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content/session/stenum.md

@@ -2,10 +2,7 @@
 title = "The Body-Border – Governing Irregular Migration Through Biometric Technology"
 +++
 
-
-# The Body-Border – Governing Irregular Migration Through Biometric Technology 
-
-## Technological Cross-Over
+# Technological Cross-Over
 Biometric technology is booming and is being developed in close cooperation between the IT and security industries, academics, engineers and social scientists, and governments around the world investing large sums of public funds to be part of the global biometric system of border control and surveillance The market analysis company “6Wresearch” announced in 2016 that the global biometrics market was “one of the key growing electronic security markets in the global landscape” and was projected to reach $ 21,9 billion by 2020. Increasing government spending, national ID projects, e-passports and visas, rising crime rates, growing terrorist activities, cyber crime, and data theft are seen as reasons for spurring the market for various biometric technologies globally.[^stenum_1] 
 
 Biometric identifiers (finger prints, facial and iris scans etc.) have increasingly become a key element in technology of EU border and migration management. Proposed by the EU Commission in 2011 and aimed at separating the ‘bona-fide’ traveller in the mobility flow from the ‘risk’ traveller, and facilitating identification and deportation of irregular migrants, “Smart Borders” based on biometric technology have become central in EU management of migration. This development takes place against a backdrop of a booming biometric industry preoccupied with technical solutions on government technology such as national ID, passports and “mobility-access-devices”.
@@ -16,13 +13,13 @@ However, public investment in private corporation-based biometrics in migration
 
 This paper discusses both recent technological developments in EU migration management, as well as the historical context of biometric technology to explore the apparent biometric divide between citizens and migrants, the latter positioned and managed as risks, through surveillance and data collection, while citizens are managed as hold of access to privileges. The technique of both circuits, however, involves bodily coded information, emphasises the general tendency of “securitization of identity”[^stenum_4]. 
 
-## Seeing Like A (N Irregular) Migrant 
+# Seeing Like A (N Irregular) Migrant 
 
 A starting point for analysing the effects of biometric technology in migration management is the perspective of the irregular migrant. Documented ‘identity’ is and has always been important for crossing borders, and migrants cross borders with various types of forged documents or without documents every day. However, for the majority of illegalized migrants in the EU, ‘border crossing’ at the external borders took place as a legalized act with their own passports, visa, temporary residence permits etc. and afterwards they overstayed for various reasons or they acted in non-compliance with the residency permits.[^stenum_5]
 
 Documented ‘identity’ and identification become crucial in the everyday life of illegalized migrants (non-status residents) in order to cope with the condition of *deportability*[^stenum_6] and to avoid deportation. To construct, buy or borrow a suitable identity, for a health insurance card for example, can protect you against deportation if you are caught in a police check. However, a “passing identity” can also give you access to gated and privileged communities or member clubs[^stenum_7] for legalized residents only – for example in workplaces, hospitals, education etc. One can say that these irregular migrants practice a strategy of ‘flexible identities’.
 
-### Flexible Identities and De-identification
+## Flexible Identities and De-identification
 
 Utilising flexible identities during migration is one of many strategies developed to counter or circumvent barriers and state-produced obstacles. Such strategies reflect the current rules and restrictions of the management of migration. Flexible identities can also work as an emigration-strategy to overcome restrictions of transnational management of migration, such as time-limited residence permits, entry bans, or not qualifying for immigration. Buying or borrowing the identity of a resident in the country of origin, for example of a family member or neighbour, can facilitate migration. Obviously this can have unintended consequences for both the migrant travelling as well as for the resident staying in the country of origin. For example, the resident could lose their social rights temporarily because they are documented as having left the country.
 
@@ -36,7 +33,7 @@ For the resident using the de-identification strategy, the state is not able to
 
 One-to-many and one-to-none relations both represent counter-conduct towards the dominant governmentality of migration management and more broadly, disorder in the context of nation state government of populations and identity. However, the idea of one-to-one relations between an individual and an identifiable state-based identity, is fundamental in constructing and developing biometric management of migration. 
 
-## Purpose and Function Creeps
+# Purpose and Function Creeps
 
 To understand the current developments in EU migration management we will look into the proposal to alter the Eurodac Regulation.[^stenum_11] Biometric identifiers have increasingly become a key element of EU border and migration management,[^stenum_12] especially in technology aimed at governing irregular migration and facilitating return and deportation of illegalized migrants. Biometric identifiers have primarily involved fingerprints and facial recognition, but also DNA.[^stenum_13]
 
@@ -44,7 +41,7 @@ In the EU Prüm system,[^stenum_14] which builds on an agreement to step up coop
 
 These systems aim to govern both a large group of third country nationals and EU citizens considered to be criminals by the state or anti-citizens. The biometric identifier is stored in order to link a specific body to specific information related to status (asylum seeker, entry banned, convicted etc.). In the digitization or “Information” strategy of the EU Commission on “Stronger and Smarter Borders”,[^stenum_17] biometric technology is celebrated and characterised by a number of qualities, one of which is: “Biometric technology can reduce the risk of mistaken identities, and of discrimination and of racial profiling”[^stenum_18].
 
