The preceding chapters have shown that borders are not just about ‘immigrants’; borders shape relations between all of us. Borders organise markets and populations, produce racial distinctions and hierarchies, and legislate heteronormativity. Borders also fuel and are fuelled by criminal punishment and counter-terrorism policies. Some readers will be familiar with the story we have told so far. What is often less understood are the specific connections between borders and technologies of identification, data capture and surveillance. We might recognise that controlling immigration relies on inspection, surveillance and biometrics. However, in light of the Home Office’s aspirations to become ‘digital by default’ and the encroachment of private companies like Palantir into the heart of public services, there is in an urgent need for anti-racist and migrants’ rights movements to develop their understanding of how emergent digital borders operate.
For us, border abolition is not technophobic per se – but it is concerned with dismantling immigration enforcement databases and algorithms that profile and predict risks, emphasising that these technological tools do not function in our collective interest. Like other technologies of power, data-management tools and architectures can be put to the purposes of surveillance, exclusion and expulsion – and once developed are rarely confined to their original targets. We must therefore challenge the state’s use of new technologies for repressive ends, and confront at the deepest level the unquestioned authority of nation-states to know who we are, to fix us in law, to hold information centrally and asymmetrically, and to compel us to hand over personal data in return for (increasingly meagre) rights and protections. Indeed, by exploring the role of data processing in border regimes, we can learn more about the shape and power of the states that govern us.
Campaigning on technology and surveillance in the UK has long been dominated by professionalised NGOs working from a human-rights perspective. Rights to privacy and free expression have been emphasised at the expense of a critical analysis of the uneven impact of certain technologies on different groups of people, and a wider reckoning with the social harms produced, beyond breaches of data protection and privacy rights. Although this is now changing, there can be a tendency for organisations to focus narrowly on specific technologies and what they might do – thus pursuing an analysis of rights that has a view from nowhere, lacking any proper account of the dominant state and corporate logics into which new technologies are inserted. This and the following chapter therefore attempt to situate debates about new technology within a broader analysis of the logics of borders and their harms.
The Hostile Environment and Digital Borders
Following a 2010 Conservative manifesto commitment to ‘reduce net migration to the tens of thousands’, in 2012 Theresa May outlined plans to make the UK a ‘very hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ (following the Labour immigration minister, Liam Byrne, who in 2007 had also committed to a hostile environment involving outsourced border checks). The hostile environment involves denying migrants access to essential public services and private goods by embedding immigration checks and data-sharing between the arenas of health, policing, education, housing and banking, among others. The stated premise of the policy was to make life so difficult for undocumented people that they would simply leave the UK of their own accord – although in fact the policies have resulted in no significant change in voluntary departures, but instead a growing class of illegalised and rightless workers, and an entitlement-checking infrastructure that affects everyone.
The hostile environment is an attempt to outsource immigration control on the cheap, making use of information collected and/or held by the Department of Health, Department of Education, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, Department for Work and Pensions, CIFAS (a fraud- prevention agency), homelessness charities, and individual police forces – often without a person’s knowledge or consent, or even that of the frontline worker collecting the data. It was an attempt to implement a vast but relatively unsophisticated data-matching architecture that would enable Home Office immigration enforcement to take action against undocumented migrants using data collected by trusted public services.
These policies and practices became the subject of fierce public debate in Spring 2018, when the Windrush scandal broke.1 The scandal drew attention to the violence of the UK’s draconian approach to controlling immigration. However, by focusing on the exclusion and destitution wrought by the hostile environment, and those wrongly caught up in it, we might miss the more mundane but no less dangerous data-management components of this policy, which have important implications for how a resolution to the scandal might be conceived.
On some accounts, the problem for the Windrush generation was the fact that they were under-documented. Much was made of the revelation that the landing cards of Windrush migrants had been lost or destroyed, for example. In the digital era, Windrush migrants were at the whim of misplaced documents and lost passports. Secure computer systems can overcome the problems of endless paper trails and lost documents, and so for some the resolution of the Windrush scandal was in fact the extension of digital borders.
