“It’s like borders 2.0, okay, so borders which embrace innovation.”
“Yeah, they’re smart borders […] primed to flex, depending on circumstances, using technology-”
“Using what technology?”
“I don’t actually know.”
When watching Channel 4’s 2023 docudrama Partygate, I was not expecting a brief discussion of the Johnson government’s proposed ‘smart borders’ to stick in my mind. Though scripted to satirise and highlight the ignorance of Downing Street advisors between 2019 and 2021, the language employed here to describe the digitisation of border technologies is not unfamiliar. Concealed by connotations of advancement and efficiency, technology is often conceived to be a good thing in the general consciousness – and certainly within policy. It is a way to move forwards and not be left behind in this fast-paced world. At the very least, there is a shield of neutrality attached to technology’s artificiality. Wrapped up in positive but vague allusions to intelligence and innovation, the actual details of what technology is being used in bordering practices is unknown and rarely questioned.
Taking the digitalisation of the UK border regime as its starting point, this article explores the discriminatory nature of bordering in practice. By reading digitalised bordering as a physical manifestation of a broader exclusionary structure, I suggest that such practices have made borders internal in a way that insidiously reshapes our communities. I conclude this article by considering whether it is possible for us to reclaim community and, in doing so, take a role in constructing the places that we call home.
If asked to imagine a border, people will likely think of the geographical edge of a territory perhaps demarcated by a wall or a gate. The proliferation of digitised bordering practices, no longer necessitating a physical form, belies this conventional image. The border is no longer visible, and it moves.
Since the 2000s, the digitalisation of border regimes has become common-place: from the ePassport gates and IRIS (Iris Recognition Immigration System) scanners situated at airports to a bourgeoning culture of surveillance humanitarianism in refugee aid as biometric data is gathered under the guise of support. These ongoing technological advancements have contributed to what Ayelet Shachar has termed a ‘shifting border’. No longer merely situated at the geographical periphery of a nation-state, the border is simultaneously being externalised to refugees attempting to make urgent journeys to safe territories and internalised to airports and the communities beyond.
Notably, technological changes to the UK border regime have rapidly expanded the reach of state control within communities and the home. A prime example of this was the nationwide rollout of the Biometric Services Gateway (BSG) app to police forces across the UK in 2019. This app syncs a mobile device to two databases: the Immigration and Asylum Biometric Database held by the Home Office and IDENT1 (a law enforcement database used by the police). In practice, police officers can use a fingerprint scanner to cross-reference an individual’s biometric data with any personal information stored on either of these databases.
Whilst contributing to a troubling conflation of immigration enforcement and law enforcement, this border technology has accelerated an internally ‘shifting border’. The delegation of immigration controls to public services has also seen data sharing become a weaponised practice as part of the ‘hostile environment’. For instance, a previous Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the NHS and the Home Office facilitated the sharing of confidential patient information for immigration enforcement purposes. Though this MOU was withdrawn in 2018, it has clearly branded the NHS as an institution which is unsafe for migrants. The intangibility of digitised bordering fosters this feeling of distrust. As the border seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, migrants’ communities – and the very places that they call home – are involuntarily cast in this shroud of suspicion.
Campaign groups like #StopTheScan and Patients Not Passports, have highlighted how digitised border controls are implemented in a discriminatory manner. Black and minority ethnic individuals (whether migrant or not) are more likely to be stopped by police and scanned with BSG devices or asked about their immigration status when accessing NHS support. As argued by E. Tendayi Achiume in their ‘Symposium on Undoing Discriminatory Borders’, ‘digital borders reinforce the racially discriminatory nature of existing border regimes by further masking their racially discriminatory nature in the cloak of presumed neutrality that attaches itself so strongly to technology in the popular and policy imaginary’. This acceptance of technology is tied to a perceived distance between its artificiality and the natural biases of the humans who use it. However, what is often overlooked is the influence of these same human biases in the creation of such technologies – whether this influence is conscious or not.
A good example of this is the use of AI sentencing software to predict defendant reoffending. The Correctional Offender Management Profiling Alternative Sanction (COMPAS) tool, designed and owned by Equivant, has been employed in several US courts and has directly led to the over-incarceration of Black people. Though supposedly distanced from the biases held by humans, this software’s algorithm has repeatedly had a racially discriminatory output which is in keeping with the US’s broader landscape of racial inequity. The deployment of digitised bordering practices produces an insidious double bind of uncritical acceptance, with the perceived neutrality of artificial technologies being exacerbated by the simultaneous perception of bordered nation-states as natural. These seemingly paradoxical but intertwining threads of artificial neutrality and naturalness veil the purpose-designed architecture of the border regime. By concealing this deliberate exclusion, the status quo is preserved and becomes all the more difficult to think beyond and ultimately change.
Since both public services and everyday people have been given responsibility for border controls, communities have been transformed into a locus for state control and surveillance. However, the surveillance mechanisms employed by the state predominantly target those who are perceived as ‘other’ to what Adrian Favell has termed the ‘invisible mainstream’. This othering is rooted in the rhetorical and ideological underpinnings of the UK border regime. Such ideas then manifest as discriminatory (and increasingly digitised) immigration controls. Notably, the rhetorical construction of the border is even more intangible than its digital form and, therefore, even more challenging to unpick. Still, it is necessary to understand the logic which forms the backbone of the digitally shifting border to truly resist it and the harmful nation-state structure it legitimises.
