts to simultaneously accelerate the mobility of some and slow the mobility of others, based on specific risk assessments and categories of suspicion. On the way to the ‘appified’ border, both groups contend with more data-driven surveillance, and the lines of differentiation can blur rapidly.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a catalyst of this individualization, in part due to the expansion of the border function, undertaken to prevent disease transmission, including the pre-arrival sharing of individual health/vaccination information, combined with strategies to reduce human interactions within transit spaces. This is part of the individualization of control, but also dovetails with the growing emergence (in part a rebranding) of ‘touchless’ biometric technologies such as facial recognition. Aradau and Tazzioli (2021) note that the Covid-19 pandemic produced heterogeneous and stratified forms of bordering, and describe what they call ‘hygienic-sanitary borders [as] bordering mechanisms which introduce or multiply exclusionary processes grounded on hygienic rules that individuals are expected to follow’ (2021: 7). This emphasis on individual sanitary choices is reflected in a number of applications bringing together testing/vaccination data for border crossing such as the EU's Covid Digital Certificate as well as Canada's ArriveCan, the latter of which discussed later in this paper.

Appification also reshapes, in some contexts, the border-crosser as a user in addition to a citizen or traveller, with those who fit the desirable racial and class categories imposed by western states having a much more empowered (and optional) relationship to the apps they use. Apps themselves are often the product of a cross-pollination between ecologies of app development and UX design from consumer mobile applications, both of which now make their way into the world of border control. This is closely related to the consumer-centrism of the border and the individualization of controls discussed above, but also highlights the importation of UX and other interface questions from the world of tech into the world of borders. Projects like One ID discussed below explicitly frame the app as a means of regaining control over one's journey and one's identity data. Even in the case of CBP One, where the app is framed more of a gateway than a new space of agency, the border-crosser still interacts with it as a user, a category we are rather more familiar with ascribing to border officials.

CBP One

As part of a broader push towards digital services, US CBP launched the CBP One app in October 2020. However, its full functionality that enabled the submission of personal data allowing the user to schedule appointments at Ports of Entry (PoE) in the American Southwest went live in January 2023 (Department of Homeland Security, 2023). CBP One was intended to be a single portal through which various border-related transactions could be completed: the submission of I-94 immigration forms; checking border wait times and plans; and the uploading of personal details and scheduling of appointments are just some of the many features that CBP will likely add over time. The January 2023 ‘reboot’ of the CBP One app was also the Biden administration's singular approach to opening the border under conditions of the Covid-19-related Title 42 closure (see Del Bosque, 2023) which gave the government exceptional powers to turn back migrants in the name of public health. The CBP One app was packaged as a response to the Title 42 related backlog at the US-Mexico border. While subtly individualizing the border, its various defects demonstrated the systemic racism, ageism, and other forms of exclusion that were codified into its hardware-software ecology.

Infrastructure

The CBP One app is an emerging infrastructure of bordering that draws on a range of tools that are in turn enabled by the smartphone's hardware features. As is often the case for Homeland Security programs, the internal PIA for the project is instructive as to data gathering and processing ambitions. CBP One's PIA notes that ‘[GPS] coordinates will be sent to CBP to determine whether the submission is occurring within a CBP-defined proximity to the US-Mexico border’, which restricts the ability of migrants to book appointments if they are not sufficiently close to the border ‒ with the smartphone's GPS connection acting as a truth-telling device. According to CBP, only contact details are associated with the personal file. Financial information, location data, identifiers and user content is allegedly not linked with one's personal file, according to CBP's privacy information on the Apple App Store. However, as Cooke highlights, mobile phone manufacturers tend to emphasize the protection of personal information in the form of content data. This is ‘top down’ privacy protection. In contrast, metadata is often in a grey area subject to ‘bottom-up’ practices such as ‘jailbreaking’ which is not part of the casual user's use and management of mobile phone. This bottom-up data protection relies on both knowledge and an activist ‒ or ‘hacktivist’ ‒ approach to protecting metadata and rendering it transparent (Cooke, 2020).