The anti-immigration polemicist David Goodhart, for example, co-authored a report stating: ‘The often elderly Caribbeans caught up in the Windrush scandal were victims of that process being mismanaged, not the process itself.’2 The report called for a national identity card scheme to be implemented as part of a wider crackdown on irregular migration. In other words, the hostile environment, properly managed, would require a system of national identity cards for all citizens, which would be connected to digital databases – and this would in turn prevent the ‘wrongful’ targeting of rights-bearing groups like the ‘Windrush migrants’. We see this insidious tech solutionism replicated in calls by EU citizens’ rights groups for QR codes for EU migrants to ease entitlement checks. Such solutions betray a damaging lack of solidarity with migrants without such entitlements, and ignore the fact that we would all be better served by universal access to essential services, regardless of immigration status.
In other words, if we maintain that policies like the ‘hostile environment’ are bad because they target the wrong people, the solution is highly likely to be tougher and more efficient systems of identification and exclusion. Here we arrive at one of the important points where abolitionists and reformists necessarily diverge. For reformists, making the immigration system better at classifying and sorting, bestowing status on the deserving, and facilitating the swift removal of the undocumented can be a worthy end in itself – or, at the very least, the most we can hope for on the current political terrain. The reformist perspective on the Windrush scandal, for example, did little to trouble the assumption that some people can rightly be subjected to a hostile environment when they are, in fact, undocumented or ‘illegal’.
For abolitionist campaigners, however, the testimonies of the Windrush generation were vital not only for underscoring the physical and psychological harm inflicted by the hostile environment, but also for opening up space for broader campaigns to end the hostile environment for everyone – especially given that governments can redraw the lines of regular immigration status with such apparent ease. Ostensible anti-racists and left nativists who concede that ‘welfare support is first and foremost reserved for citizens’ would do well to remember that citizenship is not a safe harbour.3 Trying to fit more people into the ‘citizen’ box does little to challenge the exclusionary logic of immigration control.
Identification and the Modern State
The ability to identify individuals and survey/surveil populations is what makes a state modern. States make people ‘legible’ – as workers, taxpayers, conscripts, criminals and migrants – so that they can be governed, administered and controlled.4 Early modern states sought to make people legible primarily so that they could be taxed and conscripted – but this did not necessarily require knowledge of each and every individual. As modern states developed, governments sought to identify individuals with certainty, so that each person could be distinguished from any other, and information on the population became standardised and stored centrally. Verification of individual identity was important for various forms of contract – in the leasing and sale of land, for example – and for policing imperatives: Is this person a repeat offender? Is this individual a former deserter? The standardisation of names, the use of signatures, and later the use of photographs and fingerprints all represented attempts to verify individual identities.5
In nineteenth-century Europe, states felt compelled to identify individuals more reliably because the societies they governed were increasingly mobile, industrialising and urban. In France, Alphonse Bertillon developed his system of anthropometry (body measurement) to verify the identity of individual criminals, especially repeat offenders, while Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, made the case for fingerprint identification in Britain. Unsurprisingly given the centrality of racial thought to late Victorian science, it was also hoped that, by gathering biometric information on individuals, racial differences could be classified and understood more accurately. Identifying individuals and classifying them into fixed racial groupings worked (and still work) hand in hand. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the policing imperative was rivalled only by nationalist demands to control the mobility of aliens and foreigners, especially in times of war – and the two converged in the policing of ‘vagrants’ and nomadic peoples. The passport, the identity document par excellence, has worked to nationalise populations and make people’s movement subject to more effective oversight and administration.6
Many histories of modern statecraft have been rightly criticised for their Eurocentrism, and it is important to recognise that colonial settings were often the laboratory for new technologies of identification and surveillance. As Simone Browne has discussed at length, the slave pass can be understood as a form of documentation that prefigures the passport; several historians have shown that practices of fingerprinting were developed not in Victorian London, but in colonial India and South Africa.7
That said, systems of identification are not in themselves good or evil, and they can in some instances ensure greater access to health and social welfare (it is probably a good thing that people can be identified for the purposes of vaccination, and that health providers can retain individual medical records, for example). However, given that the main prerogative of modern states has been to control and exploit workers, territorialise and nationalise populations, and police unruly populations, processes of state identification have been centrally implicated in various forms of exclusion. Identification practices always grant and deny access; in order to manage, control and police, you need to be able to identify, verify and retain centralised information on people. The technologies of identification have changed over time, but we can observe consistent logics of differentiation, segregation and exclusion long before the dystopian world of facial recognition and interoperable digital databases. With these histories in mind, we are able to interrogate the logics that drive the innovation and marketing of technologies like facial recognition and vast data haystacks, rather than simply gesturing towards scary new technologies.
