Author: Emily

From surveillance to solidarity: the political implications of digital monitoring in conservation and migration

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Naomi Millner.

During the mobilisation of migrant solidarity and anti-racist protests in the UK last summer, digital technologies – particularly smartphones – played a pivotal role. These devices became lifelines, with group chats buzzing with updates about far-right activities, tactical advice and legal guidance. The same platforms were also used by far-right groups, with live TikTok feeds and other social media channels attempting to galvanise ‘protests’ and reinforce anti-migrant narratives. Such use of digital technologies is clearly mediating new and contrasting forms of collective political action in relation to migration and mobilities.  

The mobilisations were part of a broader wave of unrest across the UK in late July and early August 2024, following a tragic killing of three girls in Southport. Misinformation quickly spread online, including claims that the perpetrator was a Muslim immigrant. This sparked violent riots, where mosques, migrant centres and hotels housing asylum-seekers were targeted.

The events illustrate how the internet and social media are transforming the way people receive information, form opinions and engage with others. Some describe these new forms of connectivity as a series of interlocking echo chambers where opinions carry rapidly along social networks without entering meaningful dialogue, fostering polarisation and extremism. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in this context, and the incorporation of algorithms that prioritise engagement in social media over accuracy has further intensified the spread of sensationalist and often false content.

On the other hand, notions of echo chambers and even polarisation have been called simplistic, relying as they do on conventional ideas of the political left and right, a glossing of what information individuals are exposed to, and an easy dismissal of populist views as being naïve and/or manipulated.

Emerging technologies in migration and conservation surveillance

The impact of new digital technologies is not limited to social media reporting on migration. As this blog series has already explored, governments and corporations increasingly employ advanced technologies such as satellite monitoring and AI-driven predictive policing to control migration flows and enforce border security.

The world of environmental conservation is sometimes imagined as being separate from migration, the former configured by a geography of protected areas and wildlife reserves, the latter linked with state borders, administrative processes for legislating il/legal movement and asylum seeking, and the configuration of associated rights. But today, the two are far more entangled, especially where biodiversity is a major subject of international geopolitics. As I have shown in my own work (Millner 2020; Millner et al. 2024, the definition of the borders of protected areas is increasingly used to control groups considered ‘risky’ by the state – including Indigenous groups and ethnic minorities – while conservation technologies such as drones can be turned on people for surveillance purposes as well as wildlife. In these areas, migrants, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and political activists are frequently collapsed together to portray an abstract threat of ‘global terrorism’ and thus authorise special military powers and actions.

Drones are used to maintain a regime of fear in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India (image: A. Pawar and T. Simlai, 2022)

In the world of global conservation, we have seen a trend of what political ecologists call ‘green securitisation’, where agendas of historical racism and Indigenous genocide are greenwashed to justify them to a global audience. In countries from Guatemala and Colombia to India and Tanzania, state exceptional powers have been enabled for protected areas, based on claims that national biodiversity is threatened by poachers or ‘potential nature destroyers’.

In South Africa’s iconic Kruger national park, for example, militarised methods and technologies have been used to control illegal migration from Mozambique by the coding of migrant groups as potential poachers. State-of-the art military technologies (including helicopters and drones) combine with media interventions that cultivate hysteria over the peril of individual animal species (rhinos, in Kruger) to legitimise strong-handed interventions.

Meanwhile, satellite technologies, especially GIS systems, have long been celebrated for their potential in environmental conservation, enabling the early monitoring of forest fires and quantification of forest loss. However, such imagery has been significantly co-opted for state control in conflicted places such as the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, satellite data intended to monitor deforestation is often manipulated to favour corporate interests and counter-activism, with enforcement actions disproportionately targeting small-scale farmers and Indigenous communities.

Social movements and digital resistance

Despite the potential for digital technologies to be abused, social movements and activists have found innovative ways to use these same tools for resistance. In the Amazon, Indigenous groups from across Péru, Ecuador and Colombia have harnessed GPS devices, drones and smartphones to document illegal logging and land grabs, providing tangible evidence to support their claims and rally international support. Through such forms of monitoring, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) may create counter-narratives to official state reports and highlighting the agency of marginalised groups.

In my own research in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala, I have seen forest-based organisation ACOFOP foster a new kind of expertise focused on RGB sensors mounted on drones. In conjunction with tablets or smartphones, images collected by drones are used to monitor forest cover and potential fires but have also been used to evidence effective management by rural communities in the face of false claims.

Community drone users from across Latin America share new skills to manage and protect forests in a workshop in Guatemala led by Naomi in 2023 (image: C. Doviaza)

Historical continuity or new power relations?

The deployment of digital technologies, particularly AI and drones, clearly represents a significant shift in the global exercise of power, especially in the governance of migration. These technologies enable states and other actors to predict, monitor and control migration flows with unprecedented precision. This capability not only strengthens traditional border enforcement mechanisms but also introduces new actors – such as private tech companies – into the complex power dynamics surrounding migration. As monitoring technologies are deployed in contested conservation spaces, private interests often collaborate with states to develop and deploy surveillance technologies, blurring the lines between public and private interests in migration governance.

Yet, digital technologies also offer avenues for resistance. Marginalised communities and social movements are leveraging digital tools, from smartphones to drones, to challenge dominant narratives and expose the underlying agendas of state and corporate actors. Just as indigenous groups in the Amazon have utilized GPS devices, drones, and satellite data to document illegal deforestation and land grabs, so NGOs and activist networks use social media and real-time communication tools to assist migrants in distress and document human rights abuses at borders, thereby contesting the biopolitical control imposed by states.

In this sense, the example of drones in conservation resonates with the ‘autonomy of migration’ perspective, which has long been active in critical migration studies and critical geographies. To assert the autonomy of migration is to assert the primacy of migration, which is to say, it is an originary and creative force, which precedes all forms of state-based citizenship and state-making. Rethinking anticipatory technologies of migrant tracking, for example, places clear imperatives on states to keep up with migrant movements to maintain a sense of sovereignty. But digital technologies also have the potential to mediate infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care by people on the move. This shows the possibility of (re)claiming digital technologies into alternative productions of knowledge and more-than-human creativity.

Naomi Millner is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. She works at the intersection between political geography and political ecology, focusing on rural environments undergoing transformation in Latin America. She has recently been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to develop PEATSENSE: Diverse Knowledges and Sensing Practices in Peatland for Inclusive Climate Futures.

Bolsonaro’s paradox: a far-right leader’s pro-immigration strategy?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Maeli Farias.

Immigration is a highly politicised and election-defining issue. Across the Global North, conservative, liberal, left-leaning and far-right leaders alike typically adopt hostile, dehumanising stances toward immigrants and refugees, as most explicitly exemplified by Donald Trump’s US presidency and what has become known as ‘fortress Europe’. Similar anti-immigrant policies and attitudes exist in the Global South. However, far-right rhetoric on immigration in this region often follows a different model. This blogpost explores one such case, that of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022) in Brazil.