One of the main aspects of appification around borders is the evolving code architecture of the software itself. CBP One is dependent on app marketplaces such as the App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google). While updates are typical of most apps and indeed often a benefit for the end user, Kocher (2023) highlights how ‘glitches’ in CBP One are not simply technical, but also a means of writing off contestation of the app's very functioning, with the agency ‘characterizing complaints as bugs to be resolved in future software updates’ (2023: 8). Glitches are a core part of the CBP One app's infrastructure, and a study by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) found that clients reported that ‘the app frequently crashes, refuses to accept their photos, or has a faulty geolocation mechanism, preventing them from successfully making appointments [and] some errors are even labelled “fraud detected”, causing distress for asylum-seekers who believe they are being accused of a crime’ (Parness, 2023). UX errors that might be benign for a restaurant booking app produce tremendous legal and human rights risks when deployed in the context of interoperation between asylum law and the technical means guaranteeing access to US border authorities and the asylum and immigration process.

Efficiency

The US CBP's approach to datafication has occurred in a dual context of high demand for entry to the United States along the southern border with Mexico, as well as concerns for traveller convenience. There is a broader app ecosystem for access to the US border which includes MPC (for quicker passport inspection) and CBP Roam (designed for advance declaration by pleasure boaters). CBP One is also influenced by a growing e-government ‘single-window’/one-stop-shop customer service mindset, which apps enable. While the border experience is heavily stratified by class and citizenship status, all of these apps work towards reducing resource strain on the public authorities but also on the ‘customer’, the person on the move, envisioned as an end user of the software.

One of the main raison d’être for CBP One is its function to organize asylum appointments along Southern US Ports of Entry, for those present in regions roughly north of Mexico City all the way to the US-Mexico border. In the 13-month period from January 2023 to February 2024, 64 million requests were made through CBP One (Montoya-Galvez, 2024). Individuals can check for and request appointments daily, and the application functions as a means for the US government to distribute appointments and ration access to the immigration system. This raises considerable risks relating to the right to asylum, with Amnesty International claiming that ‘in practice, use of the CBP One app is the only way for asylum-seekers from some nationalities to seek asylum’ (2023: 6). Access to asylum without an appointment is now highly restricted. In addition to the obvious requirements for asylum-seekers to possess the necessary hardware to access the immigration system via the CBP One app, it also facilitates an additional space of exclusion and denial.

Individualization

One of CBP One's most controversial features has been its use of the mobile phone's front camera to submit pictures for liveness detection and identify verification. The app requires a video selfie for appointments at the US-Mexico border, building on the (smartphone) hardware that migrants are assumed to have (which raises its own array of exclusionary considerations, particularly given existing systemic biases that portray migrants as ‘primitive’, see Muller, 2012: 139). In some cases, glitches with the photo capture are directly related to race and in some cases age. Children and non-white faces can pose insurmountable challenges to the app. Such embedded racism and other identity-related malfunctions in identification technologies such as biometrics have been well argued (Browne, 2015; Magnet, 2011; Pugliese, 2010). Entrenched in discourses of objectivity, identification technologies such as biometrics often masquerade as solutions to the ‘human’ problem of racism, discrimination, and forms of exclusion and mistreatment that follow from this. However, as analysis has shown, the genealogy of these technologies is a story of how embedded prevailing forms of exclusion based on race, gender, and class are (Browne, 2015; Pugliese, 2010; see also Cole, 2002). These are in turn amplified through forms of social sorting (Lyon, 2002).

