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Migration, AI and The Rise of the Machines [1]
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Date: 2025-03
Transcript
Hello and welcome to In Solidarity. I'm Aman Sethi. Today we're diving into the terrifying world of the border industrial complex, a network of corporations who have made a business of devising ever more dystopian technology to track and trap vulnerable people making their way across national borders.
Think AI powered robotic dogs with facial recognition cameras for eyes. The rise of the borders industrial complex is pretty scary on its own. But as anyone following the tech industry can attest, technologies and tactics devised to control borders very quickly become technologies and tactics to control citizens. At this point, I can imagine you sitting back saying, ‘great, the world is on fire, the plague of war sweeps the land, and now we have to worry about AI robo dogs?’, Well, yes, unfortunately we do.
And to help us worry along, we have our guest for today, Petra Molnar has written this great book called The Walls Have Eyes: surviving migration in the age of AI. Petra is an anthropologist, an immigration lawyer, and one of the most interesting minds thinking about the intersection of migration, tech, law and borders. Hi, Petra. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure, Petra. Let's just start, by cutting straight to it like, why did you write this book?
Yeah, that's it. That's a good place to start, because this book took me about six years to write. I mean, I always thought it would end up in a book, but it was a winding road, I mean, as most of these projects are. I am not a tech person, not a technologist. Six, seven years ago, I didn't know what AI was or what algorithms were, and frankly, I didn't really care, because I was a practising lawyer in Canada at the time.
I'm a refugee lawyer and an anthropologist by training, but not a tech person, but my colleague, Lex Gill, who's a technology lawyer expert, and I at the time, back in 2018 discovered that the Canadian government was experimenting with algorithms to automate various parts of the Canadian immigration system, and we wrote a report about it, and this little report made its way into all sorts of chambers of government and the UN and it really surprised me at how much attention this was getting, perhaps because it was one of the first attempts to try and put a human rights lens on the intersection of technology and migration, surveillance and automation.
And from then, because I've always tried to work from a comparative perspective, I thought, well, what's happening at other borders, what's happening in other jurisdictions and other environments. And the project kind of organically grew from there and eventually culminated in the book.
What I love about the book is you really take the reader there, like the readers with you as you traverse a series of sort of borderlands. Can you describe some of the things that that you saw and what really jumped out to you in in the geographies that you, that you traversed.
It starts off at the US Mexico border, and tries to tell a story of the kind of growing surveillance that's been part and parcel of the US immigration response for for decades, and intensifying recently, of course.
Never more so than under the Trump presidency 2.0, but the first chapter also talks a lot about the people who show up to try and help those who are on the move, so the samaritans who go into the Sonora desert to drop water or to assist people in distress and to deal with human remains as well. Then there's few chapters about the situation in the European Union, namely Greece, because Greece has been warehousing, for lack of a better term, huge numbers of people on the move for a number of years, which has resulted in essentially these open air prison refugee camps that are now replete with all sorts of tech.
What kind of tech?
It really is a broad class of tech that I cover in my work. I talk about it kind of as technologies of border management or migration control, so that can include things like surveillance tech that people might be familiar with, things like drones, cameras, but even more draconian projects now, like robo dogs that have been introduced at the US Mexico border and AI lie detectors that the European Union's been playing with.
There's also things that you know are more on the side of, for example, big data sets that are being collected on people on the move. Then also a lot of the automation projects that I briefly alluded to, the kind of visa triaging algorithms and the decision making that happens behind closed doors even once a person has already arrived in the country that they are planning to go to.
One of the things that I've found interesting about your work was that it refers to this, this idea that you call the borders industrial complex. What do you mean by that?
So this is a term first introduced by a wonderful colleague of mine, Todd Miller. He's a journalist in Arizona, and he runs an amazing platform called The Border Chronicle. I would encourage you to take a look at it.