Although Bolsonaro’s far-right government was retrogressive on many human rights issues, it maintained and even expanded entry programmes for immigrants and asylum seekers, diverging sharply from the practices of many far-right leaders in the Global North, including his ally, Donald Trump. Despite often expressing xenophobic and hostile rhetoric toward immigrants and refugees, Bolsonaro strategically leveraged Brazil’s progressive immigration framework, developed through the early 21st century, and a generally favourable public perception of immigration to advance his political agenda both domestically and internationally. His case highlights how border controls, as a naturalised and widely accepted feature of modern statehood, are employed across the ideological spectrum to serve specific political interests.

Operation Welcome Shelter Rondon 1, Boa Vista, Brazil, January 2020 (image: author’s own)

Since 2015, a severe shortage of essential goods, widespread socio-political unrest and deprivation in their country have triggered mass displacement of Venezuelans across Latin America, including Brazil. Instead of closing its borders or clamping down on the new arrivals, the Brazilian government, then led by President Michel Temer, launched Operação Acolhida (‘Operation Welcome’) in 2018 to receive Venezuelans arriving at the northern border. It is instructive to note that the crisis in Venezuela did not meet the conceptual frame for asylum under the Geneva Convention of 1951. As such, requests by Venezuelans fell outside the normative international framework for refugee status approval. Strikingly, instead of refusal and deportation, the Brazilian government used the Cartagena Declaration and MERCOSUR residency rights to create legal pathways for Venezuelans to enter and settle in Brazil. Operation Welcome also offered voluntary relocation to migrants once admitted to the country, helping them to move from remote border areas to cities where they would have greater employment and public service opportunities.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right nationalistic politician, was elected president a year after the launch of the Venezuelan humanitarian response. Given his radical rhetoric during the campaign, fears grew among those working in humanitarian, civil society and migrant support circles that the programme response would be dismantled. Indeed, one of Bolsonaro’s first acts as President was Brazil’s withdrawal from the UN’s Global Compact on Migration. Yet, to the surprise of many, his government maintained and expanded the Operation Welcome initiative. It committed significantly more resources, further easing entry and migration status regularisation pathways for Venezuelan migrants in Brazil. Furthermore, the administration did not revoke or alter any regulatory measures that facilitated the migration and regularisation of other nationalities in Brazil, such as Haitians, Afghans and Syrians.

Whenever I share my experiences working with immigration in Brazil during Bolsonaro’s administration, people are often surprised to learn that a far-right government supported pro-immigration policies and facilitated the regularisation of immigrants who otherwise would be considered ‘illegals’. It is important to emphasise that Bolsonaro is not a pro-immigration president – far from it. His rhetoric on immigration often aligns with the violent stances and interventions of other far-right leaders.

His seeming pro-immigration approach can be explained in three ways. First, it was ideological. Bolsonaro leveraged the Venezuelan migration issue in support of his opposition to socialism. He often referenced the fact that Venezuelans were ‘fleeing socialism’ to support anti-leftist narrative. In effect, he supported Venezuelan migration to Brazil because in his eyes it vindicated his political messaging that conservative, right-wing actors were the humanitarian actors and ‘socialists’ were not. Second, the Brazilian welcome programme was strongly supported by international agencies such as UNHCR, IOM and EU Humanitarian Aid. The US government also funded the scheme to the tune of USD 46 million. Thus, far from being an exclusive national programme, it had financial benefits and international dimensions that made continuation politically and diplomatically advantageous for the Bolsonaro administration.

‘Brazil shelters Venezuelans fleeing socialism.’ President Bolsonaro tweets about his visit to Operation Welcome in Boa Vista, 30 January 2022.

A third factor is Brazil’s relatively positive public perception of migration. Unlike other countries shaped by settler colonialism, Brazil has continued to embrace its multiethnic identity and history, making immigration a less politically contentious issue. Although xenophobia persists – particularly at the local level and toward specific groups – it has not become a dominant theme in national discourse. This comparatively open and progressive stance has gradually been institutionalised in governance frameworks, reflecting a broader shift in South American migration policies that began at the close of the 20th century. Brazil’s 2017 Migration Law-13.445/17 exemplifies this trend, emerging from a participatory legislative process grounded in a strong human rights orientation, emphasising the non-criminalisation of irregular migrants.

Within this context, Bolsonaro was able to navigate and utilise an already-established, inclusive legal framework, even as his public rhetoric remained openly anti-immigration. Preliminary findings from my ongoing doctoral research further indicate that, despite the progressive design of programmes such as Operation Welcome, these initiatives often reproduce patterns of marginalisation, particularly for immigrants and asylum seekers who are racialised as non-white. In practice, Brazil’s ‘welcoming’ approach remains selective, failing to guarantee dignified integration and leaving these populations to confront systemic obstacles in accessing rights and settling in Brazil.

In conclusion, taken at face value, the Brazilian case challenges simplistic assumptions about far-right politics and immigration. However, Bolsonaro’s approach reveals how immigration policies, far from being purely ideological, are often strategically contextual, shaped by history, public opinion, geopolitics and vested interests. It invites broader reflection on the complex realities behind human mobility, migration management and how power structures often shape humanitarian responses to fit particular narratives rather than being purely about doing the right thing.

Maeli Farias is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. She previously worked for two years in the humanitarian response ‘Operation Welcome’ in Brazil and most recently served as a Research Associate on the MMPPF (Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World) project at the University of Bristol. Her research explores the anthropological dimensions of narratives and everyday experiences to examine critical issues in contemporary migration, such as colonial legacies, belonging and social inequalities.

To read more blogposts on migration and mobilities in Latin America visit the MMB Latin America blog. And to see the full SPAIS Migration Research Group blog series visit the group’s webpage on the MMB website.

On mobility and ‘meetingness’ in academia

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By Charlotte Lerg.

In July 2024, Charlotte Lerg (University of Munich, Amerika-Institut) and Charlotte Faucher (University of Bristol, School of Modern Languages) were able to meet to work on a grant application thanks to the support of MMB. The project looks at the relationship between diplomats and the media in Europe (including Britain) and the US. As they began shaping this research project between Bristol and Munich they exchanged e-mails, logged onto video calls and co-wrote texts in shared documents. They also involved colleagues from our various research groups, including MMB and Manchester’s Culture of Diplomacy, which gathers (online!) academics from the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. However, it was their in-person meeting over the summer that really propelled the project forward. Having two uninterrupted days to bounce ideas off one another, ask questions to each other about how we envisaged certain aspects of the proposal, and also keep ourselves motivated over coffee and meals was priceless.

The following text was written by Charlotte Lerg after this July meeting.

 As I was waiting in transit at Heathrow Airport on my way back home, I reflected on the role of such in-person meetings for academic culture.

Thinking about this historically, we could ask ourselves how medieval and early modern scholars were able to maintain detailed academic discussions, often over years, entirely based on the exchange of letters, sometimes never meeting in person. However, while a letter certainly does not substitute an in-person encounter, these ties could be a lot stronger than the modern-day networks that are often mediated by technology. In fact, epistolary practices in early modern culture often involved a considerable commitment to an imagined co-presence in a republic of letters.