The US asylum system was essentially short-circuited at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic through the use of Title 42 exclusions, effectively orchestrating a temporary shutdown of the right to asylum (the Biden administration extended this measure). Title 42, the social distancing demands of Covid-19, existing datafication trends, and government agencies’ ongoing quest for cost-cutting measures created the confluence out of which a proliferation of border apps emerged. While apps individualize control, they also blend the individual into broader structures of data processing, as is the case with CBP One's potential inclusion of individuals’ selfie images into large scale one-to-many facial recognition databases, in which ‘entirely unclear whether asylum-seekers have consented to having their faces transferred between various agencies’ (Amnesty International, 2023: 10). The downloading of state functions to the individual enhances the biopolitical confessional aspects of the PoE experience, thus reinforcing the performance of sovereign power by the individual vis-à-vis the app. Instead of questioning oneself prior to the PoE inquiry or the immigration interview, one is (always and) already participating in this self-examination through the app, rendering the border and the affiliated sovereign power mobile and ubiquitous from the moment of download.

Arrivecan

The ArriveCan application was launched by the Government of Canada in April 2020 in response to the new legal requirements imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. This application was intended to facilitate the online submission of travel documents such as testing documents as well as the description (for assessment by border officials) of quarantine and self-isolation plans for travellers entering Canada by land and air. ArriveCan was jointly developed by the CBSA and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). Its principal legal basis resides in enforcement of the Quarantine Act which gives great powers to the federal government including over admissibility to Canada. In theory, conformity to the law does not have to be in electronic form ‒ and even at the height of the pandemic travellers made use of paper-based backups to the app with Health Canada officials. The pandemic context for the deployment of this application has shaped its reception by the public. With large fines levied for non-compliance, including when caused by many glitches and mistakes, ArriveCan came to stand in the public imagination as the symbol of zealousness in public action to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. In this section, we assess its infrastructural, efficiency, and individualization impacts.

Infrastructure

ArriveCan's principal purpose was as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, mostly as a means of ensuring that travellers to Canada could at a distance fulfil the requirements around testing and vaccination imposed at the Canadian border, as well as provide details on their quarantine planning. The ArriveCan application necessitated a speedy rollout, like many other Covid-19 applications for contact tracing, and was distributed through existing platforms for iOS (App Store) and Android (Google Play Store) users. ArriveCan is first and foremost a software artefact, rendering it vulnerable to the surprises such tools often spring. One such event generated erroneous alerts to iOS users urging them to quarantine – with the threats of fines up to $5000 and prison time for breaking these rules (CTV News, 2022). This was described as a technical glitch by the CBSA as well as in the media coverage of the event, but should also be seen as an effect of the new infrastructure of borderwork. Regardless of the authorship of the glitch, the reliance on platform-specific software tools means that the sovereign decision around the border is no longer totally in the hands of the border officer alone, and in being a software effect is further removed from intentionality. Such episodes contributed to undermining public support for this application and increasing political scrutiny of its functioning.

ArriveCan also fits into a bureaucratic infrastructure, in which public officials have had to become not only technical adjudicators of apps’ functionalities in relation to what CBSA calls ‘business requirements’, but also players in technology ethics discussions through participation in internal consultations on this theme. Some CBSA staff we spoke to during this research had strong reservations about the use of commercial providers, especially non-Canadian ones, and typically expressed a strong preference for ‘in-house’ technology design. As we see below, this infrastructure is not only an ethical one but has ramifications in terms of the political economy of appification.

Efficiency

The development of ArriveCan was mostly carried out within the CBSA, even though its development was a joint endeavour with the PHAC. Officials working on this application were keen for it to be lightweight, low-cost, as well as minimizing data retention. As information about the initial and real costs of ArriveCan have entered the public realm, controversy over this piece of software has moved from its enforcement of the border to its place within public service procurement. The logic of appification typically revolves around efficiency, in this case the streamlining of health verification processes that would otherwise be slower (in the crowded airport), more cumbersome (using paper forms) and less safe (face-to-face with a border guard or public health official). Yet according to the Auditor General of Canada, ArriveCan's costs went from a planned $80,000 to over $54 million ‒ a 67,400% cost increase. The claim to efficiency was further diluted when two developers, Lazer Technologies and Tribal Scale both produced ‘clones’ of the ArriveCan app in a matter of days, with public-facing code to boot (Globe and Mail, 2022). It should be noted that this application was not tested to work with ‘federal government backend systems’, which reflects the fact that the requirement for interoperability may be a key factor undermining the resource savings promised by appification of the border.

