Category: Bordering control justice

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

Posted on by Emily

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.

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

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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

Posted on by Emily

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.

Privatised border regulation, AI, MigTech and public procurement

Posted on by Emily

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).

Ukrainian refugees – the new white Other in British discourses?

Posted on by Emily

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

By Magda Mogilnicka.

This year has marked the 20th anniversary of the EU enlargement when eight countries from Central and East Europe, with Poland as the largest accession state, joined the European Union. The UK was one of only three European Union (EU) countries* allowing new accession members to work with almost no restrictions. As a result, many people, exercising their new right of freedom of movement as EU citizens, came to the UK. The freedom to move across European borders without a passport or a work permit became a privilege taken for granted until 2016, when the Brexit campaign put EU mobility in the spotlight, resulting in the UK leaving the EU.

Since Brexit, EU citizens in the UK have had to formalise their immigration status through the EU settlement scheme. For many Western Europeans Brexit unsettled their sense of belonging for the first time. But for the EU’s newest members from Central and East Europe, including Romanians and Bulgarians who joined the EU in 2007, belonging had long been questioned: they had experienced discrimination and racialisation long before Brexit. At first they were welcomed for filling gaps in the growing labour market economy, replacing labour migration schemes of overseas ‘low-skilled’ workers, a policy that raised questions about privileging white migrants over migrants of colour. But soon they became pejoratively labelled as ‘East Europeans’ in media and political discourses. A positive message about working hard and contributing to British economy gradually turned into a negative one as the number of immigrants steadily increased. Represented as culturally homogenous and economically inferior, constructed as ‘low-skilled’ economic migrants threatening British workers, putting pressure on public services, eating swans and being racist, they discursively became the ‘white Others’. While they may have been welcome at first, they soon became a target of hostile discourses that vilified them in racialised ways. We can see similar patterns emerging in discourses about Ukrainian refugees.

(image: UK Government website)

More than 280,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the UK since the Russian invasion in early 2022 under the Homes for Ukraine and Ukrainian Family or Extension schemes, which significantly increased the Ukrainian-born population. Under the former scheme, British families can apply to temporarily host a Ukrainian family in their home and receive some financial support from the government to do so. Ukrainian refugees are allowed access to education and healthcare and have the right to work. The scheme has been extended until September 2026.

The relatively generous policy towards Ukrainian refugees that offers access to public services and employment, as well as overwhelmingly positive public reception contrast with policies – and public support for – restricting movement for non-European asylum seekers. With the exception of resettlement schemes for Afghan and Hong Kong citizens, the policy focus has been on reducing migration through the Illegal Immigration Act 2023, which criminalises non-European asylum seekers entering the UK through routes that are not legally recognised. Opening borders to Ukrainians occurred at the same time as the former Conservative government was pushing for the Rwanda resettlement plan that aimed to permanently remove those asylum seekers with no possibility to return to the UK.

Although the Rwanda plan has been scrapped by the new Labour government, the current asylum-seeking process for other incomers is lengthy, complicated and leaves people living in limbo sometimes for years before they are granted refugee status and a right to work and can then start a route to settlement. Hence, the Homes for Ukraine scheme can be seen as a whitewashing policy that privileges white European migrants over people of colour. Indeed, whiteness and Christianity were implicitly pointed at in many Western media reports at the beginning of the war to emphasise the Europeanness of Ukrainians who ‘look like us’. In a similar way, when ‘East European’ EU citizens joined the EU in 2004, their presumed ability to ‘socially integrate’ (Home Office 2005, p.21) more easily (due to their economic activity) had subtle racialised undertones.

However, despite the privileges offered to Ukrainians, the four-year time limit of the 2022 scheme suggests that they are not expected to stay. Their acceptance therefore seems contingent upon them eventually returning home. Most Ukrainian refugees are women and have been employed in ‘low-waged’ sectors, as many face an English language barrier and have issues with their qualifications not being recognised. But even before the war, Ukrainians have predominantly been employed as temporary seasonal workers in the UK, which shows the same ‘low-skilled’ employment pattern as ‘East European’ EU citizens. Moreover, they have been represented as struggling to accept ethnic diversity: in this report by Channel 4 Ukrainian refugees’ crude racist practices are simplistically contrasted with a tolerant attitude of the British majority.