(Image by Rodrigo Pereira on Unsplash)

The perceived value of in-person encounters for academic discourse can be seen in the way the so-called transport revolution, that came with industrialization, very quickly led scholars to congregate on a regular basis. Around the year 1900 there were about five times as many international academic conferences as just two decades earlier. World exhibitions became convenient occasions for the newly emerging and professionalizing academic associations across the Western world to hold international congresses. Peter Burke has termed this development the ‘steam age in the republic of letters’. Academic gatherings in person remain central to how higher education works and yet, in most other areas of life thinking has begun to move away from steam-age disregard for natural resources. We are also increasingly questioning the social hierarchies of travelling for leisure or edification. Why is the republic of letters struggling to fully embrace the digital age?

In 2003, when the internet was still relatively young and the turn to user-generated content and multi-directional online communication was only just on the horizon (MySpace was founded in 2003 as was Skype; platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Zoom were still a few years away), sociologist John Urry contemplated the role of travel in increasingly transnational social network-formations. He observed an intriguing correlation in the growth of travel (both in frequency and distance) on the one hand, and advances in communication technology that could potentially replace in-person contact on the other. He posited that the larger but looser networks facilitated by technology were made up of weaker ties than previous networks, because they required less commitment in their creation and maintenance. In order to be meaningful, therefore, they had to be periodically shored up through in-person meetings.

The emergence of social media has proven that point: the difference between ‘knowing’ someone digitally or in real life has become more pronounced. Dwelling on this issue, Urry introduced the notion of ‘meetingness’ to discuss the added values of physical co-presence for professional as well as personal meetings. He also underscores two other components: the flow of in-person conversation and the impact of mutual commitment to the meeting. Even if bracketed by small talk, it remains extremely challenging to create a digital conversation space that enables an organic exchange of speech and gesture cues or the collaborative development of ideas as can occur face to face. Moreover, there is something to be said for the difference in our mindset depending on whether we just log on to a meeting and then off again or, instead, plan, arrange, fund and undertake a journey. In short, putting ourselves physically into a different place also puts us into a different headspace. In academia, especially, these two components of ‘meetingness’ can hardly be underestimated – even if they remain somewhat elusive – whether the potential for innovation in a free-flowing conversation or the value of co-presence in body and mind.

When Covid 19 hit and we were suddenly all conferencing online, some suggested this could ring in a new phase of academic exchange, no longer dependent on the ability to travel. There were indeed several arguments in favour of this vision. Logging onto a video call certainly requires less time and less money than taking a trip. Consequently, it is also a lot less disruptive to family life and more compatible with care commitments. Moreover, while it requires some technological equipment and ideally a stable internet connection, it is also more inclusive socially and geographically. Finally, in times of climate change and environmental crisis, fewer academics flying around the world just to deliver a keynote or say a few words at a panel must seem like a good idea.

And yet, as the pandemic ebbed the academic circuit soon resurged. Many rejoiced in finally meeting colleagues again in person and argued that, after all, the most productive moment of a conference was the coffee break, which despite some efforts in virtual reality, could not be recreated in the digital world. But is it really just the social side of these intellectual gatherings that makes them so fruitful or is there indeed something to the unique quality of ‘meetingness’ in academic practice? And if we conclude that the digital world remains a limited alternative to co-presence for academic networks, how can we seek ways to make academic mobility more inclusive and sustainable?

Charlotte Lerg is Managing Director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies at Munich University. Her second monograph considered the multilayered intersections of the academic world, the diplomatic milieu and the public sphere (2019) and she has also published numerous articles and edited volumes on cultural diplomacy from the late 19th century through to the Cold War.

Charlotte Faucher is Lecturer in Modern French History at the University of Bristol. Her first monograph Propaganda, Gender and Cultural Power (2022) examined French cultural diplomacy in Britain through the lens of gender. She has also published on global soft power, as well as the French resistance during the Second World War.

‘El Carrusel’: digitising the US-Mexico border with(out) the CBP One app

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Martin Rogard.

Many people had been waiting in Mexico for months to make their asylum claim legally in the US when, at midday on 20th January 2025, all CBP One appointments with the US Border Force were suddenly cancelled. The CBP One app, which was the only legal land asylum route for people arriving at the US’s southern border, was discontinued the moment Donald Trump’s inauguration began.  

The MAGA wing of the US Republican Party had long campaigned to shut down Biden’s controversial CBP One app, claiming it had become a back door facilitating undocumented immigration into the US. I spent two years researching this app – and the various claims made about it – for a chapter of my PhD thesis on the digitalisation of bordering practices, only to realise that it would be discontinued overnight. But how did this app compare to the COVID-era asylum ban that Trump has now effectively reinstated?

The US-Mexico border fence at Tijuana, 2021 (image: Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash)

Far from the open border policy its detractors portrayed it as, the CBP One app – which has previously been used to automate commercial travel processing – became a mandatory pre-registration step for all non-Mexican US asylum seekers arriving by land. This new protocol, which included a 5-year asylum ban penalty for non-compliance, made:

… people who traveled through a third country but failed to seek asylum or other protections in those countries ineligible for asylum in the United States… [except for those people who can reach central and northern Mexico and make an appointment]… through a DHS [Department of Homeland Security] scheduling system (AIC, 2023; see also Federal Register, 2023: 31399).

Since the app was the only such ‘scheduling system’, the protocol effectively forced asylum-seeking individuals and families to wait in Mexico for months by making their asylum eligibility contingent on securing an appointment through a glitchy, geofenced and data-harvesting lottery system.

CBP One has therefore been part of a shadowy binational bordering scheme colloquially known as ‘El Carrusel’ or ‘the merry-go-round’. The majority of people who made their long journeys to the restricted locations in Mexico where the app could function were swiftly targeted by the heavily militarised Mexican migration governance regime, which included parastatal security agencies such as the ‘grupo enlace’, which claims to enforce government contracts. Migrants report being forcibly bussed back down to Mexico’s border with Guatemala before they had a chance to pre-book or attend their CBP One appointments. Others who evaded ‘El Carrusel’ became highly visible targets for extortion, abduction, theft, exploitation and torture. As a Human Rights Watch report (2024: 4) states, ‘The more difficult it is for migrants to cross the US-Mexico border, the more money cartels make, whether from smuggling operations or from kidnapping and extortion.’

Migrants who did manage to attend their appointment on time after clearing the app’s highly data extractive preliminary security checks were subjected to a ‘credible-fear’ interview. Those deemed convincingly fearful of persecution were granted admission into the US under a temporary, criminalised and precarious status known as ‘humanitarian parole’ while they waited for their asylum decisions – the majority of which were denials, expeditiously followed by detention and eventual deportation.

The CBP One policy has recently been replaced with Trump’s renewed ‘Remain in Mexico’ asylum ban (an indiscriminate policy officially known as ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ or MPP). In the US, as elsewhere, election cycles tend to be punctuated with big promises of ‘fixing’ the broken asylum system and/or finally ‘securing’ or ‘taking back control’ of national borders. Beneath the rhetoric, however, MPP, CBP One and Trump’s recent flurry of ‘emergency’ executive orders only maintain the status quo: they subject racialised people fleeing persecution and violence to further suffering and containment, failing to meet the standards of international law or provide truly accessible, safe and legal routes for asylum.