Today's public debate on costs and contracting around ArriveCan has begun to overshadow many of the ethical concerns of the technology and the data collection. Although the prohibitive cost of ArriveCan has led to various sorts of scandal, both its cost and thin usage were sheltered from more ardent criticism in the context of Canadian Covid-19 political discourse. In the context of public messaging that urged the population to be vaccinated and participated fully in a panoply of public health measures, similar to most conditions of political exception, any forms of critique were easily discredited as ‘anti-vaxx’. As a result of this narrowed political discourse, together with a declared state of exception, the possibility to criticize ArriveCan more robustly was hindered significantly, leaving the most stinging criticisms to arise recently, long after lockdowns and vaccination mandates.

Individualization

ArriveCan became infamous, at the height of the pandemic, for its association to what were perceived to be heavy-handed punishments and fines for breaking quarantine rules. In some cases, non-citizens were denied entry to the country. The application was roundly criticized by mayors of border cities, airlines, and airport authorities for discouraging travellers and damaging tourism. While families residing at a same address could file a single request through ArriveCan, the application's functioning required the creation of individual traveller profiles. Further, ArriveCan integrated with elements of the ‘post-border’ experience, effectively becoming a tool of inland individual border enforcement through home quarantine inspections, of which about 700,000 were carried out as of 2022, often by private security companies contracted to the federal government (Global News, 2022).

While Canada's emergency measures around Covid-19 have been rescinded, the application has found a home at the heart of the infrastructure of the Canadian border, as an advance declaration tool similar to the MPC app in the United States. This enables it to process the border declaration that air travellers might otherwise have to fill out in physical customs kiosks on arrival at a Canadian airport, downloading frequently used functions to the travelling public for marginal reward.

IATA One ID

One of the central elements of the ‘smartness’ of the border, including in the pre-digital era, has always been the passport. The passport as a technology for the control of mobility and the exercise of sovereign power over admission (see: Salter, 2003; Torpey, 1999) is increasingly subject to the datafication underway in the area of border security. For instance, e-passports increasingly include machine-readable characters and digital biometrics which are in turn internationalized and made interoperable through standards around travel set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The passport and other travel documents, such as visas and proof of vaccination, are also subject to the trend towards greater ‘appification’, notably through projects like IATA's proposed One ID. OneID is being trialled in Europe and Asia and IATA already delivers training on it. One ID is IATA's effort to provide digital travel documents as well as what it calls a ‘contactless’ travel experience (IATA, 2023a). In so doing, One ID relies on digital wallets most likely on travellers’ smartphones and seeks to produce interoperable and ‘seamless’ experiences of sovereign power (border crossing) with those of consumption (airline ticketing, personalized airport shopping offers).

