Borderland Circuitry

Borderland Circuitry
Author: Ana Muñiz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520976762

Political discourse on immigration in the United States has largely focused on what is most visible, including border walls and detention centers, while the invisible information systems that undergird immigration enforcement have garnered less attention. Tracking the evolution of various surveillance-related systems since the 1980s, Borderland Circuitry investigates how the deployment of this information infrastructure has shaped immigration enforcement practices. Ana Muñiz illuminates three phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using ethnography, interviews, and analysis of documents never before seen, Muñiz uncovers how information-sharing partnerships between local police, state and federal law enforcement, and foreign partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands. Diving deep into a select group of information systems, Borderland Circuitry reveals how those with legal and political power deploy the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the destruction of land for border militarization.

Borderland Circuitry

Borderland Circuitry
Author: Ana Muñiz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0520379497

Political discourse on immigration in the United States has largely focused on what is most visible, including border walls and detention centers, while the invisible information systems that undergird immigration enforcement have garnered less attention. Tracking the evolution of various surveillance-related systems since the 1980s, Borderland Circuitry investigates how the deployment of this information infrastructure has shaped immigration enforcement practices. Ana Muñiz illuminates three phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using ethnography, interviews, and analysis of documents never before seen, Muñiz uncovers how information-sharing partnerships between local police, state and federal law enforcement, and foreign partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands. Diving deep into a select group of information systems, Borderland Circuitry reveals how those with legal and political power deploy the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the destruction of land for border militarization.

Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence

Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence
Author: Mizue Aizeki
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence. In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement. These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it. The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.

Data Borders

Data Borders
Author: Melissa Villa-Nicholas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2023
Genre: Electronic surveillance
ISBN: 0520386051

Data Borders investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship. Detailing the new trend of biologically mapping undocumented people through biotechnologies, Melissa Villa-Nicholas shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and driving force behind Silicon Valley's growing industry within defense technology manufacturing. Villa-Nicholas reveals a murky network that gathers data on marginalized communities for purposes of exploitation and control that implicates law enforcement, border patrol, and ICE, but that also pulls in public workers and the general public, often without their knowledge or consent. Enriched by interviews of Latinx immigrants living in the borderlands who describe their daily use of technology and their caution around surveillance, this book argues that in order to move beyond a heavily surveilled state that dehumanizes both immigrants and citizens, we must first understand how our data is being collected, aggregated, correlated, and weaponized with artificial intelligence and then push for immigrant and citizen information privacy rights along the border and throughout the United States.

Spy Plane

Spy Plane
Author: Benjamin H. Snyder
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0520396030

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at one of America's most controversial experiments in police surveillance. In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department had an aerial surveillance plane that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public view. Spy Plane reveals what happened with this controversial policing experiment. Drawing from incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program for Baltimore detectives, sociologist Benjamin H. Snyder recounts real criminal cases as they were worked by police using this untested tool. Deploying aircraft with powerful cameras built by a small company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the spy plane program promised to help police "solve otherwise unsolvable crimes" by tracking the whereabouts of suspects in violent crime cases. Created for the battlefields of Iraq, it had never been adapted on so large a scale in a U.S. city. This riveting book gives an unprecedented look inside the shadowy world of for-profit law enforcement technology experiments, explaining why police and community leaders place so much faith in unproven technology to fix the problem of urban violence but continually come up short.

Supply Chain Justice

Supply Chain Justice
Author: Mary Bosworth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2024-12-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691259925

How the UK’s immigration detention and deportation system turns people into monetized, measurable units on a supply chain In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice, Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged. Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such “failures” as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, “service level agreements” and “key performance indicators.” Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

Imperial Policing

Imperial Policing
Author: Andy Clarno
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2024-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452971722

Exposing the carceral webs and weaponized data that shape Chicago’s police wars Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order. Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group, Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. It analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign. Police networks and infrastructure are notoriously impenetrable to community members and scholars, making Imperial Policing a rare, vital example of scholars working directly with community organizations to map police networks and intervene in policing practices. Engaging in a methodology designed to provide support for transformative justice organizations, the Policing in Chicago Research Group offers a critical perspective on the abolition of imperial policing, both in Chicago and around the globe.

“You're Muted"

“You're Muted
Author: Mark Nunes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

Through the frame of Zoom, this collection of essays examines the rapid emergence of videoconferencing in everyday life under COVID-19, its preexisting performative logic, and the ongoing implication of these practices for millions of individuals and institutions. The year 2023 marked the end of the World Health Organization's classification of the COVID-19 outbreak as a “public health emergency of international concern,” yet many of the organizational and institutional restructurings that occurred in the rapid response to the pandemic have remained firmly in place. The prevalence of videoconferencing in everyday life marks one such instance, not only highlighting the dramatic social and cultural transformations that occurred during a period of lockdowns, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders, but also serving as an index of all that has emerged as the “new normal” since March 2020. Overnight, it seemed, Zoom emerged as the default videoconferencing platform, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic. While this volume focuses predominantly on Zoom and its place in the collective imagination and daily practice of those of us whose lives are profoundly caught up in digital networks, many of these insights presented here apply to other videoconferencing platforms as well, and a supporting logic that has governed neoliberal lives since long before the first lockdowns began. The twelve chapters in this collection explore how videoconferencing platforms in general, and Zoom in particular, have provided individuals and institutions new modes of “engagement,” while at the same time reifying, normalizing, and domesticating modes of surveillance, control, and marginalization that have been part and parcel of a networked-based performative logic for nearly a century.

Migrants in the Digital Periphery

Migrants in the Digital Periphery
Author: Matt Mahmoudi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2025-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520397010

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing. As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In this book, Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity--and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.

Legal Phantoms

Legal Phantoms
Author: Susan Bibler Coutin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2024-01-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1503637581

The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story. After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA+) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance.