The Digital Hostile Environment: Migration and Technology
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Narita, Kaelynn. 2024. The Digital Hostile Environment: Migration and Technology. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (The Digital Hostile Environment: Migration and Technology)
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Abstract or Description
This thesis investigates the design, technical features and producers of digital border technologies in the United Kingdom (UK) to uncover the power relations of migration governance practices fulfilled through computer systems. Under the Hostile Environment policies, the border checks of the UK increasingly have become internalised and spread to everyday spaces to create unliveable conditions for migrants by weaponizing the health sector, housing, employment and benefits. By combining the academic and non-academic critiques on the racialised, datafied Hostile Environment, this thesis argues how the intentions of the Hostile Environment are encoded into border technologies. Previous academic research has emphasised the harms, risk and threat to belonging that the internalisation of borders introduces to marginalised communities in the UK. Work by non-profit organisations have called to attention the impact of data sharing and instability of digital systems in holding immigration status. By the use of mixed methods - semi-structured interviews, Freedom of Information requests and system mapping – this thesis reveals the bias in Home Office administrative technologies. The thesis consists of three case studies - The Streaming Tool, The Sham Marriage Tool and the caseworking system, Atlas - to reveal how the digital systems perpetuate racialised outcomes and patterns of sociotechnical harms in the administrative technologies of the Home Office. The findings demonstrate that the algorithmic tools, Streaming and Sham Marriage tools, perpetuate racialised outcomes with and without the direct input of nationality. Subsequently, this thesis argues that these outcomes demonstrate how the logics of digital tools are poised to reinforce past migration patterns. Building on these biased features of automation, the thesis reveals how the development of Atlas to integrate algorithmic processes within the main system to manage migration is poised to perpetuate sociotechnical harms, by contributing to the non-functionality of data systems. This thesis concludes by identifying how private actors enhance the themes of adaptability, accountability and reliance on digital systems within the Home Office. From an infrastructural understanding of how digital systems influence and shape the form of the border, it is then demonstrated how future research can identify the Americanisation of the UK border, from the reliance and introduction of American technology companies. By making visible the bias algorithms, caseworking systems and plethora of private actors maintaining border technology, this thesis broadens the conception of the Digital Hostile Environment.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Keywords: |
Critical Border Studies, Critical Data Studies, Automated Decision Making, Algorithmic Bias, Border Technology, Private Actors, The Hostile Environment, Data Feminism |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
30 November 2024 |
| Item ID: |
38044 |
| Date Deposited: |
02 Jan 2025 14:21 |
| Last Modified: |
02 Jan 2025 14:29 |
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URI: |
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