Afterword—The Digital Borderlands

It was ice-cold in Minneapolis, in January 2026. However, as we know too well, ICE was present on the streets of Minneapolis in more than one sense. Hunting migrants in Latino neighbourhoods and chasing Somali residents, agents of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement wore balaclavas and deployed weapons of war—turning the city and wide stretches of Minnesota into a borderland. It was a military operation, carried out with techniques that at times resembled those employed by the IDF in the occupied Palestinian territories. In both cases, digital platforms and AI play crucial roles. In what acting ICE director Todd Lyons called the ‘largest immigration enforcement operation ever,’ federal agents used in particular two programs called Tangles and Webloc to track the cell phone activity of entire neighbourhoods and monitor people over social media and through internet data, while apps like Mobile Fortify enabled facial recognition of citizens and migrants alike. These are just instances of the wide array of digital resources employed by ICE, including those provided by Palantir, in the operation that took the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and led to thousands of ‘removals’ and deportations of migrants. The streets of Minneapolis thus offer an uncanny instantiation of the entanglement of digital technologies with the non-digital world that the editors of this special issue of International Migration emphasise as one of the crucial lenses for the analysis of the digitalisation of migration. What is at stake in the essays collected here are the multifarious ways in which the digital shapes and reorganises the experience of migration. Migration management and governance are synchronised through the pursuit of interoperability between databases, new regimes of truth and suspicion emerge, the subjectivity of migrants is placed under duress by the proliferation of data and related profiles, gender, racial and colonial hierarchies are reworked and reconfigured. Importantly, the digital is not considered as a separate domain but—to quote from the introduction—‘as a constitutive dimension of migration itself.’ And migration, to hark back to Abdelmalek Sayad, continues to work as a mirror, in the sense that its digitalisation at the same time reflects and prompts transformations that reconfigure societies at large. In uneven ways, this is true in Minneapolis as in India, where the National Register of Citizens targets ‘migrants’ while establishing a digital citizenship regime and new forms of governance of populations. Entanglement and unevenness are the two key concepts that frame the analyses developed in this special issue. It is important to note that unevenness does not simply refer to the effects of digitalisation in different geographical contexts. Conventional divisions, like the one between Global North and Global South, are rather challenged here. Digital technologies, investigated from the angle of migration, cut through such divisions while at the same time inciting a proliferation of differences, hierarchies and unevenness within all the contexts in which they operate. This is not to say that spatial hierarchies are vanishing—the opposite is true. But such an approach provides a crucial principle of method to critically grasp their mutations and recomposition. Unevenness designates an operative principle constitutive of the working of digital technologies in the field of migration. Far from corresponding to the ideal of smoothness conveyed by the rhetoric of interoperability and to the spread of belief in scientific prediction enabled by AI, such working is predicated on gaps, on a dialectic of absence and presence that can be observed (again: in different ways) along the border between Brazil and Venezuela as well as on the small Italian island of Pantelleria. Nonetheless, interoperability is not only a rhetoric. As several essays in this special issue demonstrate, in particular with a focus on the EU, it also steers crucial transformations of migration governance and management. Interoperability encapsulates a logistical rationality whose pervasiveness in migration management has been often described in recent years. Just think of the phrase ‘just-in-time and to-the-point migration,’ which corresponds to the logic of ‘delivery’ and shapes the fantasies of think-tanks and the policies of governmental agencies in many parts of the world. Such fantasies and policies are steering, and in turn are steered by the digitalisation of migration control. What this special issue contributes to demonstrate is that, contrary to the prevailing rhetoric, multiple forms of violence are internal to the operations of the digitalised regime of migration management. Long-term trends, like the blurring of the boundary between forced and economic migration, are further entrenched, and new processes of precarisation destabilise the very subjectivity of migrants multiplying inequalities. Concurrently, in a global landscape characterised by fortification of borders and anti-migration policies digitalisation takes on war-like features, consistent with broader processes of militarisation of the digital and related digitalisation of warfare. The digitalisation of migration therefore opens new vistas on emerging assemblages of power, which are reshaping border and mobility regimes and have implications for the governance of society writ large. What Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke call ‘algorithmic reason’ takes on specific characteristics at the border and in the everyday experience of migrants but addresses citizens as well. Focusing on such reverberations has been a distinctive feature of many critical border and migration studies in recent years, and this special issue nicely fits that trend. Moreover, both the editors' introduction and several essays go well beyond a unilateral focus on the political and legal implications of the digitalisation of migration. Logistical rationality and algorithmic reason are indeed key sites for the analysis of the intermingling of political and economic logics, which means of the transformations of capitalism. Entangled and uneven landscapes of digital migration are crisscrossed by operations of power and capital. What matters more here, in conceptual terms, is the extraction of data, which lies at the root of the accumulation of capital and power by big infrastructural platforms and more generally crystallises an extractive paradigm that is increasingly dominant today across key domains of economic activity—from the extraction of minerals to finance, from real estate to logistics. Digital technologies place the migrant body and mind at the intersection of multiple practices of data-extraction, scrutinizing them in search of a ‘value’ that foreshadows the opening of new frontiers of accumulation. What we witness here is a paradigm shift in the field of migration, which challenges a rights-based logic and instead celebrates the imperative of valorisation—with its reverse side, the multifarious forms of de-valorisation it produces. Even beyond the exploitation of migrant labour that is selectively facilitated by digitalised border and mobility regimes, migrants' behaviours and lives, imaginaries and desires are coded according to that imperative. To employ a colonial image, migration becomes a kind of ‘dark continent,’ within which digital technologies work as devices of inspection for a sorting of bodies that count (that can be sources of value) and bodies that do not count (that are doomed to be discarded). However, the boundary between the two categories is never absolute, considering the proliferation of subjective profiles enabled by the extraction of data and by their constant combination and recombination. While this, as already mentioned, has momentous implications on migrants' self-perception, it also provides an instance of the digital operations of capital along the frontiers of its valorisation that resonates with other experiences of dispossession and exploitation. This special issue offers key findings and fosters our critical understanding of the emerging assemblages of power and capital in the digitalisation of border and mobility regimes. But it is far from limited to an emphasis on surveillance, control and dispossession. Processes of digitalisation are rather investigated from the angle of the ‘deflections, contestations, and reappropriations’ that concur to make them a field of struggle and contestation. This is a crucial contribution from the angle of method and a key point for the future agenda of studies on the digitalisation of migration. Data extractivism does not erase the space for the agency of migrants, who constantly discover new ways to negotiate spaces of control and to open spaces of freedom and mobility. The counter-use of digital technologies has relevant roles to play here. And the same is true for organisations supporting the freedom of movement of migrants and refugees, who are often capable of taking advantage of those technologies. Going back to Minneapolis, mass mobilisation against ICE was highly mediated and shaped by digital technologies too. Counter-patrolling, a political tactic reminiscent of the Black Panther Party's operations in Oakland in the 1960s, was enabled by apps like ICEBlock. Encrypted messaging apps facilitated communication among community members to protect migrants, 3D printers were widely used to mass-produce whistles to alert residents and migrants alike to the presence of federal agents in the area. Needless to say, this is a quite extraordinary example that took shape under very specific conditions. Nonetheless, the use of digital technologies within forms of mass struggle and resistance against an immigration enforcement operation can also be taken as symbolic for the further investigation and theoretical elaboration of a politics of migration within and against processes of digitalisation. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.