ID Cards and the Database State
By recognising that technologies of identification are central to modern statecraft, we can also better connect bordering practices to wider state practices. In the UK context, for example, the data-mining and matching architecture underpinning the hostile environment cannot be isolated from broader state practices of mass surveillance and data- harvesting. By the late noughties, catalysed by the post-9/11 assault on civil liberties and a broader crackdown on crime and disorder, the UK had implemented a DNA database, a domestic extremism database, gangs databases, counter-terror databases, bulk interception of communications data, and more. Interestingly, the Conservatives formed the 2010 coalition with the Liberal Democrats partly on the basis of a manifesto that promised to ‘reverse the rise of the surveillance state’, following a years-long attempt by the Labour government to introduce a nationwide ID scheme – a scheme that would have seen the personal data of every individual who applied for a British passport entered into a national database, with the possibility of being issued an ID card on a non-compulsory basis. The system was introduced for migrants in 2008 by Labour, and partially rolled out in some areas of the country in subsequent years. Predictably, biometric residence permits for migrants were the only aspect of the scheme to be retained when the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition came to power in 2010.
The question of national identity cards is interesting in the British context. Unlike on other civil liberties issues, the chorus of parliamentary opposition has historically included a Conservative aversion to the idea of compulsory national identification cards. Nationalistic tropes about Britons as freedom-loving people, in contrast with Germans and other Europeans, and in conjunction with arguments about cost and red tape, have long made national ID cards difficult to introduce. As a result, ‘a Briton is more likely to be identified by a car than by a card’.8
However, what we see in the digital hostile environment are the foundations of an architecture that could be repurposed well beyond the requirements of immigration control. After all, entitlement checks require everyone to be checked, not only those perceived to be migrants. And the recent authoritarian response by the Conservative government to the pandemic – on both vaccine passports and policing powers more broadly – suggests that that parliamentary coalition against compulsory ID may well be fraying at the edges.
In September 2020, The Times reported on UK government plans to create online ID cards and digital identity systems. Under these plans, people would be ‘assigned a unique digital identity to help them with such tasks as registering with a new GP’.9 At the same time, the government is borrowing a tried and tested voter-suppression tactic, introducing legislation to mandate the showing of ID for voting in general elections.10 Meanwhile, the Home Office presses on with its ‘status checking programme’, which aims to further automate and intensify entitlement checks and data-sharing on citizens and migrants for the purposes of immigration enforcement. Clearly, the debate about ID is not now and never was purely a debate about pieces of plastic, but rather about the character and scope of centralised government databases. A digital identity system would make it far easier for government institutions to access records across a whole host of different agencies, from health, tax, immigration and education records, linking previously siloed and purpose-limited datasets to build up an intimate picture of almost every aspect of our lives, and then to intervene in our lives, granting or denying us access to essential services on the basis of what it thinks it knows about us.
