There is a lie at the heart of every modern border, and it is dressed as innovation. We are told again and again that new digital technologies have made borders smarter, that drones, biometric scanners, and algorithms can cleanly, objectively and without politics or prejudice sort the deserving from the dangerous (Hao). We are told such technological progress is inevitable, that it is the only serious answer to the so-called problem of people-on-the-move (Miller, Empire of Borders). This lie is enormously profitable, and it is remaking the world.
I have spent years at the world’s borders, sitting in olive groves above the refugee camps on Lesvos, walking through the Sonoran Desert where hot wind quickly dissolves your dusty footprints in an arroyo (a dried riverbed), in detention rooms where motion tracking surveillance is always watching. At the sharpest edges on innovation, where techno-solutionistic tendencies of states wishing to securitize their borders are met with profit driven agendas of private sector actors, we are sold the idea that technologies are making border enforcement more clever through increasing spectacles. Autonomous surveillance towers, drones, robo-dogs running along the border (United States, Department of Homeland Security), and systems that claim to read fingerprints and irises and the supposed truth written on a face: all of it is marketed as omniscience, the power to know in advance who belongs and who does not, who is a threat and who is allowed to enter. Those who shill these tools at expos like the World Border Security Congress or the Border Expo tell us that these tools are objective, effective, efficient, and above all inevitable, the only natural and obvious answer to the so-called problem of migration that needs to be solved (Miller, “Many Scandals”).
But none of this is true. It is a story and a spectacle – and a profitable one at that.
Securitization is the name for this spectacle once it becomes a way of governing (Buzan et al.; Huysmans). It is the policy move that turns a human being on the move into a security problem, a risk to be scored, a body to be sorted (Geiger and Pécoud). And once movement is criminalized and treated as a matter of security (García Hernández; Stumpf), almost anything can be justified: indefinite detention (Silverman and Molnar), deportation back into danger in direct contravention of international law (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, art. 33), biometric registration demanded as the price of a meal inside a refugee camp (Human Rights Watch), walls of sensors strung across deserts and lakes and seas, an AI-powered genocide (Albanese). The promise that a clever machine can decide all this objectively, efficiently, without politics or prejudice, is exactly what launders politics that dictate who we cage, who we bomb, and who we let drown (Neuber).
But instead, I want us to sit with Rumi’s invitation. What lessons can we find in bewilderment, in the recognition of the tremendous complexity of the human condition, in knowing that we can never have all the answers, that human life is not reducible to binary choices?
However, a commitment to bewilderment is not easy. Its lessons run in opposition to the border-industrial complex trades on a performance of cleverness: prediction, classification, the confident sorting of the deserving from the undeserving, all of it dressed up as objective (and lucrative) facts that can be turned into profit. Bewilderment is the direct refusal of this performance. It is the insistence that a person cannot be fully known in advance, and that any technological confidence is merely a sales pitch that sees complexity as a threat.
But there are powerful actors at the center of this lucrative industry. Consider who builds these systems: Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company, markets its surveillance towers as battle-tested, where the testing ground is the Occupied West Bank and the ongoing genocide in Gaza (Albanese; Mbembe), and the export market is the United States, where those same towers now watch Tohono O’Odham Indigenous lands and border crossings in Arizona (Parrish).
Strawberries grown in Gaza, one of the few exports you could find in Ramallah, Occupied West Bank before the start of the 2023 Genocide, P. Molnar, 2023/p>
Peter Thiel’s Palantir builds software, most recently a platform called ImmigrationOS, that fuses tax files, license-plate reads, biometric records, and immigration histories from dozens of separate databases into a single searchable system, so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can rank and remove specific people at scale, even as the errors in that data mean the wrong people are caught in it (American Immigration Council; Axios Denver; ACLU). Under the guise of a research pilot project, Europe has trialled iBorderCtrl, an AI ‘lie detector’ system meant to detect deception from the movements of a traveller’s face, as if something as complex as plausibility and truthfulness in high-stress situations like a border interview is a thing that a facial recognition and micro-expression analysis can measure (Gallagher and Jona). None of these projects are neutral infrastructure, and often, these interventions do not even work the way they are advertised. Algorithms oppress and biometric systems misidentify and misfire (Noble; Benjamin), and the errors land hardest on the same racialized bodies the systems were built to identify and suspect of wrongdoing. And, these systems of surveillance do not actually stop people from moving into territories where they are unwanted. Rather, they push people into deadlier deserts and colder seas (Chambers et al.), leading to thousands of deaths (International Organization for Migration). Yet despite – or perhaps because of its deadliness – the border remains one of the most lucrative markets on earth (Akkerman; Akkerman et al.), and every political panic about people-on-the-move becomes a sales opportunity (De Genova).
But in the ongoing droning on about security by politicians and the private sector, who is this type of security actually for? This is where Big Tech, the security state, and the rising fascist and fundamentalist right meet (Hayes). They share a dream of purity and sorting, of a world built on white supremacy that is cleanly divided into those who belong and those who must be removed. The far right wants the wall. The tech company sells the smart version and calls it state-of-the-art. The state then passes emergency laws and the counter-terror power to operationalize a perception of safety. And the nomenclature of securitization allows these fascist projects to appear respectable. Because after all, are we not talking about ‘public safety’? And who are we to question such a ‘laudable’ goal in these troubled times of the polycrisis?
But question we must. Because questioning the seeming inevitability of the Big Tech-Borders-Fascism conflation opens up our coin-purses just a little, to perhaps space a few cents here and there and buy some bewilderment instead. The Black feminist writer Lola Olufemi calls this work “imagining otherwise”: a constant practice of refusing the world as it is handed to us and conjuring, together, the one that could exist instead (Olufemi). Bewilderment clears the ground for this other world.
Feminist and decolonial traditions have always insisted that real security is the presence of what people actually need: housing, a doctor, a community that will not turn you in (Molnar, “Revolution Begins”; Spade). This is security rooted in relationships rather than in walls, in collective care rather than in control, in mutual accountability rather than in a cage (Montgomery and bergman). Innovation sold to us as cleverness is really selling us a misguided certainty that a person can be known in advance. Instead, a commitment to care and a commitment to bewilderment is a commitment to the patience to find out that we often do not, or cannot, have all the answers.
From border to border and spaces of occupation and oppression, I think often of the people I have met over the years who have survived the harshest of border regimes, the technologies that tried to strip them of their humanity, the violent spectacles of the management of human movement. But ‘survived’ is perhaps not the right word. Rather, I have seen again and again the tenacity, care, stubbornness, creativity, and contestation of people who the system tries as hard as it might to reduce to data points and iris scans to remain steadfastly themselves. Whether by digging out tandoor bread-ovens in a refugee camp spilling over the slopes of an olive grove in Lesvos (Papangeli and Malichudis), burning off their fingerprints to avoid detection in the European asylum system (Molnar, Technological Testing Grounds), or by creating deep networks for care that transcend histories and lived experiences, they refuse to acquiesce to the system that renders them as a problem to be solved.
So, to help this project of refusal, let us sell the so-called cleverness that sorts people into the deserving and the disposable (Molnar, “Ghost Sharks”). Let us, instead, practice the bewildered conviction that no one is illegal, that no one is a threat for moving, that apartheid will fall, and that any notion of a safe and secure world should always be rooted in care.
List of resources
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