Infrastructure

The trend towards greater digitalization of travel documents has operated through multiple often overlapping or competing initiatives. As a result, it has run into problems of standardization, with multiple actors working towards similar ideas in uncoordinated ways. The European Commission's new Schengen strategy of 2021 (‘A strategy towards a fully functioning and resilient Schengen area’) called for the Commission to present a ‘proposal for a Regulation on digitalisation of travel documents and facilitation of travel’ in 2023. Member states have noted this and Finland reported having been in contact with the Commission about soliciting funding for a pilot project using mobile devices (euronews, 2022). Ukraine is one of few countries where digital documents issued through its Diia e-government app have the same legal force as paper documents, including the passport for foreign travel (UkraineNow, 2022). Yet attempts to produce digital travel documents in the past have been mostly successful when common and enforceable technical standards, like the ICAO's Doc 9303, have provided a backbone for interoperability between state and other issuing authorities. This has been the Achilles heel of other pilot projects more limited in scope, such as the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI), a proposed pilot endorsed by the World Economic Forum that would have enabled ‘passportless’ travel between Canada and the Netherlands. The KTDI is a public–private partnership working with Montreal Trudeau and Amsterdam Schiphol airports, and key proponents of the project such as Dutch official cited in a key KTDI document point to the successes of registered traveller and automated border control gates as a justification for further moves towards digitalization. The KTDI's flaw may have been its limited scope or its reliance on blockchain – right as the hype around this technology has been diminishing – but it is also due to the European Union's own digital travel plans (Financial Post, 2022). As is the case with many other border apps, pre-existing infrastructure and credible standards are crucial to successful rollout.

The ICAO's role in standard-setting, debated elsewhere in the literature (Walters and Vanderlip, 2015) is central in the feasibility of programs such as One ID and the underlying apps (IATA Travel Pass). The ICAO's document around standards for what it calls ‘digital travel credentials’ (DTCs) outlines three types of digital documents: one derived from the existing travel document, a second derived from an existing travel document with a physical component that can be on a physical device (such as a mobile phone), and a third which can effectively replace the underlying e-passport or similar (ICAO, 2020). The IATA's efforts to ‘digitalize’ identity for travellers are designed with this technical infrastructure in mind, in a way that is interoperable but not dependent. The IATA's own documentation notes that a digital wallet can work with DTCs but ‘industry can still create a digital identity by reading the information stored in the ePassport chip to make processes more secure and efficient’ (IATA, 2023b). The DTC being focused on travel documents, and the One ID being focused on a range of uses (including commercial) for a broader digital wallet, the scope of the IATA's project requires greater interoperability which in turn requires an infrastructure open to more platforms and app providers.

Efficiency

As with ArriveCan, the objective of digital travel documents is to increase throughput at key international travel points such as airports. This is also in line with the IATA's principal focus on airlines and airports. The ICAO's DTC standard notes that digital credentials will not replace physical documents for the foreseeable future, with the exception of countries who have reciprocal trusted traveller programs built on top of this infrastructure (ICAO, 2020). This enables One ID to build on top of an existing regulatory and technical infrastructure. It is also worth noting the relationship between security and facilitation is also fundamentally one about resources. In the pursuit of speed and efficiency, the technical requirements for the strictness of matching between document bearer and the travel credential can be relaxed, in what IATA calls a ‘business decision’, to facilitate mobility in conditions in which the traveller likely has their physical travel document on hand (Lin, 2022). The assumption here is that the passport may not be transcended, but simply ‘appified’ to expedite travellers’ trips as is already the case through other programs such as trusted traveller registration.

Beyond the questions of efficiency, so crucial to the travel process, there is also a broader political economy behind One ID in terms of training and other materials. IATA positions itself as a pedagogical organization, providing 4-day courses around this project including ‘One ID: Digital Identity and Biometrics Fundamentals’ (|USD 2850) and ‘Passenger Facilitation’ (USD 3345). This is not dissimilar to other organizations’ efforts in this space, whether it is the International Organization for Migration or ICAO, in terms of ensuring the standards and interoperation of complex border management and travel systems. IATA also has a much more obvious commercial rationale for making identity interoperable, describing what it calls a ‘travel value chain’ (IATA, 2023c) which includes airport shops and airline ticketing.

Individualization

The IATA One ID is based around the concept of digital form of SSI, a concept which emphasizes the individual's ownership of data, and consent around sharing bits of this data in particular transactions (e.g. with an airline or border authority). SSI emerged partly in response to critiques about privacy and databases, and growing public awareness of the technical and ethical limitations of government data collection. It is paperless but moves away from ‘data about you that you don't own’ (databases, PNR etc.) towards a more individual or empowering approach. Travel document ‘apps’ such as IATA's One ID (with roots in an earlier effort called IATA Travel Pass, which had a branded app) largely share similar logics of justification around the types of screening they enabled, particularly around the individualization of control we discussed earlier. These build on existing infrastructures within individual devices such as the iPhone's ‘Secure Enclave’ (Pax International, 2021).

