Race, Algorithms, and the Work of Border Enforcement

abstract:This article uses border modernization programs, including the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time (AVATAR) and the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet), to examine how race and labor have been central to high-tech border enforcement strategies. While I discuss specific technologies and programs, I am less interested in the machines and much more concerned with the work they allow humans to do. By "work" I mean the epistemic and manual labor that is required to imagine, produce, and use border enforcement technologies. I integrate approaches from critical ethnic studies and geography to broaden how the mostly white fields of STS (science and technology studies) and military studies have treated border-making and enforcement technologies. Consequently, I argue that the machines, data networks, and human agents that constitute the modern border apparatus function as a sociotechnical articulation of the settler-colonial state.