Just as the hostile environment ushered in increasing demands for compulsory ID, the Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified demands for internal checks and digital registration systems. The Tony Blair Institute, set up by the former British prime minister who tried and failed to introduce ID cards, has long lobbied for a compulsory ID system. As soon as the pandemic began, it started lobbying for vaccine passports under the explicit heading of ‘mobility credentials’. Many people might find it convenient to download an app that verifies their vaccination status or antibody levels – just as they might prefer to have one national identity number for accessing government services; but these technologies enable new and more total forms of surveillance and exclusion. Under cover of ‘protecting public health’, states have accrued new powers with relative ease. Biosurveillance tools that claim to identify risk at the level of the individual, and can be easily repurposed once normalised, have been adopted, when what is really required is greater funding for public health infrastructure, enforcement against unsafe workplaces, and social and economic support for people who need to isolate.
When it comes to ID systems, there is much more at stake than being able to fill in tax records more quickly, or go to the pub during a pandemic. The slicker the entitlement check, the more refined the capacity to monitor and exclude. And we know from historical experience that the list of those who fall foul of government is rarely fixed for long, and has a habit of expanding. Rather than massively increasing state and corporate surveillance capacity in a bid to make ID checks easier, we should instead work against conditionality in access to essential goods and services in the first place. While in relation to Covid-19 this means prioritising public-health messaging, vaccine outreach and proper financial and social support for those required to isolate, in relation to hostile immigration policies the answer is quite simple: remove the hostile immigration policies. This is terrain on which reformists and abolitionists might find common ground. One need not be an abolitionist to agree that police, health services and education should be firewalled from immigration enforcement. At the very least, we can agree that the protection of public health, support for victims of serious crime and children’s education should take priority over immigration enforcement.
There are several non-reformist reforms that can help stem the tide of digital borders, many of which aim to disrupt their logics as well as opposing their methods and modes of implementation. In the UK, campaign groups like Docs Not Cops, Unis Against Border Controls, and Against Borders for Children have campaigned against hostile environment immigration policies, and encouraged teachers and health professionals to resist and refuse complicity with immigration enforcement. In the United States, campaigns like No Tech for ICE, and the integration of undocumented people’s rights into broader campaigns for workers’ rights and universal healthcare, have countered the spread of borders into everyday life, challenging the idea that only citizens should qualify for basic rights and dignity, or that human misery should be a valid source of profit.
We need to challenge and reduce the power of the state to make access to essential goods and services conditional. New technologies will continue to increase dramatically the scale and speed at which the state can exclude. This is why migrant rights’ advocates, people concerned with state racism, and progressives more broadly must become more digitally literate, building coalitions that can challenge the private corporations and governments constructing technological dystopias. We need to consider the safeguards that would ensure that new tech is meaningfully purpose-limited – or, if necessary, banned – as well as the firewalls that could be implemented between health, education, welfare support, and so on, and immigration enforcement and policing.
At the same time, we need to imagine how datasets might be deployed in the service of human flourishing in the broadest possible sense. Those solutions will need to be more inventive than suggesting that a more benevolent state should be in charge of public data, and will need to take into account the political economies of extraction and pollution underpinning digital infrastructure. We do not have all the answers to these vast questions, but it is important to start asking them.
Digital Identification and Managing the Global Poor
The UK is by no means alone in its expansion of digital borders. The EU is planning to introduce a ‘single, overarching EU information system’, which aims to help member-states ‘to more effectively and efficiently locate and expel those who are irregularly present in the Schengen area, through the processing of more personal data, gathered from a greater number of people, for a broader set of purposes’.11 The plan is to make EU databases interoperable, so that they function as a single entity, mirroring Home Office aspirations to build a unified ‘biometric services gateway’.12 The database under construction, the Common Identity Repository (CIR), will have a capacity of up to 300 million records containing biographic and biometric data, pooled from various existing EU databases. This runs counter to one of the key data-protection principles: that the original data should only be collected for a specific stated purpose. The CIR will facilitate identity checks and assist criminal investigations, and data ‘will be subject to large-scale, automated cross-checking to try to detect the use of multiple identities by non-EU nationals, through the introduction of a system called the Multiple Identity Detector (MID)’.13 This data infrastructure, which in effect consolidates various databases at the supranational level for use by individual state authorities, will create a capacity for identification and surveillance that was until recently unthinkable. Like the hostile environment ‘status checking programme’, it will be easily extended to citizens.