Despite the recent termination of the CBP One app as an asylum tool, much of my research remains relevant because it speaks to broader patterns of border digitisation that are expanding states’ reach far beyond pre-existing democratic and legal limits (see also Albert Sanchez-Graells’ post on AI and MigTech in this series). CBP One was repurposed for asylum processing during the COVID-19 pandemic with little public attention. At the time, humanitarian shelter workers in Mexico were tasked with filling out questionnaires on the app on behalf of asylum seekers under a deceptive US government promise to expedite their claims; in reality the app was introduced alongside restrictive immigration policies ‘that sought to increase penalties for crossing the border unlawfully, even to request asylum, and greatly reduce the number of migrants eligible for asylum’ (Kocher, 2023: 6).

But the CBP One app was never just the efficacious ‘scheduling tool’ that the DHS claimed it to be. It was principally a mass-scale data-gathering experiment that exploited undocumented migrants in order to extract a large-scale, non-cooperative dataset featuring biographic, biometric and live-location information. These data were avowedly shared across an equivocal ‘law enforcement community’, likely to train risk-predictive policing algorithms (AIC, 2025: 6; Longo, 2017: 150-153).

As Matthew Longo explains in The Politics of Borders, contemporary ‘smart’ borders have become increasingly reliant on large risk-predictive algorithms in order to ensure that ‘the good [are] let in quickly, and only the risky are slowed down… a process that depends heavily on data’ (Longo, 2017: 141; see also Travis Van Isacker’s post in this series, ‘Who’s in the fast lane?’). These large algorithms are known as ‘convolutional neural networks’. They work by combining the users’ biometric data (facial recognition, iris scans, liveness checks) and biographical data (travel history, gender, age, recent contacts) to build adaptive and multi-layered ‘risk profiles’. The more data they are fed, the better these so-called neural networks allegedly become at predicting and flagging potential ‘criminals,’ ‘terrorists’ and ‘impostors’ prior to any crime, attack or threat having taken place.

Before the CBP One app, for legal and practical reasons, the US’s physical borders were its primary site of personal data accumulation and surveillance. There are restrictions around the private information states can uncooperatively capture from non-citizens outside their jurisdictions. By requiring prospective asylum seekers to book an appointment via a smartphone while they waited in Mexico, the US decentralised and expanded its surveillance capacity far beyond preexisting limits. Conveniently, the geofenced app – requiring live location and prohibiting VPNs – forced its users to remain in Mexico. Since CBP One users were outside its jurisdiction, the US could shed its accountability for the human rights abuses asylum seekers faced while waiting across the border.

The app required the latest phone technology, updated software and stable broadband, excluding anyone unable to meet these expensive requirements. Its limit of four language options also disempowered those who didn’t read English, Spanish, French or Haitian Creole as well as anyone without good literacy skills. Similarly, the app’s so-called ‘glitches’ and design choices, prevented its users from correcting mistakes, contacting support or speaking to a human. The app automatically deleted profiles flagged as spurious, disadvantaging families and/or people with similar names and/or facial features (see, for example, Kocher, 2023: 7-8).

While this ‘smart’ digitised asylum system promised efficiency, its black box design prevented accountability and transparency for the harms it caused. Furthermore, as Human Rights Watch (2024: 26) explains, the insufficient number of appointments available on the app was presented as being due to ‘limited capacity’. Yet, this limited capacity largely reflected the US government’s prioritising of removal proceedings and hyper-securitised bordering over humanely processing asylum seekers.

By amassing vast archives of personal data from non-citizens, which were then shared domestically and internationally without their informed consent, the CBP One app fuelled a new wave of discriminatory and abusive bordering practices. Sold as a ‘technological fix’ this digitisation only perpetuated cycles of violence and disempowerment while expanding the US’s imperial reach beyond existing democratic, physical and legal limits.

Martin Rogard is a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Bristol. His research explores how artefactually mediated practices of memory-making and forgetting constitute and unsettle (b)ordering processes in the North American borderlands.

After border externalisation: migration, race and labour in Mauritania

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New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Hassan Ould Moctar.

In March 2024, the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement with Spain and the European Commission, the stated aim being to address a surge of unwanted migrant arrivals on the Canary Islands. While unprecedented in financial scope, this was just the latest in a long line of border externalisation strategies that have been implemented in Mauritania. In 2006, Spain and the EU adopted a range of military and surveillance measures off West Africa’s Atlantic coasts, opening a new period of migration control cooperation with West African states. Despite two decades of such efforts, the past year has seen both unprecedented sea arrivals in Spain and – more concerningly – unprecedented deaths on the Atlantic route.

For many scholars of migration and border policy, this persistence of deaths and unwanted arrivals occurs not despite the strategy of border externalisation, but because of it. Many have long illustrated how such policy approaches typically create more ‘irregular migration’, and thus more of the social condition of migrant illegality. Building upon these insights, my new book After Border Externalization: Migration, Race and Labour in Mauritania (Bloomsbury, 2024) examines how this process interacts with the social and historical landscapes of the contexts in which EU migration management increasingly operates. To this end, it analyses how externalisation intervenes within pre-existing histories of bordering and population management in Mauritania (chapters 3 and 4). It then takes an ethnographic turn, asking how the condition of migrant illegality interacts with the social relations that have emerged from this history (chapters 5, 6 and 7).

As such, the book is motivated by a desire to overcome the Eurocentrism that necessarily underpins EU border externalisation policies, but which can also seep into the scholarship, as critical migration and border studies scholars have suggested. To this end, I have drawn on ideas of Samir Amin, who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’ and wrote a short book on the topic. In Amin’s view, the geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean was central to the Eurocentric ideological project; it acts as the source of a Eurocentric universalism which asserts that ‘the only possible future for the world is its progressive Europeanisation.’

Looking at this geographic imaginary from its margins in Mauritania unveils the contradictions of the historical juncture in which externalisation unfolds. On the one hand, externalisation is conditioned by the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, in particular the division of the Senegal River Valley into the territories of Senegal and Mauritania, and a racialising colonial imaginary dictating who belongs on which side of the Senegal River. These developments were consistent with the ‘define and rule’ strategy of indirect colonial rule that Mahmood Mamdani has analysed, whose logic resonates in contemporary international development and migration management projects, as I show in chapter 4.

 At the same time, however, the form of this colonial legacy is shifting as externalisation unfolds. While Mauritania has periodically figured in the EU’s geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean – through the 5+5 dialogue and the Union for the Mediterranean – it has in recent years become more salient in its capacity as a Sahelian state. Drawing from interviews with officials in the permanent secretariat of the G5 Sahel in Nouakchott, my book argues that the Eurocentric universalising goals of the EU’s Mediterranean geographic imaginary – exemplified in norms such as democracy promotion, human rights and good governance – are giving way to a more security-driven imaginary of the Sahel. At the same time, this region has seen an unprecedented challenge to European dominance in recent years. Together, these facts yield epistemic openings that were not present at the time of Amin’s original writing of Eurocentrism. 