In my own research, I draw attention to migrants’ processes of learning to live in multicultural Britain. Many of my Polish participants, having expressed crude racist attitudes at first, grew to appreciate cultural diversity and made efforts to live in diverse neighbourhoods. The Channel 4 report depicting Britian as a tolerant multicultural bubble that intolerant Ukrainian newcomers struggle to accept, paradoxically excludes Ukrainian refugees while emphasizing inclusivity. Similarly to EU ‘East European’ citizens, Ukrainians’ status is therefore not, in fact, ‘white enough’ in public discourses.

Being contingently accepted is a familiar story, reminding me of discourses about EU citizens from Central and East Europe 20 years ago, which over time changed from welcoming to more hostile. This discursive division between British and ‘East Europeans’ continues a nation-making project that constructs a binary of citizen and migrant. In recent media reports Albanians have also resurfaced in political debates as criminal migrants, a long-known trope of dangerous East European masculinity. The mixed reception of Ukrainians demonstrates that migration continues to produce racialised difference of ‘East Europeanness’.

* The other two were Sweden and Ireland.

Magda Mogilnicka is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Until recently she was Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, where she remains an Honorary Lecturer. Magda’s research interests are in the area of migration, ethnicity, lived diversities and belonging.

Read about Magda’s research on how Polish people in the UK were impacted by Brexit and COVID in her previous MMB blogpost ‘Brexit, COVID and stay/return narratives amongst Polish migrants in the UK’.

From documentation to computation: the shifting logic of UK border control

Posted on by Emily

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

By Kuba Jablonowski.

The UK immigration status is going online. Tangible documents issued by the Home Office are set to expire at midnight on 31st December 2024 as the department has been short-dating them for years. From 1st January 2025, status holders will transact through a set of websites called View and Prove to access their status, which is now called an eVisa, and to evidence it to others using share codes. Status checkers will transact through Home Office websites too, verifying people’s right to work or right to rent online as part of the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy. Carriers, such as airlines, will rely on automated status checks as part of their check-in procedures. Should these fail, they can resort to View and Prove as well. This unassuming portal warns users it is in the beta phase: feature-complete but not bug-free. And yet, it controls access to a vast network of casework systems and data stores holding information that is used to generate an immigration subject and their immigration status.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

Borders, once firmly on the ground and often imagined as cliffs and rivers, walls and fences, are about to be governed entirely through online computing. It is hard to overstate the significance of this seemingly technical change. It does not just transform who enacts borders and how. It also transforms the way the subject of immigration control is administratively constructed by the border bureaucracy.

Immigration status was traditionally inscribed into a token that would represent the person as a subject of immigration control: a visa sticker, a biometric residence permit, a permanent residence card, and so on. What makes these into tokens is not the material quality but the inscribing of multiple types of information such as biographic, biometric, and immigration records into a single and stable medium. This medium then remains in the hands of the person who holds the immigration status inscribed into it. There are also digital tokens of status, such as machine-readable codes used in boarding passes and vaccine passports. They give their holder a similar level of autonomy as residence cards or visa stickers. They can be downloaded onto a personal device or printed on a physical medium, and they grant access as long as they remain valid.

The online system designed by the Home Office replaces such stable tokens with online transactions. Each time the holders want to check or evidence their status, they must transact through the View and Prove portal. They first log on with the document they used to create their online account. They are then sent a verification code to the email address or phone number held for that account. Once logged on, users have the option to view their status or generate a share code. This code, which is valid for 90 days but which can glitch for a number of reasons, then needs to be shared with the status checker – the landlord, the employer, the airline, and so on – who in turn enters it into the relevant status checking website along with their own details to verify the holder’s right to work, rent, travel, and so on. Status holders and checkers use different portals but they are all hosted on the gov.uk domain.

Screenshot from the UK Government’s View and Prove website (accessed by the author on 5th November 2024)

However, the View and Prove portal is merely the front end of a complex network of upstream services that store and compute data at the back end. This network includes legacy services and novel systems developed incrementally as part of the Immigration Platform Technologies programme since 2014, at the cost of around GBP 500 million to date. In total, there are more than 90 different casework systems that feed data into this network. Two central components amongst them are the Person Centric Data Platform, which holds historic records from legacy systems and live records from new applications, and the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System, which holds the facial image and finger scans.