-### Recast Eurodac Regulation
+## Recast Eurodac Regulation
 
 The so-called refugee crisis[^stenum_19] in 2015-16 in Europe has intensified the development of biometric technology aimed at managing populations and the mobility of migrants. In the spring of 2016, the EU Commission proposed to change the criteria for capturing data in Eurodac as one of the measures to regain control of migration to the EU.[^stenum_20] Changing the use of data for a different goal than it was collected for can be characterized as purpose creep.[^stenum_21] 
 
@@ -72,7 +69,7 @@ It is proposed that facial images are to be collected and stored in the database
 
 The use of facial images as stored identifier of a person is different from a fingerprint in various ways; from the ‘gaze of the governor’ it is easier to obtain a facial image (what the industry refers to as “less intrusive”), it facilitates a unique key to surveillance in public and other places, it supports state of the art global biometric identification efforts by governments, such as biometric passports, visa-systems, national ID cards etc., to maintain “the national order of things”[^stenum_33] where every human being is identified as belonging to a nation state. A facial biometric identifier is much more difficult to spoof or alter than fingerprints and furthermore, as the EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor) has noted “the unique identifier might be used for other purposes, for example for identifying the individuals in other databases, making the comparison of databases easy and simple”[^stenum_34].
 
-## Biometric Citizenship and Flexible Zones and Gates
+# Biometric Citizenship and Flexible Zones and Gates
 
 The proposal to creep purpose and function in the Eurodac however, is part of a larger EU agenda on migration management in general, and reforming the Common European Asylum System more specifically.[^stenum_35] Hence, also a proposed Entry/Exit system is designed with a similar logic – especially when it comes to the specific biometric facial identifier.[^stenum_36]
 
@@ -90,7 +87,7 @@ From the perspective of the EU commission the capacity of enforcing a unique one
 
 Biometric identifiers are constructed as non-flexible in order to create the preconditions for flexible borders, zones, channels and gates that can facilitate both the celebrated global, fast-tracked, smooth mobility of humans[^stenum_41] and the reproduction of the geo-political division of individuals into national populations and the social sorting of residents within and between nation states.[^stenum_42] This is a new disturbing infrastructure, which has been characterised as irreversible.[^stenum_43] 
 
-## Biometric Alienage[^stenum_44] 
+# Biometric Alienage[^stenum_44] 
 In a nation state context, biometric identifiers have primarily been reserved for criminal residents and unwanted foreigners, with the fingerprinting of rejected asylum seekers, deported aliens and illegalized migrants. During the last decade, the EU has however, as we have seen, implemented technological mechanisms to ‘combat’ the possibility of *de-identification* and *flexible identities* through the use of forged documents at the border.
 
 Fraud, false documents, low penalties and corruption are often cited when linking irregular migration to criminal activities.[^stenum_45] Within a control regime based on unique identification, a centralised state authority for issuing the required identifications, and a high degree of state access to unique, identifiable data, creates conditions for borders being patrolled, regardless of if these borders are placed at the perimeter of the nation state or if the patrolling and control takes place through individual profiling and random inspections at bus stations or public parks.
@@ -105,7 +102,7 @@ Biometric technology is the materialization of a political thought mutated from
 
 Large scale databases, such as SIS II and Eurodac, containing data of the expelled, the penalized, the overstaying etc. – offers the possibility to select and separate legals from illegals, the deserving from the non-deserving, citizens from unwanted migrants. The “biometric passport” or identifier merges several mutated key technologies of the colonial nation-states such as fingerprints, mug shots and passports into a technical, depoliticised instrument targeting ‘the Others’.[^stenum_52] However, with biometric passports, national ID cards, access codes to mobile phones, credit cards using the same standards and technology, the ‘Selves’ are now also included as objects for biometric surveillance and scanning.
 
-## Fictions of Freedom and Non-discrimination
+# Fictions of Freedom and Non-discrimination
 
 The primary underlying argument for biometric smart borders is the need for “securitization of identity”[^stenum_53] which is constructed as enhancing “freedom of movement” through “speeding up travel flows” as analysed by Bigo: “[…] under liberal government mobility is translated into a discourse of freedom of circulation, which reframes freedom as moving without being stopped and confuses the speed of well-channeled movement with freedom”[^stenum_54].
 
@@ -123,7 +120,7 @@ An effect of the built-in ‘whiteness’ of the technology[^stenum_62] is that
 
 The focus on the particular kind of governmental technology is exactly this; the technified “gaze of the governor”[^stenum_64], tracking and scanning through enormous amounts of data to identify the specific, bodily differences that single you out as an object for surveillance and control, and at the same time subjectify the human being as a container of a physical, essential and unique identity. Essential identities are constructed in the fabric of the biometric systems through technique, algorithms, data-mining, profiling etc. as materialised social categorisations of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality etc. You could say that the paradigm of the biometric system is more of a “scan-opticon”[^stenum_65] with the capacity to manage populations through bodily identification and with a spatial flexibility to create zones, gates and borders anywhere.
 
-## Conclusion
+# Conclusion
 
 Tightening up controls will likely increase the number of migrants being detained and deported, making residence more difficult. Biometric surveillance and profiling, separate the privileged from the unprivileged, the desired from the unwanted, the non-deportable from the deportable. It is an ongoing development, which is also linked to the ambition of enumeration and surveying irregular migrants.
 
@@ -135,7 +132,7 @@ Despite significant differences in the way biometrics is used as a technology to
 
 While Agamben had the capacity to control his fingerprints being taken back in 2004, who has the capacity to control who takes, or tags our facial images now?
 
-## References
+# References
 
 [^stenum_1] Tech in Asia: According to 6Wresearch, Global Biometrics Market is projected to reach $ 21,9 billion by 2020. Cp. 6Wresearch, “Global Biometrics Market is Projected to Touch $21.9 Billion by 2020”, *Linkedin*, Mai 31, 2016. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-biometrics-market-projected-touch-219-billion-2020- [accessed June 27, 2017]. Another market research company projects Biometric System Market worth $ 32,73 Billion by 2022: “The biometric system market size is expected to increase from USD 10.74 Billion in 2015 to USD 32.73 Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 16.79% between 2016 and 2022”. Markets and Markets, “Biometric System Market worth 32.73 Billion USD by 2022”, *Press Releases*, n.d. Available at: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/biometric-technologies.asp [accessed November 30, 2016].