Automating Migration and Citizenship : Surveillance, Control and Critique

The proposed book undertakes a critical examination of the relationship between technologies of automation, migration and citizenship.

The proposed book undertakes a critical examination of the relationship between technologies of automation, migration and citizenship. Automation is refers to the use of technological systems to carry out operations independently, without human intervention (Nof, 2009). Typically automation is used to augment, improve, and complete tasks in a more efficient manner, promising significant benefits, from standardization to financial savings, freeing labour time for humans (Borry and Getha-Taylor, 2019; Restrepo, 2023). While technologies of automation are accompanied by narratives of progress and freedom, they are linked not only with increased surveillance but also with a shift in surveillance practices from discipline to prediction (Andrejevic, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Automating technologies, especially machine learning algorithms, operate through sorting and categorisation, which are subsequently used to identify patterns and make predictions on the basis of these patterns. It comes as no surprise therefore that such technologies are involved in replicating discriminatory patterns of the past.