Digitised borders

By Bridget Anderson, Sanja Milivojevic and Travis Van Isacker

We tend to imagine borders as physical objects—walls, barbed wire, features of the landscape like The Channel, an officer in a booth. But today’s borders are digitised. States promise future borders that are ‘efficient, smart, and responsive’ thanks to biometrics, facial recognition software and fully digital records of immigration status. But as sociodigital technologies, whose futures are they playing out?

Digitisation and the UK/France Border

The 2025 UK Border Strategy (UKBS) takes a ‘digital by default’ approach to acquiring and processing border crossing information, paving the way for ‘seamless’ and ‘contactless’ border crossings. The vision is that data collection and analysis before transit combined with non-intrusive tracking technologies at ports will facilitate movement of legitimate goods and people, and will identify threats well before the border.

Scanners, e-gates, cameras are highly visible, but the ‘backend’ of databases, risk engines and fuzzy matching algorithms is neither visible nor well understood by travellers. Some of us are used to applying for pre-travel authorisation certificates but few are aware that the length of time to complete the form or changing responses multiple times has consequences for whether the automated system approves, denies or flags.

As part of their vision for the world’s most efficient border, the Home Office is rolling out its Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) for short stay visitors. Using the UK ETA smartphone app the applicant scans their passport, photographs their face, does a ‘liveness check’, and submits all this with information about their stay to the UK government who then checks the applicant against immigration and criminal records databases.

Without an ETA you cannot purchase a ticket to travel to or transit through the UK. The ETA App builds off the one developed for the EU Settlement Scheme enrolment after Brexit.

Perceived as largely successful, this has nevertheless raised issues including untraceable errors and an overall lack of accountability. Decision making at the border is already criticised for opacity. Is there a risk of further automation exacerbating rather than improving this?

Moreover, there are (at least) two sides to every border and on the French side things look more complicated. The European Union agreed its new Entry Exit System (EES) in 2017. Instead of a border guard verifying identity and issuing a passport stamp, the EES compares border crossers’ fingerprints and facial biometrics with their passport and logs their movements. Implementation was set for 2022.

An app for enrolling some information into EES has been trialled but biometric data is valid only if captured in the presence of an EU border guard. Digital systems interact with bodies, and this creates problems in the ‘physical world’. The EES launch has been repeatedly delayed, and in October 2024 was postponed without a new timeline for implementation.

Dover

The kinds of problems dogging implementation are exemplified by Dover. The port manages eleven million passengers and £144 billion of trade annually. It is a site of ‘juxtaposed controls’, meaning that French immigration and customs officers operate entry checks in Dover before travellers begin their journey. The pinch point of initial enrolment therefore impacts Dover and its hinterlands rather than Calais. How and where will biometrics be taken if they have to be monitored?

Will border officers use mobile devices enabling people to remain in their vehicles, or will passengers’ biometrics be taken inside the terminal building? Moreover, the famous white cliffs on either side of the valley that protects Dover port from the wind also hem it in. And this compounds the problem: how to manage the incoming traffic as people queue?

EES biometric enrolment promises a future of seamless movement, but the present offer is border queues and delays and there are concerns too about reliability and security. Despite significant technological developments at borders, manual passport stamping is for now at least, set to continue.

Border Futures

There are physical and political obstacles to achieving the vision of frictionless border crossings. But technology is facilitating a move towards a world where physical manifestations of the border are relegated to the background, and hours, minutes, sometimes seconds, are shaved off our journeys.

Understanding that these new border systems are not simply digital, but sociodigital technologies means that we cannot shy away from the social and political questions which risk being overlooked in the drive towards an ever-accelerated crossing.

How can we measure the speed these technologies claim to deliver at border crossings, against frictions and jams they introduce into people’s homes or at other stages of their journeys?

What are the material challenges such visions confront, and what space is there for people subjected to and affected by them to influence their roll-out?

How do the ever-proliferating automated digital borders systems, which increasingly involve Artificial Intelligence, decide who is a ‘legitimate traveller’ and what assumptions, values and relations are hardcoded into this designation?