To examine these, the book’s ethnographic chapters foreground migrant agency, detailing from this perspective the social relations in which the condition of migrant illegality is infused in Mauritania. I start in the northern port city of Nouadhibou, detailing a dynamic interplay between Europe-bound migrants and an apparatus of externalisation in the city, before then illustrating how this interplay sits within the political economy of Nouadhibou. While European capital no longer dominates the scene in the city, the EU continues to play a crucial role in facilitating transnational capital flows, as its production of migrant illegality enables the labour exploitation of a precarious and transient workforce.

This Europe-bound transience is key in the context of Nouadhibou, but an exclusive focus on such Europe-bound trajectories also obscures the living legacies of colonialism. For this reason, I am also interested in the Senegal River Valley town of Rosso, which straddles the colonial border between Mauritania and Senegal. Turning my attention to migrants who weren’t on the move to Europe when I met them, I have contrasted their prior experiences of EU border violence with the relative lack of illegality in Rosso. In its absence, a violent history of racialised territorial belonging that I detailed earlier in the book resurfaces. Here, it takes the form of a rice industry that was erected against the backdrop of a spate of expulsions and dispossession in the late 1980s, which acts as the primary employer of migrant labour in the town today.

My final ethnographic chapter moves to the capital city of Nouakchott, where experiences of illegality and border violence are common. But the colonial legacy of racialised territorial belonging means that Afro-Mauritanian nationals can also get caught up in migration policing operations. The line between national and non-national is further blurred by the fact that such operations dovetail with an urban cleansing drive, and therefore often extend to everyone rendered ‘surplus’ and forced to survive on the urban margins. From this perspective, externalisation is the most visible element of a broader regime of spatially managing the racialised outcasts of contemporary capitalism.

It’s important to foreground the agency of those at the receiving end of this triad of illegalisation, racialisation and economic abandonment, and I conclude the book with a reflection on how those encountered in previous pages interpret their own agency. The response to this question opens a window into a non-Eurocentric universalism of the kind Samir Amin envisioned when he first wrote Eurocentrism.

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS University of London. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research examines how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. His recent book, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania (2024), is published by Bloomsbury and available via Open Access here or in print with a 35% discount (use the code ABE35 by 24th October) here.

Home and researching home from near and far

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By Nyi Nyi Kyaw.

My self and my work

I am from Myanmar and most of my academic work on identity, displacement, migration, mobility and immobility focuses on this country. Having been (self-)exiled and displaced for a number of years I have had the opportunity to think about and research home from near and far, and yet I have to admit that it is taking an increasingly heavy toll on my thinking head and feeling heart.

Since the 2021 military coup in Myanmar I have had the privilege of teaching, mentoring and informally advising several Myanmar students, researchers and academics. We talk all the time and even text about Myanmar – our home. We miss it. But we have to or choose to research home, which has become the bane of our existence and work.

My academic work before the coup was privileged in the sense that I could always go back to Myanmar and research home at home, in addition to visiting family and friends. Now I can’t. These days I tell myself and others that I am both homesick and fieldsick. By homesick, I mean I miss home like any other person from Myanmar who is now (self-)exiled and cannot go back there for any reason. By fieldsick, I mean I miss my field because I can’t go home, visit places, meet people, and talk to people for research.

Myanmar, viewed from Thailand at the Mae Sai-Tachileik land border crossing, December 2023 (image: author’s own)

Where is home?

Where is home for scholars of displacement who are themselves displaced or (self-)exiled? For me, home is Myanmar. In recent years I have been fortunate enough to see it from across the border a few times, and yet I have still felt that home is far away. I have always returned from the border relieved that home would go on with or without me, but dismayed at the prospect that it would be different, most likely worse, when I am finally able to return. When home is fine, I can deal with homesickness. But my home bleeds, burns and suffers – it is being destroyed through tyranny, crisis and displacement. Then I feel the double blow of homesickness and pain for my country.

As an academic I sometimes have the feeling that I can keep in touch with home through reading, discussing and writing about it. But is this really home? Or am I encountering a virtual version of it? But must home be a physical entity? Or could it be an idea or a feeling? I still can’t find satisfactory answers to any of these questions.

Multiple homes in multiple locations at multiple times

In the past four years I have been based in Germany, Thailand and, most recently, the UK. I have encountered multiple homes or multiple Myanmars in all these places, depending on the time and circumstances. Very early on, just a few months after the coup, I arrived in Germany with memories of disturbing events and scenes from home. But the situation in Myanmar was not as bad as it is now, and the Spring Revolution was not yet in full swing. I had high hopes for a good future for all of us, and yet, as a political scientist, I was deeply concerned about what would or could happen next. In Germany, I was largely out of touch with my political folks, most of whom were still in Myanmar but about to flee to neighbouring countries, especially Thailand. Home felt so far away for me.  

But after I moved to Thailand in late 2022, the resistance was getting stronger and the displacement and humanitarian crisis was already worsening. Thailand is physically very close to Myanmar. I reconnected virtually and face-to-face with old friends and acquaintances in the political world and made new ones. I met all kinds of displaced people. Home felt closer, and we talked and texted about home all the time. I became part of the world of Signal, which became arguably the most popular channel of communication among people of, from and still in Myanmar. Also, I could sometimes see home from across the border.

Recently I moved to the UK and home feels very remote again. But this time I have brought many fresh memories, good, bad and mixed, and home does not seem as far away as it did when I was in Germany. So does this mean that home is indeed a feeling, a memory or an idea?

Researching home or homes

How do I research home now? How can I do it differently? Admittedly, losing access to Myanmar means that I have lost the privilege of doing research at home, with significant implications for topic selection, generalizability and multi-sited fieldwork and ethnography. But I am still digitally connected to people inside and outside the country, though I have to be extremely careful about what I tell and ask people inside, respecting their safety first and foremost, and also their privacy.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Over the past few years, I have been working on various types of displacement and forcibly displaced people in and from Myanmar. While one field site has closed, others have remained and new ones opened. Myanmar refugees, asylum seekers and migrants of all sorts, alongside the more established diaspora, are now dispersed across Southeast and South Asia and further afield. And many of my key informants, who are also my political people, have relocated outside of Myanmar. I also have new informants that I met after the coup. They are no less enlightening. I can move from place to place, meeting and talking to all kinds of people, displaced, exiled or self-exiled, about our homeland and our new homes or temporary shelters.

If home is made up of ideas, feelings, memories and people then it is everywhere. And for now, at least, I must be content with a home of this kind.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Marie Curie Fellow in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His Marie Curie project examines the nexus between conflict, displacement and (im)mobilities with a focus on Myanmar since 2010. He previously held the position of Research Chair on Forced Displacement in Southeast Asia at Chiang Mai University. You can read his recent article about young people under Myanmar’s military rule in The Conversation here.