So Todd's been talking a lot about the border industrial complex as an idea, because what we're really seeing is this rise of an industry, an industry built on innovation by the private sector to solve the so-called problem of migration that states are very concerned about. So if a state is able to say, well, people on the move are a problem, and we need a solution for it, the private sector sweeps in and says, ‘well, look, we have the solution for you, and we will sell it to you, and that solution is a robo dog or a drone or AI’, and it really is a multi billion dollar industry now, and it's exponentially increasing.
I don't have the figures for 2024 and 2025 yet, but there is a massive uptick of investment. And perhaps disturbingly too, the day after President Trump was re-elected, stocks in private security and surveillance firms soared. So there is this relationship between a turn to the right, anti-migrant sentiments, and the private sector stepping in and offering these so-called solutions to assist with this kind of move towards controlling migration more and more.
I've worked as a tech journalist for many years. And I've noticed, especially with the introduction of tech into what we broadly call governance, that there is the tech itself and then there is the performance of the tech, right? So, there's a robo dog, and we can be like, is a robo dog more efficient than anything else? But there's also the performance, right? Where you're clearly sending a message, we're using robotic cyborgs to hunt migrants. Is that something you noticed in the course of your work that... there is the tech itself and the banal tech or the data set and then there is the drama of the tech.
Absolutely, I mean, so much of it is about this performance, this performance of state sovereignty, and also this kind of surveillance theatre. And definitely, I think since the introduction of a lot of these border technologies, there has been an open question that scholars have been putting forward, like, what actually is this tech doing right? And, are we sometimes also over focusing on the tech, like, being really concerned about the robo dogs and the drones? Like, what other systems of violence are still at play? But I think it's, it's a little bit of both.
I think the performance and the theatre of this tech does work as intended, because it makes the border more sharp for the people who are on the move. And so even though there is this gap in terms of, well, are the robo dogs actually there? What are they doing? Are they even more efficient than kind of more traditional systems of border violence, that is almost kind of besides the point, because that affective, or that even that kind of socio emotional side of the technology is still very much there, and it's still very present in people's lives, and then also in the choices that they make as a result.
Is the politics of migration like a post-World War Two phenomenon? Is it something that has predated the great wars like my reading of history, which I am absolutely not a historian, seems to suggest that there was a period where states were fighting each other. This is my land, or this is your land, but they didn't particularly care who was coming and going across these kinds of demarcations.
I mean, it makes me think of a few things. One, for example, I think being... or if we really want to map it to a particular historical moment, 9/11 I would say, is definitely a major inflection point in the rising Islamophobia as a result. But then also perhaps this discomfort of the West to really sit with the fact that so many people are migrating as a result of Western imperialism for centuries, and now Western nations have to kind of contend with that.
But it is interesting when we really like to think about, well, this kind of hardening of borders and this concretization of border security and border control now through tech and previously, through policy making and law making. I mean, it is definitely intensified. Because when we think back to just how porous borders used to be, it is a different phenomenon. Makes me think of a really great book by journalist John Washington. It's called the case for open borders. And John really lays out a very interesting kind of historical case study that open borders are not actually some crazy leftist phenomenon that oftentimes critics make it sound to be, but it actually was something that that was practised, and I can give you a direct example.
When my book first came out in May of 2024, I really wanted to share it with some of the Samaritan groups and search and rescuers in Arizona, because that forms a big part of the narrative. And so I went down there and did a small book tour. But being an ethnographer and anthropologist, I was like, well, what's happening at the border? Like, let's go there. So my partner and I drove down there to see and there was this really interesting small town called Naco in Arizona, really tiny. I mean, it's like a couple 100 people. Now there's a massive border wall. It's very difficult to cross, very much similar to other parts of Arizona that have been securitized. But just a few decades ago, people are playing volleyball from the Mexico side to the US side, and people were freely moving back and forth, right? So even the kind of sharpest, most physical manifestations of the bordering regime were not always the case, and I think it's important to remember that, because as much as we're seeing this exponential turn towards building more walls, if it's so easy to build them, then perhaps it's also easy to unbuild them, but it's a political choice and a societal choice to do so.
