The production and control of ID documents has been central to the police activity of contemporary states relating to the monitoring of human movement since the nineteenth century. Control was initially conducted face to face through paper documents, as part of a logic of social control for the poor, delinquents, and laborers, before being extended to immigrant workers and later to foreigners and refugees with the invention of the passport in the early twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, anthropometry added anthropometric measurements to the identification techniques police used to register and monitor populations. The registration of individual biometric data continues today, but does so via digitized procedures. This data is gathered and accessed using scanners and readers located in airports, refugee camps, police prefectures, and in consulates as part of passport or visa applications. It is then processed by software programs and stored in databases that algorithms sort through in order to establish the similarity between the digital and physical body. Computerization, in correlation with intensified mobility, has contributed to control that is broader, deterritorialized, and increasingly to the advantage of private companies. A token of “freedom of movement,” fluidity, and rapidity of border crossings for European citizens, it has been denounced as intrusive and discriminatory for migrants and refugees from the Global South.
Schengen, or the exchange of biometric information
The biometric registration of migrants and travelers is central to European migratory, asylum, and border control policy. It was initiated by the Schengen Agreements. The first Schengen Agreement between France, Germany, and the Benelux countries, which was signed in 1985, bolstered police collaboration against cross-border criminality. The Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement was extended to other countries beginning in 1995, before being included in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, and enshrined as a European acquis. This cooperation later took the form of information exchange on foreigners in irregular situations with the Schengen Information System (SIS), which combines all of the information available for individuals profiled as “at risk.” This system consecrated the human/machine interconnection by easing judicial controls. The SIS subsequently grew in scope, in terms of the number of recorded individuals and data categories. Three principles govern this system: access to the Schengen Area is determined by not being registered as an “undesirable” in the files; the harmonization of visas and trust between member states; and the absence of control, in theory, once allowed into the Schengen Area. The Schengen system is central to a larger system of discourse (on threats, immigration, the internal enemy, European integration), institutions (police, public agencies, governments), architectural dispositions (waiting areas at borders, sensors, video), and laws and administrative measures (on terrorism, immigration, etc.). Such a system also outlines a mobile European border where control is exercised remotely, sometimes well before (at the departure locations of migrants) and after (within the territory of arrival) mobilities. The European border thus purports to be an “intelligent” one, as affirmed in the 2010 European Security Strategy. It filters desirable mobilities and permits the rapid crossing of borders for “good faith” travelers (businesspersons, frequent travelers, merchandise, etc.), while producing a racialized figure of the “undesirable” migrant, in accordance with the programming for these software programs and algorithms. It is based on the suspicion of “migratory dangers” in advance of dealing with migrants, and sometimes before respecting their rights, especially that of asylum.
Migratory control via databases
Software programs and databases have become more sophisticated since SIS, and their storage capacity has increased. The European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, abbreviated eu-LISA and created in 2011, is responsible for the three primary computer systems involved: European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database (Eurodac) for asylum applications, Schengen Information System (currently version II) for crimes, and the Visa Information System (VIS) for visa applications. In recent years it has developed the Entry-Exit System, which is larger in scope (nearly 400 million entries), and will be operational in 2022. In connection with the ETIAS travel preauthorization system, it will apply to travelers from third countries, and will record their name, type of travel documents, fingerprints, facial morphology, and entry and exit dates, in lieu of the manual stamping of passports in an effort to detect those who exceed the authorized duration of their stay. In reaction to the Covid19 pandemic, a digital “green” Covid certificate system for travel also risks increasing the conditions required to enter the Schengen Area in the name of health objectives. The major issue behind the adoption of these systems is the sharing of common standards between security agencies, in order to ensure the interoperability of databases. Migratory control is therefore largely extra-territorialized to departure countries, notably in Africa, in a collaboration between international organizations (such as the International Organization for Migration), Frontex, Interpol, and African police. For example, the Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) gathers data from travellers from 23 African countries.
Privatization and resistance
The digitization of control has fueled the defense and surveillance industry, which has become involved in border security over the last two decades. In the European Union, the private sector has been central in framing migratory issues and defining technology research programs with the European Commission. Forums allow for regular dialogue between European institutions and companies, such as the European Organization for Security (EOS) created in 2007, which brings together a number of defense companies. For institutions, it involves shaping and reinforcing European know-how in the field, one that can be exported globally. For companies, it involves financing for research and development, and securing opportunities with states purchasers. Stakeholders in civil society and the European Parliament are consulted very little, and companies rarely bear legal responsibility in matters of migratory control. Budgets are also opaque. Investment in the digitization of control is thus self-perpetuating in the form of public-private partnerships. However, databases are not infallible. First, they include design and reading errors such as false identifications, errors connected to homonymy in the cross-referencing of databases, and problems relating to anonymization (for example for travelers and their European hosts). This has been denounced by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and European Digital Rights (EDRi). It has also generated resistance, with refusals to have fingerprints taken for Eurodac on the part of exiled persons who do not want to be controlled during their migratory journeys.