The nation and its others

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By Bridget Anderson.

Hostility to migration and claims about the negative changes that it brings are increasingly being mobilised to fan racism. At the same time, some of the most prominent anti-migration advocates are themselves people of colour. How can we understand the current relationship between the politics of race and the politics of migration?

While hostility towards migrants is growing across all regions of the world, each country has its specificities. In recent years in the UK, the prevention of Channel crossings by people in ‘small boats’ has become a stated political priority of both the Conservative and Labour parties, and the failure to carry this out, together with rising immigration more generally, is regarded as a source of ‘legitimate grievance’.

This was the reason given for last summer’s riots in England – the motivation was thus labelled as ‘legitimate’ even if the violence was condemned. There were arson attempts on hotels where asylum seekers are housed, and immigration advisers were also targeted. However, those singled out were not only asylum seekers; mosques and shops were also attacked. What mattered were not passports and immigration status but the colour of people’s skin: rioters blocking streets allowed ‘whites’ to pass, but not ‘non-whites’. For the rioters, ethnic minority citizens are ‘migrants’ and, regardless of rights or legal status, they simply do not belong.

In migration studies, there is increasing interest in ‘migrantisation’: the legal, social and political processes that turn people into migrants. While this is a rather clumsy and intellectual sounding term, this is precisely what rioters were doing. Giving themselves the authority to decide who were and who were not rightfully present, they ‘migrantised’ British citizens. Crucially, what mattered was not the legal status of citizenship but whether one belonged to ‘the people’, and more particularly the national people (no more a naturally occurring phenomenon of course than ‘migration’).

For migration policy and politics, nationalism and nationality have long been key mechanisms for navigating the treacherous waters that distinguish hostility to immigration from racism. While there is general agreement that racism is a bad thing, nationalism is treated as a far more nuanced phenomenon. Thus, while it is key to the legitimacy of immigration controls that they are not seen as openly racist, they are unabashedly a performance of nationalism. To discriminate or differentiate on the grounds of nationality is ostensibly quite different than to differentiate on the grounds of race.

What is being leveraged here is the ambiguity of nationality. Nationality can mean citizenship in the sense of a legal relation to a state, but nationality can also mean belonging to the nation in the sense of a particular national people. It is possible to be a national in the sense of having citizenship and yet not be regarded as a bona fide member of the nation. To belong to a nation is to make a claim to a history and to (cultural) values, which is why when white people intervened to stop the violence of rioters, they were taunted with the chant: ‘You’re not English anymore’. How one gets to become a part of the nation is, unlike citizenship, not subject to a set of procedures. The mechanism to make such claims is strongly imagined as through ancestry and cultural characteristics, both of which are also imagined as constituents of race.

‘The people’ calls on the class as well as the racialisation of the nation. Indeed, the justification of immigration restrictions lies in part on the representation of the migrant as the competitor with the national working class for privileges of membership. The terminology associated with migration exposes the class dimension of whiteness, which is not a singular identity: the visible whiteness of the ‘Eastern European migrant’ and of the ‘white working class’ both contrast with the invisible whiteness of the white middle class. In contemporary Britain, ‘migrants’ are not imagined as the well-to-do: the movement or presence of wealthy people is not considered a problem; ergo, they are not migrants.

This association between migration, class and race does not come about because the person in the street doesn’t understand who migrants ‘really’ are. Assumptions about migration do not float free of immigration and citizenship policies. It is rather the other way around: that everyday assumptions about who a migrant is make visible the underlying logic of these policies. Immigration controls are aimed at the negatively racialised global poor. A combination of skills, wealth and nationality determines how free a person is to cross international borders. To understand how anti-migration sentiment is being politically mobilised, it is necessary to appreciate the blurred boundaries between race and nation and between race and class and how this blurriness is drawn on in particular circumstances.

Crucially, we do well to remember that while the legal status of citizenship often offers very material advantages, there are exclusions within citizenship as well as from citizenship. Even in wealthy European and North American countries, neither citizenship (as a legal status), nor whiteness, nor the ‘right’ to work, nor even access to the welfare state fully protect people from domination, precarity and exploitation. Indeed, the welfare state itself can force citizens to move within country, that is, can ‘migrantise’ citizens. Finding similarities, parallels and connections and shared interests across differences is necessary to respond to the deeply embedded and highly affective tropes that are powerfully at work in our politics.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol. She is the editor of Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (2025), available in paperback (use the code CNF25 for a 50% discount) or via open access here.

This post was originally published by Transforming Society, the Bristol University Press blog, on 3rd March 2025.

Call to arms, but to whom? Conscription, race and the nation in South Korea

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Minjae Shin.

Military service is mandatory in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Over the past ten years, one of the main concerns of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces (hereafter ‘Korean military’) is the integration of the country’s so-called Damunhwa (mixed heritage) soldiers into the military. In 2010, the Korean government announced a revision of the Military Service Act to expand the conscription base to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background. It stated that ‘[Any Korean national] wishing to engage in mandatory military service or voluntary military service shall be protected against discrimination on the grounds of race, skin color, etc.’ Before then, the Act exempted men who were not a member of the Korean nation ‘by blood’ from bearing arms in service of the nation, for the simple reason that they were not ‘fully’ part of the Korean nation despite their legal status as citizens.

Due to the country’s unique security environment, in which a significant proportion of the population has at least some role in the military – approximately 1% if counting just the standing army but 6.5% if including the reserve force – every military issue quickly receives great attention in civil society. Public reaction to the concern was polarised. There were positive reactions welcoming the advent of a Korea that embraces different ethnicities, but there were also voices questioning the Act’s impact on unit cohesion, combat effectiveness and the loyalty of these soldiers. This was yet another occasion shedding light on the racialised aspect of Koreanness.

South Korean soldiers stand guard inside of the Demilitarised Zone, June 2024 (Image: Free Malaysia Today)

Korea is a highly militarised society. Under the South Korean constitution mandatory conscription service for men is required of all male citizens. Under this ‘duty to the nation and the state’, all able-bodied men between 19 and 35 are required to serve in one of the three branches of the military. Failure to fulfil this obligation is punishable by prison sentence. Before their military service, men are constantly asked by friends, parents and schools about their detailed plan for the service, such as when and where they will do it; life in their 20s is essentially planned around military service. During their service, men re-establish their relation to the state and nation, as well as their place in society. Completion of the service means not only that one is a ‘normal’ man but also a ‘Korean’ man, who has fulfilled his duty to the Korean nation. The image of an ideal citizen intertwined with the military service is wired into its management of conscripted manpower.

Before 2010, this was applied only to ethnic Korean men. This meant that men from mixed heritage backgrounds were considered neither a Korean nor a man in Korean society. Since the concept of race, ethnicity and nation were conflated throughout colonial history, the core of the Korean identity entails physical aspects. Speaking Korean language and understanding Korean culture and history is not enough. One has to ‘look’ Korean, with ‘Korean skin tone’. Being a Korean therefore has a strong racial undertone in Korean society. The entrenched belief is that it is these ‘ethnic citizens’ who bear the duty to defend the nation and the state.

