Online with Petra Molnar, co-creator of the Migration and Tech Monitor, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Technological experiments play up an ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ mentality at the centre of migration management policy. Border spaces serve as testing grounds for new technologies, places where regulation is deliberately limited and where an ‘anything goes’ frontier attitude informs the development and deployment of surveillance at the expense of people’s lives. Unbridled techno-solutionism and migration surveillance exacerbates deterrence mechanisms already so deeply embedded in the global migration management strategy, like at the Polish Belarusian border, making things as difficult for people to set an example and to prevent others from coming. This paper is based on ethnographic on-the-ground research at various borders, drawing on vignettes from Poland/Belarus, the Aegean Islands of Greece, and the US-Mexico border. Coupled with a human rights-based approach to analysing the far-reaching human impacts of surveillance and automation at the border, it argues that an increasingly global and lucrative panopticon of migration control exacerbates discrimination and obfuscates responsibility and liability through the development and deployment of increasingly hardline border technologies, once again reifying the vast power differentials between those who move and those who make decisions about how to ‘manage’ migration.

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