There is, of course, the question of race here, right? Because if you look at the European Union, which has for a long time, had mostly open internal borders, once you get in, it's not like all of Germany showed up in France, or all of France showed up in Germany. People more or less have an anchor that they kind of, stay around, and then some people move, and some people stay. And I have been thinking a lot about whether a lot of the conversation about modern day migration is actually a conversation about race.
100%, it is predicated on racial politics of exclusion and which communities are seen as desirable and which are not. And this is absolutely coded along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, especially in the European Union space, but same could be said about North America and the racial element to all of this is crucial. I mean, I think we would be missing a major, major piece to the puzzle if we don't look at this right in the face. I mean, a direct example is the European Union's treatment of Ukrainian refugees, which, again, I think shows how benevolent and well, how open borders could actually work in a state of crisis, right? And the fact that a lot of Ukrainian refugees received residence permits.
And yet, a few kilometres north, for example, of the Ukraine Poland border, lies the Polish Belarusian border, where hundreds of people were trapped for months while the Lukashenko regime was weaponizing migration and basically pushing people from Iraqi Kurdistan into Poland back in 2021 to essentially use the people as pawns to try and lift sanctions against Belarus. And yet those people, people from Iraqi Kurdistan, people who are non white, non blonde and blue eyed, were not welcome. So there are racial logics that animate where decisions get made and who is welcome and who isn't. And that is absolutely an element to kind of Western bordering. That is the reality today.
What I love about your book, and the the kind of tagline of your book, I think, is migration in the age of AI, and it brings together, for me, like two of the kind of big, fundamental anxieties that we're grappling with, where migration taps into into the anxiety of what it means to be a nation or a people. But AI taps into this, anxiety of what it means to be human, and what's interesting about the way you talk about AI decision making. The proponents of AI decision making will obviously say that this is about cost and this is about efficiency, but it does seem to me that there's something more at play here when we say we're gonna give this decision to the machine. What's really going on here is there, is it a way of kind of creating a bloodless framework over what is actually a kind of dirty, gritty business? Like, how do you read this?
Yeah, absolutely. if I think about it from a refugee lawyer perspective, I can't help but think that a lot of this has to do with kind of creating a veil between the decision maker and the person on whom the decision is rendered, right? And this already happens in the immigration space, where, if you're interacting with officers or judges, I mean, you kind of see that there is a disconnect between their lived experience and the lived experience of the person that you're working with that's seeking asylum, for example. So there's already dehumanisation in these systems, right? But what is automation doing, right? It is creating a further distance between the person in power and the person on whom that power is wielded.
So that's no accident. Some people call it responsibility laundering, right? Because powerful actors can also say, well, if a mistake is made, it wasn't me, it was the AI ssystem. And even when you know there's conversations about having a human in the loop, for example, which oftentimes what I'm told when I critique these systems, governments say, well, what are you so worried about? We have an officer checking this. What about automation bias, right? And like we know that human beings have a tendency to assume that an automated rendered decision is somehow more accurate or truthful. I mean all of this, I think we have to look at it from the lens of the context that we're talking about, because in immigration and refugee decision making, the decision making space is already extremely opaque, very discretionary.
I mean, you can have two officers look at the exact same set of evidence and render two completely different yet equally legally valid decisions. So if that's the milieu we're operating in, and then we start augmenting or replacing human decision making with machine learning. What does that do to that kind of human to human interaction? I did want to add one other thing. It also makes me think of, I don't know how to put this, but like the direction of travel when it comes to innovation, and whose priorities really take precedence on what we innovate on, and why, it ultimately is about power, because it's the powerful actors that get to say, well again, migration is a problem, and so we need a solution to it, instead of, for example, using technologies to make the system more fair, more transparent, we're developing things like robo dogs and AI lie detectors, instead of using AI to identify racist border guards or to look at immigration decision makers. Like, that's a clear normative choice that powerful actors are making. So it is, it is about power, really.