It is not only in Europe that governments are experimenting with new forms of identification. Indeed, many of the key testing grounds for biometric national databases are in the global South – primarily in formerly colonised countries in Africa and Asia, where privacy and data protections are weaker, and the options for policy experimentation and profit- making therefore greater. In most cases, the principal justification for the introduction of national databases is framed in terms of inclusion rather than exclusion: financial inclusion, democratic inclusion, welfare inclusion. By verifying individual identities, governments and international organisations will be better able to provide them with access to services – especially financial services (banking, loans, aid); or so the argument goes. These initiatives draw on the UN sustainable development goal 16.9, which seeks to ‘provide legal identity for all’, defined as a fundamental human right. However, like earlier forms of state identification, these technologies grant means of both access and denial, while more accurate information on individuals offers tools for more extensive control and exclusion by states and international agencies.
Since 2013, the Kenyan government has sought to implement a form of mass registration that will gather biometric and biographic information on every person living in Kenya. Under the Huduma Namba initiative, each Kenyan citizen will be assigned a unique identifying number and then a national ID card, so that individuals can be verified against the national database. It is argued that this national identification system will combat fraud, modernise the democratic voting system, and guarantee better ‘inclusion’, although the scheme’s tagline – ‘a single source of truth’ – sounds somewhat more ominous. Numerous concerns about the policy have been aired, and in early 2020 the Kenyan High Court ruled that the implementation of the National Integrated Identity Management System should not continue without further legislation to guarantee the security of data (especially of fingerprints and facial photographs), as well as measures to prevent the exclusion of certain groups (particularly the Nubian and Somali communities). Following the judgement, the government introduced measures that responded to these concerns; by October 2020, over 37 million Kenyans had registered, and the programme was moving to the next stage: card production.
In Jamaica, a similar process has been unfolding. Under the National Identification System (NIDS), citizens and residents in Jamaica will be given a unique lifelong identification number corresponding to biographic and biometric data that will be ‘held securely’ on a national database.14 This identification system has not been designed with the exclusion of minorities and migrants in mind, but it is telling that the initiative has been funded largely by the Inter-American Development Bank. Jamaica’s economic and social policies are largely shaped by international organisations and more powerful states – whether in relation to tourism, economic policy, or, as in this case, national identification. The United States, the UK and Canada remain concerned about drugs, weapons and phone-scams emanating out of Jamaica – all of which involve transnational networks and the transfer of illegally acquired funds. Modernising the ability of the Jamaican state to identify each individual and monitor their financial transactions therefore serves the policing imperatives of more powerful states.
The point here is that motivations for setting up biometric national databases vary in different places – but in countries in the global South they are seldom straightforward questions of national policy; they tend to concern demands from powerful states and institutions for greater surveillance and control over the movement of people, funds and illicit goods out of and into the underdeveloped world.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the EU’s development programmes, which seek to restrict and control irregular migration from Africa and the Middle East. In Chapter 3, we briefly touched on the EU Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), the EU programme that commits billions of euros each year to an attempt to ‘tackle the root causes of irregular migration’. Crucially, many of the schemes within the programme involve building state capacity precisely through the modernisation of systems of state identification and surveillance. For example, in 2018 the EUTF provided €5 million to modernise and strengthen secure identity chains in Cape Verde and Guinea- Bissau, in the hope of more effectively combating irregular migration and trafficking. Several organisations have observed that these EU-funded technologies of identification and surveillance have been used by recipient governments to control their own populations, denying civil freedoms and squashing political opposition.15
While in the UK and Europe modern databases might self-evidently be designed to create hostile environments for suspect communities, in the global South they tend to be focused on preventing people departing in the first place – although this objective is usually masked by the language of development and inclusion. The UN sustainable development goal 16.9 – which aims to ‘provide legal identity for all, including birth registration’ – might ostensibly be designed to ensure the ability of everyone to make democratic claims and access justice, but in practice it serves those institutions that seek to control the unruly mobilities of the global poor.