This belief is closely related to an almost unanimous outrage towards ethnic Koreans who do not serve the military. This can be seen in cases where Koreans who migrated abroad came back with children who are of foreign nationality. These children are often referred to as Geom-meo-oe, which literally translates as ‘black-haired foreigner’. As these male children enter their early 20s, they are casually asked by friends when they will apply for the military, as well as their preferred branch. When they identify themselves as foreign nationals, people express their negative view towards them for not serving in the military, even when they are not legally required to do so. It is at this point that Koreanness as a racial concept reveals an interesting paradox. On the one hand, it doubts the capacity of mixed heritage Korean citizens to fulfil military duties; on the other hand, it demands ‘ethnic Koreans’ of foreign nationals to serve the Korean nation.

Korea’s birth rate has been in constant decline since the late 1990s. A shrinking demographic is damaging for all militaries, but the combination of the heavily militarised border with North Korea and maintaining a conscription-based force in a state of constant readiness means that such a demographic shift hurts the Korean military more than most. The government’s decision to expand its conscription pool to all Korean nationals regardless of their ethnic background was its answer to this issue. Many of the new conscripts are the children born of cross-border marriages between Korean men and women from nearby Asian countries, which saw a steep rise since the 1990s. The young honhyol (‘mixed blood’) men had often been subject to discrimination from their childhood. But since 2010, as they have entered their late teens and early 20s, they have been called to bear arms to serve the nation.

As of 2022, the number of mixed-heritage conscripts reached 5,000, making up 1% of all military enlistees. The number will surpass 10,000 by 2030, making up 5%. Although it is a small proportion at the moment, the growth rate is exponential. This is a close reflection of the country’s changing demographic composition, with continuously increasing numbers of foreign nationals entering Korea, including North Korean defectors and multicultural households. In the face of this demographic shift, the government is making changes, such as including and accommodating mixed-heritage soldiers through policies related to their religions and dietary needs. However, expanding the conscription base will lead to more complex issues lying ahead. The mobilisation of mixed-heritage men challenges the historic racialisation of Korean identity and will raise questions about what ‘being a Korean man’ means in the near future.

Recent developments in global geopolitics means that the relevance of these discussions is no longer limited to countries such as Korea. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European countries are rushing to re-build their military capacity, which has caused a wave of conscription panic. Already, the discussion around a military conscription system has been brought to the table in the UK. However, European countries’ defence policies are formulated in the context of a vibrant political tradition of civic nationalism less focused on ethnic purity. For example, the UK military includes numerous ethnic minorities in its ranks.  Its cultural diversity and officials’ experiences have been already investigated by scholars. By contrast, the Korean military is based on ethnic nationalism and a highly racialised identity. In this context, the conscription of mixed-heritage personnel presents a new set of challenges as it is forced to redefine itself. Will the incorporation of mixed-heritage soldiers in the ranks bring the myth of an ethnically pure country closer to its end, or lead its proponents to dig their heels in deeper?

Minjae Shin works in a teaching support role in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Bristol in 2023 with a thesis on ‘Representing foreign brides: Koreanisation, ethnic nationalism, and masculinity in South Korea’. Her research interest is gendered migration in Asia; discourses and practices of nationalism in receiving countries such as racialisation and discrimination by institutional stakeholders.

Are the UK’s immigration rules forcing couples into marriage?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley.

The UK has one of the world’s most restrictive spouse and partner immigration systems. The UK government has long suggested increasing restrictions to the rights of citizens to be joined in the UK by a foreign partner are needed to prevent forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. There is therefore some irony in the fact that our research suggests bi-national couples are now finding themselves pressured into marriage by the UK’s immigration rules.

In the Brexit Couples research project we are working with couples with one UK and one EU partner (without settled status in the UK). Since Brexit, EU citizens come under the UK immigration rules, so if these couples want to live together in the UK, they have to meet various requirements, including a rapidly increasing Minimum Income Requirement.

Illustration by Michael Grieve for the ‘Kept Apart‘ report (2020).

Most fundamentally, they must demonstrate that they are a couple. Couple relationships in contemporary Britain take many forms, but immigration rules tend to be based on more normative models. UK spouse/partner visa applicants must prove they are either in a recognised marriage or civil partnership, or have been living together as a couple for at least two years. This was recently amended to allow relationships in which the couple ‘cannot live together, for example because you’re working or studying in different places, or it’s not accepted in your culture’, but the strongest evidence of relationships remains documentary, such as shared bills and evidence of financial support.

There are a variety of reasons couples may not have lived together or cannot provide evidence. UK-EU couples have been used to Freedom of Movement between each other’s countries (continuing through visa-free visits since Brexit), so one couple told us: ‘Actually proving ourselves as a couple on paper, because we’re not married, it’s not at all easy, and because we’ve lived quite a sort of free, freedom of movement life… we don’t have this neat paper trail that shows that we’ve been living together consistently.’

Some couples did not want to get married at all but felt forced to do so. One participant explained that the institution of marriage was incompatible with her values, but now,

‘I feel like we have to do it… if we are not married then we have to prove all sorts of different things and we thought that was way more complicated… One of the reasons we haven’t got married is because we don’t think that an institution or the state should know who we love or who we sleep with or anything like that. But… all the information we would have to provide to prove that we are in a relationship would be so much more personal than just getting married… I haven’t told any of my friends or anything about it, because to be honest I feel embarrassed because I’ve generally been a bit against marriage, so it’s sort of going against something that I’ve always had as a value. So it’s really frustrating that we’re having to do that.’

Several described their marriages as pragmatic; as simply routes to their visa and life together. One participant told us, ‘we’ve decided we’re just going to get married just because we feel we want to make it more bullet proof, our relationship evidence’, whilst another stressed: ‘We are not religious people. We don’t see any value in marriage other than in practical terms… For us, that’s what marriage is: to get things done and make things work… So, maybe pressured a little bit, but… marriage doesn’t mean anything to us.’ This did not, however, mean the decision was necessarily unemotional, as the stakes are high. Hence one interviewee said, ‘I asked her to marry me out of desperation.’

Other couples may have married eventually but felt rushed into it: ‘We feel like we have to do things in accordance with another person’s timetable, not on your own terms.’ Younger couples in newer relationships (less than five years) particularly struggled with this compression of the timescale for an important life decision: ‘Even though we’re like, “Oh yeah, we want to get married,” we’re not there yet. I’m 25… I’m still very young in my mind in some ways, so I need that time to grow up… I think we want to stabilise ourselves first.’ Another argued directly that the immigration process ‘forces us to get married, which is not what we would do right now, only for the visa. But it feels like that’s the only way.’ Some felt their relationship progressed ‘too fast’: ‘It definitely put some more pressure about making things work, making things official’ [original emphasis]. Couples resented what they saw as state interference in their relationship. One noted that, ‘our relationship has been sort of interfered with by a lot of administration from different angles’, while another complained of ‘someone making these decisions for us in a way, like the situation demanding that we do something, just because it will make our lives easier.’

