How does migration change Europe? This question can be answered legally and politically, as most policy makers, sociologists and journalists do. Or it can be answered technically: how do data infrastructures for migration management shape Europe?
Attempts to manage contemporary mobility are changing not only European policies, but also the way knowledge about individuals, Member States and Europe is produced and shared. Information systems and infrastructures are key enablers of these forms of knowledge. They shape, collect, evaluate and circulate data about people on the move to and across Europe: from asylum seekers to VISA travelers, from migrants to tourists, from travelling residents to refugees. Information infrastructures have a major role in enacting some of these people as regular, and others as “alterity”.
How information infrastructures for the “processing of alterity” work, the categories they use to sort people out, their degree of interoperability and standardization are thus questions that raise technical as well as social, organizational, political and institutional questions. While processing the identity of individuals, such infrastructures also shape the multi-level European order. This has been the main insight of "Processing Citizenship. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe", a six-year research program involving a team of ethnographers, sociologists of technology, software developers and political scientists.
Over these years Processing Citizenship has aimed to develop a “history of the present” that accounts for contemporary material practices of registration and identification of Alterity as activities of long-term governance transformation. The Project has pursued three interrelated objectives.
1) To understand how migrants’ identities are shaped by registration and identification infrastructures and practices, and how migrants adapt or resist them.
2) To understand how institutional relationships (e.g. between Member States and Europe, authorities and contractors, humanitarian actors and international organizations) are shaped by data infrastructures and practices for alterity processing.
3) To understand how modernist conceptualizations of space are challenged by data infrastructures for population management.
Results confirm the hypothesis about the co-production of alterity and European order. On the one hand, data infrastructures and practices make people on the move knowable, but they do not do it neutrally. They often enact them as alterity, as irreducible others - migrants and asylum seekers, and even as security subjects. On the other hand, infrastructures have long-term consequences and transform the epistemic priorities of European reception and asylum actors, the chains of actors involved in migration management and eventually our imaginary of what “Europe” should be.