How did we come to a regime where, and this is something I think about, where it's where you're trying to decide if someone is oppressed enough to be let in, in the sense that if you were to just walk in and say, Well, I want to migrate for fun, which is something that strikes me as the debate has moved so far that to even say, Well, I just want to migrate for fun sounds almost fundamentally disrespectful to the incredibly hard circumstances in which most of humanity is currently forced to undertake migration journeys.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the current kind of conversations also are so short sighted, right? And also very ahistorical, because I think people forget how easy it is to become a refugee, right, and how so many of these situations really are on a knife's edge. So many of us have migration stories right that are precisely about things turning on a dime from one day to the next. I mean, not to fear monger, but like that is part of the human experience, and human movement has been with us since time immemorial. The other thing too, I think, is that it is very short sighted to look at migration display, because what about environmental migration? And the fact that 1000s, millions of people are likely going to be on the move in the coming years? Is due to environmental degradation. I mean, strengthening borders and preventing people from coming is not going to work.
I think your your point about the idea of becoming a refugee is something like that that exists on a knife edge. And I've been thinking about the fact that America is now enacting legislation that may force a vast swath of people who are either, are trans people, are people who may just want an abortion, people who feel victimised for a wide variety of reasons, may actually need to leave the United States to get something as simple as or... I think simple is the wrong word, something as fundamental as a medical procedure. And I think that as I hear you talk about this idea of anyone can actually become a refugee, you just don't know what that decision is going to turn on.
Absolutely and as you're talking it also makes me think of a fundamental issue that I have with legal categories. And I know this might sound strange coming from a lawyer, but I just think the way that the law is formulated around these extremely rigid categories just does not capture the complexity of the human experience. And I really struggled with this when I was a practising lawyer in Canada. I mean, like, why can't a person be both a refugee and an economic migrant? Most people are, by the way, right? Like, it's not a clear cut kind of division, and yet the law forces us to squish complexity into these boxes in order to check off whether you are worthy enough of refugee protection. And just going back to the environmental angle, for example, like the Refugee Convention, which is the foundational legal document that sets out the parameters for who can qualify for refugee status, does not include environmental migration, for example, at all. So again, like there is this rigidity to the way that the law operates.
I want to dig deeper here. So I've been, on another podcast I've sort of done this, I've spoken about this as well on another episode of In Solidarity. But for years I was in conversation with a German writer and philosopher,Georg Diez, where I put forward the idea, we were writing to each other in the context of the great kind of Syrian migration, right? And I was talking about how maybe we need to retire the term refugee and replace it with musafir, which is an indo Arabic word for traveller or guest, and to acknowledge that journeys are just journeys, and one journies is for many different reasons. As a lawyer, when does the idea of the refugee get codified? Like, when is it that humanity starts looking at each other as refugees versus someone who is travelling for whatever reason, right? Like, when does this happen?
Well, I mean, people would argue that, there's different starting points to the refugee regime, but really the current, modern definition that is in the Refugee Convention of 1951 came as a result of World War Two and Jewish refugees needing a legal protection mechanism in order to qualify for protection and refugee status. And so when you actually go into the text of the drafting and the actual final definition that got codified, you really see how circumscribed it is around a particular experience that Jewish refugees were having at the time. I mean, law also then expands, right and over the decades, the definition has been stretched, really, to accommodate people who are making claims for gender based issues, for example, or sexual identity and social group was one of the other areas that got expanded a lot to recognise the fact that people are escaping very different conditions. But again, it became codified at a very particular moment in time, and it created this rigid legal category that we are still very much working with.
It's fascinating to hear you kind of give that history, because there is a chapter in your book where you spend a lot of time in Israel, kind of talking about the borders and regimes of control. Can you can you describe to our readers like what you saw? Like, what is the experience that that you saw?