One ID follows in the footsteps of earlier efforts in making travel procedures, especially around security and border control, as granular as possible. Looking back at the KTDI, for instance, documents state that decisions on admissibility ‘will be based on the individual traveller and their assessed level of risk rather than a blanket risk level primarily based on an individual's country of origin’ (World Economic Forum, 2018: 21). Such individualization of control is also structured by assumptions that paper/physical travel documents are cumbersome and pose forgery and privacy risks in addition to the inconvenience of having to be shown multiple times during a journey. As one IATA fact sheet notes, with paper documents travellers ‘do not control their data and do not have a choice but to disclose all the information on the document that may not be necessarily needed to get services or go through the processes’ (IATA, 2023d). The ability to personalize travel processes is at once the promise of greater freedom but also the ability of sovereign power to reach further into the pockets of people on the move.

Conclusion

This article has argued that we are in the midst of an ‘appification’ of the border, a process which brings the digitalization of border control into the form of software bundles typically downloaded to travellers’ mobile devices. Travellers have long had to exchange biographical and biometric data for mobility purposes, whether through early travel papers or contemporary forms of digital biometrics. The rise of consumer-facing mobile technology, and its attendant infrastructures such as app stores, smartphone GPS and camera hardware, has extended the geographical and temporal dislocation of the border through app-based interfaces. Geolocated migrants are now expected to capture a selfie to request asylum appointments, while other travellers are directed to apps to make customs declarations in advance or even to replace their passport entirely. We have found that three trends in particular underlie this phenomenon. The first is a pre-existing infrastructure such as major mobile software platforms (iOS, Android, and the like) but also GPS systems, border databases, and airline systems, which apps help to make interoperable. The second is a logic of efficiency through which apps become harbingers of efficiency and speedy mobility, helping the state target travellers more effectively but also envisioning the person on the move as a user and customer. The third tendency is towards the individualization of control, with apps reliant on the ubiquity of personal devices as well as new combinations of interoperable personal data, purchase, and geolocation information. This enables more specific targeting of individual travellers and reduces the pertinence of risk profiling derived from national, population-wide characteristics.

Appification of the border has a number of consequences that each call for further research. Firstly, while appification is an extension of how data comes to inform the application of sovereign power at the international border, it further downloads the performance of sovereign power to people on the move. This is noteworthy because the process itself is one Markussen (2023) refers to as the appropriation of consumer devices, which are in turn symbols of private (technology companies) authority. This is particularly notable in shifts towards digital identity, through which individuals armed with a smartphone can manage multiple aspects of their travel ‒ passports, airline bookings, and much else ‒ remotely. Secondly, appification is dependent on existing infrastructures such as iOS or Android operating system platforms, which in turn makes the sovereign state reliant on complex and overlapping private standards for app approval and distribution. This has an unpredictable effect on the power of the state that requires further investigation in context. On one side, state power grows in reaching down into personal devices. On the other, it forces negotiation with private providers whose interests may lie in privacy and facilitation rather than security. Thirdly, consumer logic is reinforced at the border. Projects such as the IATA One ID explicitly build on the idea that customers expect the border to function in line with other app experiences such as shopping. Appification produces the border as a technical but also a UX and interface question. Fourthly, the rise of border apps adds a further layer to the power of transnational authority in border control. While ArriveCan and CBP One are mostly national responses, OneID explicitly builds on and adds to emerging international standards on digital identity. In the case of border apps, interoperability is a technical question of hardware and software infrastructures but also a political one around global systems and standards.