Migrant Data Extractivism: Tech and Borders at the Limit of Rights

Abstract

In this paper I present the notion ‘migrant data extractivism’ and argue that it is a defining aspect of pervasive systems of data-based migration governance. I focus on two specific examples: the partnership between the International Rescue Committee and OpenAI for providing chatbot assistance for the delivery of educational experiences to refugees, and the collection and processing of migrant DNA by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Within a system of ‘induced scarcity,’ forcibly displaced persons have been at the centre of exploitative mechanisms of behavioural data extraction aimed at expanding an economy of service provision that profits from the capture of migrant data with considerable behaviour-predictive value, and from racial-profiling securitization technologies. Working through the conceptual lens of the Latin American experience of extractivismo, I argue that migrant data extractivism goes far beyond mere user data collection. Migrant data extractivism sediments an ongoing shift from a system of rights, based on human dignity, to a system of sustained racialized dispossession, appropriation, and control, raising the question as to the limits of human rights in the datafied world.