Some couples resist, fearing negative impacts on their relationship, as this participant put it: ‘I just think we would have both kind of resented being obliged to do things for the sake of bureaucracy’, whilst another was clear that ‘we want to do it on our schedule and our own timeline of our relationship, and the romance, not for the sake of a visa.’

Back in 2012, when the rules were first dramatically tightened, the government presented increased restrictions as necessary to prevent both forced marriages and marriages of convenience for immigration purposes. Thirteen years later, it is striking to hear couples use the terms ‘force’ and ‘for the sake of a visa’ to describe the immigration system itself pressuring them to marry when they otherwise would not. This pressure was set to increase again as couples rushed to meet visa requirements before the previous Conservative government’s planned further increase to income requirements for partner visas – which would have raised them to a level at which roughly 75% of working adults in the UK would be unable to sponsor the immigration of their partner. The incoming Labour government put these plans on hold whilst the Migration Advisory Committee reviews the financial requirements for family visas. We (along with thousands of bi-national couples) await the outcome of that review.

Nicole Hoellerer is an anthropologist whose work focuses on migration. She is a Research Associate in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol, and a researcher for the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project. Before joining this project, she ethnographically investigated the practice-policy gap in UK refugee resettlement (Brunel University), and as the lead researcher for the ASYFAIR research project (University of Exeter) conducted research on asylum appeal court hearings in Europe.

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on migration, gender and families, with a particular interest in transnational marriages and relationships. She is PI of the ESRC-funded Brexit Couples project looking at the impact of the immigration rules on UK-EU couples after Brexit.

Privatised border regulation, AI, MigTech and public procurement

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Albert Sanchez-Graells.

Moving across borders used to involve direct contact with the State. Moving people faced border agents attached to some police corps or the army. Moving things were inspected by customs agents. Entry was granted or denied according to rules and regulations set by the State, interpreted and enforced by State agents, and potentially reviewed by State courts. Borders were controlled by the State, for better or worse.

As States pivot to ‘technology-enhanced’ border control and experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) – let’s call this the ‘MigTech’ shift – this is no longer the full story, or even an accurate one.

More and more, crossing borders involves interactions with machines such as eGates, with increasing levels of automated facial recognition ‘capabilities’ (see Travis Van Isacker’s blogpost in this series). Face-to-face interviews are progressively (planned to be) replaced by AI ‘solutions’ such as ‘lie detectors’ or ‘emotion recognition’ tests. The pervasiveness of AI touches moving people’s lives before they start to move – such as when visa and travel permits are granted or denied through algorithmically-supported or automated decision systems that raise red flags or draw inferences from increasingly dense and opaque data thickets (see Kuba Jablonowski’s discussion of the UK’s shift from border documentation to computation). The movement of things is similarly exposed to all sorts of technological deployments, such as ‘smart sensors’ or drone-supported surveillance.

(Image by Markus Spiske on Unplash)

We could think that borders are now controlled by technology. But that would, of course, conflate the tool with the agent. To understand the implications of this paradigm shift towards MigTech we need to focus on control over these technologies. Control rarely rests with the State that purports to use the technology. Control mostly lies with the technology providers. Digitalisation thus goes hand in hand with the privatisation of border regulation. Entry is granted or denied as a result of ‘technical’ embeddings over which technology providers hold almost absolute control. Technology providers increasingly control borders, mostly for the worse.

There is a rich body of research on the impacts of digitalisation and automation of border control on people, communities and injustice. And also increasing calls for a reconsideration of this approach in view of its harms. At first sight, it could even seem that new legislation such as the EU AI Act addresses the risks and harms arising from digital borders. After all, the EU AI Act classes as ‘high-risk’ the use of AI for ‘Migration, asylum and border control management’. High-risk classification entails a long list of obligations, including pre-deployment fundamental rights impact assessments. By subjecting the technology to a series of ‘assurances’, the Act seeks to ensure that its deployment is ‘safe’. This regulatory approach can create the illusion that the State has regained control over the technology by tying the hands of the technology provider. Indirectly, the State would also have regained control of the borders, for better or worse.

My research challenges this understanding. It highlights how the regulatory tools that are being put in place – such as the EU AI Act – will not sufficiently address the issue of ‘tech-mediated privatisation’ of ‘core’ State functions because, in themselves, these tools transfer regulatory power back to technology providers. By focusing on how the technology reaches the State, and who holds control over the technology and how, I highlight important gaps in law and regulation.

The State rarely develops its own AI or other digital technologies. On most occasions, the State buys technology from the market. This involves public contracts that are meant to set the relevant requirements and to complement regulatory frameworks through tailor-made obligations. To put it simply, my research shows that public contracts are not an effective mechanism to impose specific obligations. Take the example of a State buying an ‘AI lie detector’. The ‘accuracy’ and the ‘explainability’ of the AI will be crucial to its adequate use. However, the EU AI Act does not contain any explicit requirement or minimum benchmark in relation to either of them. Let’s take accuracy.

The EU AI Act solely establishes that ‘High-risk AI systems shall be designed and developed in such a way that they achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Art 15(1)). Identically, the model contractual clauses for the procurement of AI that support the operationalisation of the EU AI Act do not contain specific requirements either. They simply state an obligation for the technology provider to ensure that the AI system is ‘developed following the principle of security by design and by default … it should achieve an appropriate level of accuracy’ (Clause 8.1). The specific levels of accuracy and the relevant accuracy metrics of the AI system are meant to be described in Annex G. But Annex G is blank!

It will be for the public buyer and the technology provider to contractually agree the applicable level of accuracy. This will most likely be done either by reference to the ‘state-of-the-art’ (which privatises the ‘art of the possible’), or by reference to industry-led technical standards (which are poor tools for socio-technical regulation and entirely alien to fundamental rights norms). Or, perhaps even more likely, accuracy will be set at levels that work for the technology provider, which is most likely going to have superior digital and commercial skills than the public buyer. After all, there are many ways to measure and report an AI system’s accuracy and they can be gamed.

In most cases, the operationalisation of the EU AI Act will leave the specific interpretation of what is ‘an appropriate level of accuracy’ in the hands of the technology provider. The same goes for explainability, and for any other ‘technical’ issue with large operational implications. Which does not significantly change the current situation, and which certainly does not mitigate the effects (risks and harms) of the privatisation of AI regulation – or, in the context of MigTech, the privatisation of border regulation. The EU AI Act – and other approaches to ‘AI regulation by contract’, including in the UK under the ‘pro-innovation approach’ to AI and the recently announced AI Opportunities Action Plan – creates a funnel of regulatory power that dangerously exposes the public sector to risks of regulatory capture and commercial determination. And, ultimately, exposes all of us to the ensuing risks and harms. A different regulatory approach is necessary.

Albert Sanchez-Graells (he/him) is a Professor of Economic Law at the University of Bristol Law School. He is also an affiliate of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. Albert’s current research focuses on the role of procurement in regulating public sector AI use, on which he recently published the monograph Digital Technologies and Public Procurement: Gatekeeping and Experimentation in Digital Public Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024).