The rise of the border apps

People on the move make extensive use of digital devices and tools. States also rely on these tools to control and channel mobility, making software an essential feature of mobility and borders. Various types of software are at the heart of maintaining traveller databases, deploying risk management tools and expediting identity checks, and migrants' use of smartphones is an increasingly salient area of analysis. Yet, the expansion of “apps,” as tools of bordering, both internal and client-facing, has not been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis (with some exceptions, e.g. Kocher, 2023). Understood as “software applications,” apps are a subset of programmes designed to solve specific, often singular needs (see Pressman, 2005, in Light et al., 2018). Apps are also a kind of interface, between transparency and opacity, opening interfaces to users while concealing proprietary platforms (Aradau et al., 2019). However, they also connect the oceans of data in the cloud and the device in one's hand, interfacing between the sovereign geopolitics of users and the planetary computation of the cloud (Bratton, 2016). Border security is increasingly mediated through such software applications, extending its reach and intensity. What we call “appification” does not follow a simple pattern of cause, effect and consequence. The drivers, effects and outcomes of the process are intertwined and co-constitutive. Market forces, the COVID-19 pandemic, and political pressures all contribute to and benefit from these processes. The proliferation of “border” apps, whether for electronic travel authorizations, passenger name records (PNR), customs declarations, border clearance, vaccine passports or visa application purposes, is becoming commonplace in border management. In each of these cases, apps are the interface between the person on the move—conceived of as a user—and a broader computational logic of the border. We consider the causes, effects and consequences of appification around four axes. First, we discuss the catalysing role of austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic as catalysts; second, the way apps speed up the mobility of desirable travellers (and restrict that of others); third, we examine how they individualize border control. We conclude with reflection on the new, often unexpected security actors such as software engineers that are brought into the work of securing borders and mobilities. The combination of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic with austerity presented states an opportunity to further digitize border management. The necessity to reduce human interactions resulted in countries leapfrogging tech and abandoning tools like paper declarations, reducing contact time and in turn the human resources in the border control process. These factors accelerated the trend towards “touchless” forms of authentication (e.g. facial recognition, the use of apps) whether it be passports or airline boarding cards. These measures built on what Walters (this issue) refers to as the “ordinary” technologies already at the border. While governments typically increase investments in border management, they also desire border bureaucracies to become leaner, meaner and increasingly digital sorting machines. Greater investment in technology in general, and AI in particular, coexists with reducing and outsourcing, especially of functions that provide protection for asylum seekers. This paradox is the result of a market logic where well-funded border agencies are committed to doing border control on the cheap (Miller, 2023). Apps are part of a global ecosystem of digital borders. They emerge from the intersection of individualized risk assessment and global public health, similar to the passport before them (see Salter, 2003). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a pre-existing reliance on technology for preassessment of risk at borders. This amplification extends the ambitions of border security actors. In Canada, the current ArriveCAN app began life as a means of ensuring the federal government's capacity to enforce the Quarantine Act at international borders. It emerged through collaboration between the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency and was compulsory for much of 2020–22 for all travellers entering Canada. As vaccines became available, the app's functions expanded to account for proof of vaccination. The requirement for travellers to use ArriveCAN for land crossings filled a gap in the state's ability to preclear and preassess travellers, which was previously easiest in the air travel domain through airline data such as PNR. The EU's deployment of a Digital COVID Certificate, as a “tool for the reopening of economies and societies” (European Commission, 2023) required an app to recognize vaccine and testing certificates among various EU member states. This app was built on an existing digital infrastructure for Schengen borders and visas. In the US, the development of CBP One for asylum applications is in a mutually constitutive relationship with the persistent undermining of migrant rights. This is grounded in decades of anti-immigrant discourses in US politics and extraterritorial processing practices amplified during the Trump administration and consolidated during the pandemic. In each case above, the pandemic accelerated existing trends in border security and produced durable technologies likely to outlast the pandemic. In the case of ArriveCAN, as the sense of emergency around the pandemic subsided and public outcry at its mandatory nature grew, the app was rebranded as an advanced customs declaration, intertwining with existing computerized kiosks at many Canadian airports. As Étienne Balibar (2010) has noted, the border is “polysemic”—it is experienced vastly differently by different classes or identities of people. The deployment of app interfaces at the border echoes the segmentation underway between different types of people on the move when they encounter an international border. Appification is part of a broader move towards making the