Ultimately, the formulation of this ‘other’ category is at the centre of bordering practices, as Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis S. Tsianos pointed out in 2013: ‘[t]he more migrants become imperceptible, the more they become like everyone’. But who is this ‘everyone’? In political theory on migration, the ‘everyone’ category may instead be termed ‘society’, a ‘community of value’ or – as mentioned before – the ‘invisible mainstream’ (as per Willem Schinkel, Bridget Anderson, and Adrian Favell respectively). Captured in this changeable terminology is the abstract and vaporous nature of these rhetorical constructions. Beyond the sphere of theory, these semantics have a real-world impact. Imagined constructions of a majority are frequently employed as a justification for the further exclusion of those considered to be external to this imagined in-group. As Anderson notes in her book Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, the ‘notion of ‘community’ facilitates a seamless switch between the imagined national community and the imagined local community’. In this rhetorical switching of scale, the fuzzy figure of the ‘community of value’ legitimises the bordered nation-state as an extension of its own indivisible form. Restrictive (and discriminatory) border controls, which are often presented as protecting this in-group, are also then justified in this rhetorical weaponisation of ‘community’. The conflation of ‘community’ with a broader national community propagates a covert equation of the ‘mainstream’ with Whiteness – which then leads to racialised bordering mechanisms in practice. Vague notions of ‘community’ are necessarily abstractive, ensuring the harms of bordering practices appear coincidental rather than purposefully built into their very structure.
The homogenising force of the imagined ‘community of value’ necessarily obscures the differences (and, crucially, the inequalities) that are present within the in-group as well. Structural injustices faced by migrants, such as inadequate housing, job insecurity, or the inaccessibility of healthcare, are not issues faced exclusively by migrants – though migration status inevitably adds an additional layer of vulnerability. The weaponisation of ‘community’ is purposefully divisive and produces competition between different groups in order to distract from the intertwining nature of their inequalities. Though marred by these rhetorical usages, is it possible for social justice organisations to reclaim ‘community’ from a space of state control to a radical mechanism for collective resistance?
One such organisation championing this approach of collective resistance is the Community Union Acorn. Intrinsic to Acorn’s work is a recognition of the intertwining nature of injustices which collectively shape, restrict and influence communities at the local-level. It is this specific outlook which enables Acorn to build solidarity between its different members rather than competition. The Union’s community organising endeavour could equally be termed a community building project. As bonds of solidarity are forged between members, and subsequently directed towards a shared space, Acorn encourages individuals to become key actors in constructing the very places they call home.
First formed in Bristol in 2014 to challenge housing injustices, Acorn has since expanded to almost 30 different branches across the UK and its membership continues to grow. Though Acorn’s primary focus has continued to be housing, individual branch campaigns are responsive to community needs. It was whilst I was studying in Leeds for my Masters that I became aware of my local Acorn branch’s campaign for the year: Carers Fight Back. Aimed at supporting migrant care workers based in the Leeds area, this campaign developed in response to stories of a UK-based care company over-charging migrants from Zimbabwe thousands of pounds to work in and around the city. Given far fewer shifts than promised and being housed in overcrowded accommodation, the threat of deportation was employed to try and prevent any of these workers from challenging abuses. The fear of becoming visible, both within the community and thus also to border controls, cultivated a climate primed for worker abuses. A clear example of the intangible border, both everywhere and nowhere at once, alienating migrants from the communities that they call home. In this instance, the ‘hostile environment’ sharpened vulnerabilities that were already present within the working class. By recognising the exploitation of these care workers as a collective issue of class (rather than a niche issue of migration), Acorn Leeds was able to build solidarity within the community and rally members behind those who were being exploited. Subsequently, the community was transformed from a space of suspicion to one of collective resistance.
It is fitting that the root of Acorn’s work has been quite literally in the home: protecting community members from housing injustice. I would argue that the Carers Fight Back campaign falls under this same umbrella of creating home. Through garnering local support for migrant care workers, Acorn Leeds assisted with positioning the community as a place of safety rather than hostility. Subsequently, migrants could feel more at home within the city. Beyond this though, I am suggesting that the very act of organising as a community works to forge a greater sense of belonging for all – migrants and non-migrants alike. Community organising allows members to have a say in, and a responsibility for, shaping their home. Encouraging this investment within the community and empowering members to feel that they can be actors in defining their home allows for a more radical imagining of what ‘home’ can be. This space for radical imagination facilitates thinking beyond the scope of the bordered nation-state (and the harmful hierarchies it necessitates) and instead towards formulating alternative ways of being in common.
I started this piece with a satirical scene from Partygate, highlighting parliamentary advisors’ lack of understanding of the very policies they were promoting. Beyond being a good example of the abstracting force of digitised bordering, this scene highlights the complete absence of questioning when it comes to the border. If we want to resist the encroaching of the discriminatory border, we need to start asking more questions of the status quo it both presupposes and entrenches. The normalisation-come-naturalisation of the bordered nation-state has shaped how people create their own sense of belonging within a place. Internally shifting bordering mechanisms have operated like a pair of hands moulding the shape of community, with the digitalisation of these mechanisms simultaneously speeding up and making these processes more invisible. Through defying vague and homogenising constructions of the community, and giving a face or voice to members, community organising has the capacity to start undoing the rhetorical underpinnings of the ever-shifting border. It is in this dismantling that space for more radical alternatives is created.