As we show in a paper recently published with my colleague Monique Hawkins in the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law, this design proved to be prone to glitching when originally rolled out for the European Union Settlement Scheme. Our paper argues that glitching, albeit marginal in the sense that it affects the minority of users, is nonetheless systemic because it results from the design and configuration of digital status services. This argument is built on hundreds of cases reported by status holders and legal representatives to the3million, a civil society organisation and a strategic research partner on the Algorithmic Politics and Administrative Justice project.

Based on that evidence, we outline a typology of glitches. They include problems with service availability or user login, as well as errors with profile maintenance or status sharing. In the most serious cases user profiles can become entangled with each other due to problems with data linking. When viewing or sharing status after login, such users see someone else’s photo, name or visa in their own profile. A whistleblower report earlier this year suggested this type of glitch, which the Home Office refers to as a merged identity, was affecting more than 76,000 people in early 2024. The Home Office later disclosed that it had identified around 46,000 ‘records with an identity issue’ and managed to fix some of them, but not others. And that was earlier this year, before the estimated four million users with expiring biometric residence permits were added to the millions of those who have to rely on digital services to prove their status.

Fundamentally, these problems stem from the specific design of digital status services. The Home Office insists the system must reflect the current immigration status of the status holder. In 2023 the department reaffirmed its commitment ‘to a digital system of real-time checks’ and said it ‘will not compromise on this principle’. This necessitates ongoing computation of identity and immigration data processed on different systems that handle immigration transactions: applications for grants and upgrades of status, reviews and appeals of caseworker decisions, updates of images and documents linked to the user’s account, and so on. There is always a risk this computation will go wrong – and that if it does, the holder is locked out of their status as they are trying to evidence it.

This is why View and Prove should not be seen as a digital immigration document. Rather, it is the online interface of a transactional system set to replace immigration documents. This system does not swap tangible tokens of status – residence cards or visa stickers – for digital tokens. Instead, it mandates online checks of immigration status in real time. This system does not come with any document that can be stored on a personal device or reproduced on a physical medium. The proof of immigration status is produced on the screen in the moment of the check – and it vanishes into the cloud of Home Office servers as soon as the check is done.

Kuba Jablonowski (he/him) is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His research investigates the design and operation of digital identity systems in the context of governance, and he approaches the border as a site of identity production rather than a device of mobility control. To generate and disseminate research findings, Kuba collaborates with civil society, the civil service, private actors and the media.

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Who’s in the fast lane? Will new border tech deliver seamless travel for all?

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

By Travis Van Isacker.

For the past year I have been attending border industry conferences to understand the future claims they are making as part of my research on digitised borders for the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Listening to their keynotes and speaking with industry professionals I have learned that the border crossing of the future is imagined as a ‘seamless’ one, devoid of gates, booths, even border officers. In their place will be ‘biometric corridors’ lined with cameras observing people as they move. Captured images will be fed back to computer systems matching facial biometrics ‘on the fly’ with those held in a database of expected arrivals. Passports will not be needed as travellers will digitally share all necessary information—biographical details, images of faces and fingerprints, travel permissions—with states and carriers before a trip. There will be no need to stop and question people at the border as they will have been vetted and pre-authorised before leaving their homes. Any people considered ‘risky’ will not even be able to book tickets. The goal: ‘good’ travellers won’t feel the cold gaze of the border’s scrutiny, nor be slowed down.

‘PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE: Seamless Traveller Journey’. World Travel & Tourism Council, April 2019 (image: original photograph cropped, from the World Travel & Tourism Council Flickr account)

This seamless vision is mostly shared by governments who do not want to give visitors a bad first impression and consider that most travellers do not pose any risk. However, there are still differing levels of enthusiasm for the seamless border depending upon, for example, a state’s economic dependence on tourism, or its concern about a terrorist attack. Curaçao recently launched its Express Pass to allow travellers to provide passport information and a selfie from home to then (hopefully) be quickly and automatically verified at the border. By contrast, the United States still does not use automated ePassport gates despite already biometrically verifying all travellers upon entry and exit.