border more user-friendly for certain travellers. Applications like Mobile Passport Control (MPC), developed by the US Department for Homeland Security, are intended to allow travellers to complete passport inspection ahead of arrival. It builds on a similar logic to that of trusted traveller programmes, which both displace the border function while seeking to provide the state advance information about “safe” citizens (Muller, 2010). Another such US application, CBP Roam, is intended to allow pleasure boaters to submit border clearance formalities away from a border post and without the presence of an officer. Border apps also make the border experience hostile and precarious. Reducing human interaction, eroding asylum rights and reinforcing technologically mediated discrimination, apps like CBP One combine many of the self-serve benefits typically presented to wealthier “safer” travellers with restrictive services aimed at undocumented migrants. The app allows migrants to schedule appointments for interviews at US ports of entry, but has been dogged by technical issues: migrants insufficiently close to the US border are barred by the app's geolocation features from requesting an appointment; the facial recognition features regularly fail to recognize darker skin tones and children; and the app crashes regularly, in part because there are too few available spots in the asylum queue (Miroff, 2023). The contrast between the CBP Roam app and the CBP One app speaks to the diversity of interests and intentions that integrate in the development of border and migration apps. While an app like CBP Roam is aligned with the logic of trusted traveller schemes, and as such, in sharp contrast with the exclusionary aspects of CBP One, these apps, and indeed, most apps, “off-load” border functions onto the mobile subject themselves. This quasi-self-service model is situated within broader shifts that individualize the border and mobility experience. Border apps are harbingers of a reorientation from a population-centric understanding of border controls to a more thoroughly individual one. This is a longstanding trend, but apps accelerate it. Recent announcements in Canada regarding trusted traveller prescreening in airports (Transport Canada, 2023) speak to the individualization of the security function, as well as a transfer of norms from the US to Canada, dissolving historical differences in border/aviation security that have focussed on suspicious objects (Canada) versus persons (US). These trends are analogous to what in the EU context is referred to as Europeanization, where functional spillover (similar to Canada's emulation of the US strategy) means the advantages for “trusted travellers” extend from customs and immigration to security screening and beyond. The individualization of border control brought about by apps such as CBP One is a symptom of the broader prominence of software platforms and the transfer of the customer experience of computing to the sovereign space of the border. People on the move experience the border as a customer, downloading and rating products in a platform's “app store.” This model of the border speaks to both the motivation of policymakers and the ramifications of these changes at the border. While enhancing convenience, these changes also off-load responsibility onto the traveller/migrant in the name of self-service. Future efforts to enhance convenience at the border, such as document-free travel promised by programmes like the IATA OneID project, give individuals more power over their data with the understanding that they must manage their digital travel profile. The cultural ubiquity of the app as an interface is part of its appeal to border security actors. This ease and accessibility of apps is itself down to the rise of digital platforms which simplify their design and distribution. As noted by Aradau et al. (2019), the move towards apps not only opens the interface to the users but also protects and amplifies the proprietary authority of developers, who have a direct impact on the problem definition of migration and border policymaking. App developers and engineers are not simply technical actors. Rather, they become crucial to the mediation of the border experience. As Molnar notes in her commentary (this issue) algorithmic decision-making does not reduce bias or make lines of accountability any simpler. Border scholars have drawn productively on the idea of the “street-level bureaucrat” to understand the everyday policing of borders (see: Côté-Boucher, 2018). The appification of the border, bringing together as it does the worlds of code and of control, empowers what we call a software-level bureaucrat. These actors are inserted directly in the evolution of the digital border. The critical politics of borders and migration must account for not only the role of state border agencies but also hardware and software vendors and developers, whose sales processes reveal much about how the border is to be run today: cheaply, without touch, and maximizing data collection just-in-case. The cross-pollination between the worlds of tech and security is well-established, as evidenced by recent controversies around Silicon Valley giants' relationships to US military R&D, and by the movement of personnel across these worlds (Eric Hysen, the Biden administration's chief information officer, was a Google executive). The aesthetic and design choices of the app economy are being felt in the world of border security. Like the history of biometrics (Browne, 2015; Pugliese, 2010), these technologies—such as facial recognition—have deeply racist and sexist genealogies that are rendered opaque by the veneer of clean and efficient computing and processing. Questioning the potential racism among border guards is common and accepted; indicting computer software and hardware as subject to embedded racism is a harder sell. Critical analyses of borders must assess interfaces, and app platforms, as central tools for the control of mobility. The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons.

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