As Virginia Eubanks stresses in her book “Automating Inequality” data collection with digital tools and the automated analysis of data can be used “to create a shadow institution for regulating the poor” in the context of social service programs and social benefits (Eubanks 2018, S. 4). This can also be interesting when referring to surveillance, control and care of migrants and refugees in the setting of EU migration politics.
The text “Digital Biopolitics, Humanitarianism and the Datafication of Refugees” from Btihaj Ajana (2020) may be a good starting point to explore the distribution of benefits for asylum seekers and migrants as well as the recognition of refugee status and how these topics depend on the analysis of digitized data such as data from drones, satellite imagery, interoperable identification systems and the monitoring and tracking via mobile phones and social media (Ajana 2020, S. 470).
It is interesting how some systems of surveillance and tracking are legitimized (for the first time) when applied to asylum seekers and migrants from non-EU-states when at the same time they are not (yet) applied to EU-citizens. There are different examples for those systems: First, there are Data base systems such as EURODAC, a fingerprint database where all asylum seekers and certain third country nationals as well as stateless persons have to give their fingerprints to prevent them from applying for asylum in multiple EU-countries or PRIMES (Population Registration and Identity Management Eco-System), a platform for refugee registration including a biometric identity management system, a iris scan database and ProGres v4, a case management software application that is interconnected with other elements of PRIMES and “allows end-to-end data transmission to financial service providers when cash assistance is used” (UNHCR 2021) – which means that the withdrawal of money from, for example, World Food Programme’s smartcards can be tracked (UNHCR 2021; Ajana 2020, 470f). Another monitoring and surveillance system is EUROSUR, a – as Frontex puts it – “information-exchange framework designed to improve the management of Europe’s external borders” (FRONTEX 2021) monitoring and collecting data on the illegalized immigration to Europe (Spiegel 2013). And there is another kind of data that is being collected with the aim of monitoring refugees and verifying their eligibility for assistance and the refugee status: Authorities can examine mobile phones of asylum seekers to verify their ID and their country of origin by assessing photos or using tracking data of the phone. This procedure is routine in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Also, in Germany, in 2017 the parliament allowed the Bamf (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees) to use the data of phones to verify the identity of asylum seekers (Kirschbaum 2017; Turß 2021) – but in a lawsuit filed by an Afghan woman this year, the Berlin Administrative Court decided that the Bamf’s routine cell phone analysis is generally illegal (Rath 2021; Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte 2021).
It can therefore be said here that the EU and the UN have various instruments through which data on asylum seekers are collected and managed, and that this data is used and evaluated during an asylum application process: If photos on a smartphone or text messages in a particular language cannot confirm that a person is from a particular country, the person’s testimony about his or her country of origin can be doubted and his or her asylum claim may be rejected. If an asylum seeker applies for asylum in one country, the first step is to verify that they have not already done so in another country. Thus, not only is the mobility of asylum seekers tracked and restricted with the help of surveillance and tracking systems, but the receipt of benefits and the recognition of a refugee status also depends on the partially automated analysis of digital data. So, the argument of finding out a so-called truth and the necessity of selecting those who are actually eligible to apply for asylum legitimizes that the group of refugees and asylum seekers is monitored much more precisely with the respective instruments than other groups in society (to go deeper into this “dual risk of rendering certain groups invisible and of misinterpreting what is visible” in the context of monitoring who should get benefits or a refugee status, see also “No place to hide? The ethics and analytics of tracking mobility using mobile phone data” by Linnet Taylor (2016)).
(721 words, by 7434099)
References:
Ajana, Btihaj. 2020. “Digital Biopolitics, Humanitarianism and the Datafication of Refugees.”, in Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, edited by E. Cox (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342282526_Digital_Biopolitics_Humanitarianism_and_the_Datafication_of_Refugees).
Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
FRONTEX. 2021. “EUROSUR.” Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://frontex.europa.eu/media-centre/multimedia/photos/eurosur-Tx7j0f).
Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte. 2021. “Handyauslesung bei Asylsuchenden – GFF – Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.” Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://freiheitsrechte.org/refugee-daten/).
Kirschbaum, Erik. 2017. “In election year, Germany to tap asylum-seekers’ phones for ID checks.” Reuters Media, February 20. Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-asylum-idUSKBN15Z1Y1?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuters+World+News%29).