So I was in the occupied West Bank in the spring of 2023 so before October 7, and I felt I needed to go there in order to complete the book, because Israeli surveillance really lies at the centre of so much of the border technologies that the rest of the book explores. Because Israel has been testing so much technology on Palestinians, both in Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank. And that, of course, predates the Gaza genocide. I mean, Israel has been working on all sorts of different projects, cameras, automated weaponry, social media scraping and anything else you can imagine. And so I felt it was important to to go there and get a sense of just how omnipresent this surveillance feels, and to also talk to civil society actors and lawyers and Palestinians themselves, who are facing this really digital apartheid daily. And then, of course, post October 7 and the kind of exponential use of AI powered targeting technologies in Gaza, I mean, we are now seeing a completely expanded use of these kind of automated technologies that really have been oppressing Palestinians for decades.
So what I'm hearing from you is that border technology is, in a sense, military technology, calling it border technology is, I mean, important because it it kind of talks about the way it's being deployed. But at its heart it, would you say that the border industrial complex is sort of like a descendant of the military industrial complex?
Yeah, and maybe not even a descendant, but like a sibling or a strange bedfellow. And you really see this a lot, if you have a chance to go to, for example, some of these big private sector conferences or events like the World Border Security Congress or DEFEA or the Border Expo. These are places where you literally will see military grade technology being sold to governments who are, again, so quote, unquote, concerned about migration. And again, Israeli companies form a massive presence here, selling the wares that they are testing out on Palestinians for the purposes of border enforcement. So it is this kind of, yeah, it really goes hand in hand militarization, and then the militarization of the border and the migration space.
What I'm hearing, as I hear you describe these technologies, is that that one kind of outcome of this is that the border is now a concept. It's no longer a physically demarcated space like the border is everywhere now. So the border is in the heart of the city and the border is out in the periphery, but the border is now something that you and I could walk through the same town square, and depending on our immigration status, one of us could be basically at the border and the other could be in the heart of the city.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, scholars like to use this really clunky term of border externalisation, by which we mean really, that the border is no longer just the physical location. It's been disaggregated from, a border gate or a wall, but expanded, vertically into the sky through drones, or horizontally through surveillance and policies. And even like training of border guards in places like Niger, which is what the European Union has been doing for years. The US does the same in Latin and Central America. So again, it's to make the border as wide and broad as possible, create this surveillance dragnet to make it virtually impossible for people to actually even enter into the European Union Territory or US territory. And also with the rise of biometrics or the use of body data, so things like fingerprinting, iris scanning, even things like the way you walk or the vein pattern, on your hands, it basically creates this kind of bordering where your body becomes a border. So absolutely, the border is everywhere now.
You're really freaking me out now.
I'm sorry, it is pretty dystopic.
It is pretty dystopic, but one of the things we try to do In Solidarity is kind of think about, like, what is a strategy of resistance, right? And I kind of, I, of late, I'm almost tiring on the phrase resistance, because I just feel like it constantly makes it feel like we're trying to protect something where actually we need to go ahead. But for lack of a better word right now, let's stay with resistance, like, how does one escape the dragnet?
I'm so glad you asked that, because, yeah, I mean, this stuff can get so depressing and so demoralising. And I was pretty demoralised a couple of years ago, after seeing all this stuff over the years, it's like, what is the point? But the thing is, at every single border that I've worked at and all the people that I've met, there are always people who make the choice to show up for one another. whether that's the 70 and 80 year old samaritans who could be on a sun lounger in Arizona, but instead are driving into the Sonora desert to look for people there, or whether it's, brave journalists documenting pushbacks in Greece, or digital rights activists in Palestine or Kenya, like really trying to lay down an evidentiary record of what's actually happening, that gives me a lot of hope. I think a lot of it in terms of, resistance or solidarity building is maybe about knowledge building and making sure that we don't work in silos with the digital arts community here and the lawyers over there and the migrant justice sector here, but rather finding ways back towards one another, to learn from each other, and also to come up maybe with novel strategies of how to resist some of it. That's really powerful, I think.
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