‘Faster meets more secure’. Biometric Facial Comparison advertisement, Miami International Airport, June 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

There has long been a trade-off between speed and security at the border. Screening, searching and questioning people all take time, and that means disgruntled passengers, travel delays, economic loss and press headlines that can make a country less appealing for travel and investment. New digital border technologies promise to resolve this tension. Automated identification through biometrics claims to work with greater speed, accuracy and consistency than humans, allowing for increased security and expedited checks. Advanced data analytics makes a similar claim: knowing more about people earlier, and ‘risking’ them algorithmically, allows digital borders to automatically deflect those it considers undesirable at an earlier stage. By combining these systems, the border industry promises to reduce to seconds the time it takes average business travellers to clear immigration.

The seamless vision of the future border is sold to us all, but is it actually for everyone? A facial recognition system I observed for passengers to bypass showing their passports to a border officer when disembarking cruise ships in Miami failed to deliver for families with small children and people who did not have a passport. There were no suitable images of their faces in the government’s database to match against. Later, I explained to border experts my difficulties in getting airlines to allow me to board flights to the UK with my European identity card. I was told by the vice-president of a facial biometrics company that it sounded as if I was ‘trying to make a point’. Why didn’t I just always carry my passport to avail myself of the eGates? For him it wasn’t only illogical that I wasn’t always able to adopt the most ‘seamless’ path, it was suspicious.

Technologies claiming to offer a seamless border crossing for everyone in fact create a two-tiered system. True, some experience an accelerated border crossing, but those who, for whatever reason, cannot satisfy the tech’s requirements are held up, if allowed to cross at all. The fact that border professionals are all in the first group means they usually don’t experience their systems not working for them.

Edited photograph of the arrivals hall of the Miami Cruise Terminal, June 2024. To the left are exit lanes with facial recognition tablets. To the right is the long queue of people waiting to see an officer (image: author’s photograph)

At industry events there is limited recognition of the fact seamlessness is not necessarily what it claims to be. A senior manager for one of the world’s largest systems integrators (an IT and management consultancy contracted by states to implement border tech) admitted that, actually, a ‘frictionless’ border was not the end goal. Instead, the future border would be one that applies ‘variable friction’, easily speeding up or slowing down movement depending on who or what is crossing it.

Despite the hype around tech-enabled seamless crossings there is nothing to guarantee that the widespread adoption of new digital border tech will necessarily take us towards that future. Just recently, the UK Home Office took Jordan off its list of countries allowed to use its new Electronic Travel Authorisation (which uses an app to biometrically enrol people’s faces at home) due to an increase in the number of Jordanian nationals travelling to the UK to claim asylum, and for purposes other than what is permitted under visitor rules. Perhaps the clearest example is the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), which will require third country nationals to provide face and fingerprint biometrics against which to verify their entering and leaving the Schengen-bloc. This system promises to eventually allow for faster automated crossings but is primarily intended to identify overstayers and strengthen border checks, especially against criminal records databases which are centred on fingerprints. Despite state-of-the-art biometric enrolment kiosks and tablets, there have been nightmarish predictions for the disruption caused when suddenly everyone entering or leaving the EU has to stop to provide their biometrics at the border, especially at the Port of Dover. The fact that the implementation of EES has been delayed for years and was recently postponed again, without a new timeline for implementation, proves just how contingent the future border is.

Sign announcing works in the Port of Dover for Entry/Exit System’s enrolment zone, August 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

State initiatives to increase friction at the border often frustrate those working to develop and sell new border technologies. Some I spoke with believe quite wholeheartedly that everyone will soon be able to cross borders without even realising it, in large part thanks to their inventions. They like to think our modern, globalised world has moved on from the need for severe mobility restrictions and heavy-handed border controls and that we would all be more prosperous if everyone could travel more easily. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true. With anti-immigration rhetoric increasing in the world’s richer countries, the EU is currently facing the collapse of restriction-free travel within the Schengen area (itself enabled by immense databases of people considered risky and/or foreign built in the early 2000s). However, luckily for the borders’ builders, their products—originally developed for applications in defence, security and policing, and designed to better identify and surveil individuals—are just as suited to a future in which states are walled off from one another, and movement between them is heavily monitored and restricted. If and when this future vision becomes promoted instead of seamlessness largely depends upon the political moment and intended audience.

Travis Van Isacker is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol working in the Moving Domain of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. His research focuses on the transformation of border infrastructures through the application of new digital technologies. Travis has written previously for the MMB blog on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais‘.

Find out more about the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures here.

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Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

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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 Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.