Rath, Christian. 2021. “Urteil zu Datenauswertung: Das Handy bleibt Privatsache.” taz, June 2. Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://taz.de/Urteil-zu-Datenauswertung/!5776067/).
Spiegel. 2013. “Kampf gegen illegale Einwanderung: EU startet Überwachungssystem Eurosur.” DER SPIEGEL, December 2. Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/eu-startet-ueberwachungssystem-eurosur-im-kampf-gegen-menschenschmuggel-a-936799.html).
Taylor, Linnet. 2016. “No place to hide? The ethics and analytics of tracking mobility using mobile phone data.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(2):319–36. doi:10.1177/0263775815608851.
Turß, Daniela. 2021. “Studie “Das Smartphone, bitte! Digitalisierung von Migrationskontrolle in Deutschland und Europa” – GFF – Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.” Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://freiheitsrechte.org/studie-handydatenauswertung/).
UNHCR. 2021. “Registration tools – UNHCR – Guidance on Registration and Identity Management.” Retrieved June 15, 2021 (https://www.unhcr.org/registration-guidance/chapter3/registration-tools/).
Race and/as technology. A course blog. 
Hello,
thank you for your detailled overview over invasive technologies that are used to control and surveil refugees. This reminded me of this article here: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/greek-camps-surveillance/ (24 April 2021). So I would like to add one aspect to your blog post. The article talks about new surveillance technology to be applied to refugee camps in Greece. The EU-funded project would mean that those refugee camps would become even more prison-like and secured with military-fences. The ability of leaving and re-entering the camps, as well as generel movement around the camp, would be restricted and controlled. Other technological tools would include: “[…] a CCTV system and video monitors, drone flights over the facilities to detect incidents, perimeter violation alarms with cameras, control gates with metal detectors and x-ray devices and an automated system for public announcements, broadcast from loudspeakers.” In the official statement, these tools are only supposed to guarantee security in the camps.
Here, some links to Virginia Eubanks’ text become clear as well. As the often remote and isolated locations of refugee camps indicate, these people are supposed to stay separate and out-of-sight for the rest of the population. The isolation and criminalization of refugees – through the prison-like secured camps – can also be understood as a try to divert these people from public resources, under which maybe even human and civil rights could count. However, the refugee camps are very physical institutions while Eubanks’ “digital poorhouses” are not.
I am looking forward to more aspects and discussion on this topic!
Annika (7425345)
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Hi everyone,
a very interesting blog post! The sheer amount of examples of digital technologies used to track and register refugees during their migration is quite astonishing as well as alarming to me.
A quite good report about the iris scan technology of UNHCR and how it is practically used in a refugee camp in Jordan is produced by Al Jazeera in part 4 “Follow me” of their all in whole really good web series “All Hail the Algorithm”: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2019/hail-algorithms/index.html. There, it is also mentioned how this eye scan is linked to the UNs goal to provide a legal identity to everyone in the world’s population.
Besides, in the examples you give, Virginia Eubank’s argument that all these new technologies are promoted only as “simple administrative upgrades, not consequential political decisions”(24) is very strikingly visible to me. Also, how “bigger, more crucial conversation”(25) are drooped by presenting tracking technologies as an only-way-administrative-option to handle and organize refugee camps as well as migration in general. An administrative inconvenience is put higher than people’s human rights.
Finally, the scalability of these systems is quite obvious. To prove, verify and collect people’s identity also e.g. travelers all these technologies could – in Eubanks terms of the “invisible spider net” (18) – simply be switched on in other contexts too.
Janila Dierks 7432657
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Thank you for your contribution! Your article shows once again the shocking -still not surprising- double standards refugees and asylum seekers have to face on a daily basis. It is consistent with the EU’s agenda of outsourcing policy, but however brings a new (technological) dimension to light. The pretense of arguing with efficiency to ensure faster and automatized mechanisms that help the bureaucratic process, is overshadowed by its real goal: to ensure that deportations have some, even the tiniest basis on which they seem legitimate. The fact that the study still focuses on the cost-benefit relation in this matter is also not surprising. The surveillance techniques should not only enrage us for the sake of asylum seekers but also for our sake. For now, we are “protected” in a sense by our citizenship, which should make us cautious about our actual rights and privileges, and how quickly this can change.
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