Indeed, when the World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) programme promises ‘to help countries realize the transformational potential of digital identification systems’,16 we are reminded that it is not only the UK Home Office that aspires to be digital by default, but in fact the very architects of ‘international society’. When the UNHCR uses fingerprinting and iris-scanning to register refugees seeking assistance – demonstrating what Mark Latonero calls ‘surveillance humanitarianism’ – and when the UN’s World Food Program partners with data-mining firm Palantir to help manage personal data on millions of food-aid recipients (for more on Palantir, see Chapter 7), we are reminded that these forms of biometric identification and data-capture seem to evade critical scrutiny altogether.17 We need to evaluate these systems to increase our collective understanding of our digital present. We also need to understand the enormous resources poured into developing border technologies, so that we might mount an argument for those resources to be diverted to life-giving structures and practices that would in the long run make border technologies obsolete.
Identity Politics
[Y]ou are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are multiple. You are not broken apart because you are multiple.
Edouard Glissant
Across the political spectrum, people seem fixated on what they perceive to be the problems of ‘identity politics’ – a term that now circulates in popular discourse wholly untethered from its roots in the black feminist politics of the Combahee River Collective.18 The Collective’s use of ‘identity politics’ grew not out of a conceptual abstraction, but out of an affirmation of the inherent value of black women, and of their experience and analysis of organising against the inter-locking oppressions of racism, sexism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Identity politics led them to be concerned ‘with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people’.19 Their terrain was the struggle for socialism, for abortion rights, against sterilisation abuse, and for better healthcare – a far cry from the discourse of liberal representation with which ‘identity politics’ is so often associated today.
For those of us working to abolish borders, the ‘identity politics’ of the Combahee River Collective has much to offer our organising strategies. Returning to it can help us to challenge closed and parochial identities that prevent the formation of wider solidarities and collectives.
But we should also think carefully about the challenge posed by psychoanalytic, poststructural and postcolonial approaches, which in various ways unsettle dominant liberal notions of identity and the self. They help us to theorise identity otherwise, in terms of unfinished and undecided processes of identification. They remind us that the self is split and fractured, multiple and contingent – perhaps unknowable, even to itself.
Stuart Hall described identity as less a fixed state of being than a kind of story we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.20 And yet, if our cultural identities help us sleep at night, then it is practices of state identification that might keep us awake. While theories of identity have in some ways become more promiscuous, states have found new ways to fix us. While we celebrate open-ended processes of identification, states have been identifying us in new and more total ways.
Perhaps, then, the politics of border abolition require a rejection of the tenets of identity legally and technically, in the same ways that twentieth-century radical theory has culturally and existentially. The abolitionist vision is a world where I am not only me, but many things; I am undecided, and I should therefore not necessarily be knowable to, or capturable by, any central authority, when I am not even visible to myself. In this way, when Edouard Glissant urges us to embrace a radical openness to the Other, this might require us to dismantle the systems of state identification that force us to be radically fixed, singular rather than multiple.
In short, maybe we are expending too much energy talking about the wrong ‘identity politics’. To build the world we want to live in, perhaps we need to pursue a radical cultural openness to the Other, celebrating promiscuous processes of identification against identity, while also resisting processes of state identification and identity-fixing. Can the radical openness of the self and of culture somehow be mobilised against the fixing, policing, surveilling power of states? Imagining how these struggles are connected and combining them in practice will surely turn out to be much more revolutionary than refining our quips and gripes about ‘identity politics’.