Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal proudly hold up their Canadian citizenship certificate, placed in a plastic sleeve for protection. Looking closely at their hands that grasp this hard-won document, one can see that both men have lost hands and fingers.
Mohammed and Iyal nearly froze to death at the Canada–US border when trying to seek asylum in 2017. Now, according to the Canadian Government’s plans—announced in December 2024 as a result of threats by the incoming Trump administration to punish Canada with tariffs—this frozen border will be augmented by expanded border technologies, including 24/7 surveillance between ports of entry, helicopters, drones, and mobile towers, as well as cross-border data sharing and a “joint operational strike force.” Canada’s new border plan will cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. And now, with President Trump’s planned major overhaul of the US immigration system underway, there is already an expansion of its surveillance regime and bolstering of border technologies, moves that will separate families and harm communities.
From robot dogs at the US–Mexico border to Israeli drones used by EU’s Frontex flying over the Mediterranean Sea to algorithms deporting 7,000 students from the UK, technologies now impact every aspect of human migration. Yet very few laws currently exist to regulate these high-risk and experimental interventions that weaken the global right to asylum, an internationally protected right guaranteed by the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its accompanying protocols, as well as non-refoulement, a foundational principle of international refugee law that guarantees that a person will not be forced to return to a place of persecution (Articles 1.A(2) and 33). As I explore in my book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, there are profound human stakes in the sharpening of borders around the globe, as technical solutions turn human beings into problems to be solved.
Art. 14.1. "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Erosion of rights at the digital frontier
Unregulated and high-risk border technologies infringe on a panoply of human rights. Privacy rights are impacted when sensitive data is indiscriminately collected and inappropriately shared with nefarious actors. In one example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) collected sensitive data from Rohingya refugees and then shared this data with the Myanmar government they were fleeing. Freedom from discrimination and equality rights are also impacted when border officials rely on racially biased facial recognition technologies or when dubious projects like iBorderCTRL—a program to create an AI-lie detector to be used at the border, relying on facial recognition and micro-expression analysis—are funded.
How can an AI lie detector deal with differences in cross-cultural communication or the impact of trauma on memory in sensitive and high-stakes interactions at the border and in migration decision-making? As scholar Hilary Evans Cameron explores, human officers already make problematic determinations that do not take into account the complexity of human behavior. And perhaps most worryingly, unregulated surveillance technologies can also push people into life-threatening terrain. Scholars like Geoffrey Boyce, Samuel Chambers, Sarah Launius, and Alicia Dinsmore have found an exponential increase in deaths at the US–Mexico border since the introduction of so-called “smart border” technologies.
These rights infringements do not just come from the state. The private sector has also been making massive incursions, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar border industrial complex. US companies like Palantir and Anduril have turned their eyes toward the US–Mexico border. At the same time, Israeli firms have been testing out their technologies in the occupied West Bank and fueling the ongoing “tech-facilitated genocide” in Gaza.
All the while, little regulation exists to curtail the expansion of these digital frontiers or provide mechanisms of redress for people and communities harmed and killed. A 2023 report I co-authored with Professor Lorna McGregor with the UN Office of the Human Rights Commissioner (OHCHR) called for a human rights–based approach to digital border governance, including bans and moratoria on the most high-risk applications. Unfortunately, its recommendations have not yet been taken up.
New frontiers of exploitation
Unregulated technological experimentation is often justified under the guise of efficiency and security. These projects also play into a growing techno-utopian drive, weaponizing innovation against the so-called unwanted for the benefit of those in power, employing tropes of security, and making determinations of who deserves to be safe and who is a threat. The locus of power and technological development is concentrated in North America and Europe, primarily to be deployed against Majority World countries.
Therefore, technology and its development cannot be divorced from historical structures of oppression, labor exploitation, and various forms of imperialism, including settler colonialism, a system of oppression through the destruction and elimination of Indigenous peoples. There can be no real way out of the most pressing global crises without addressing these legacies precisely because technology is neither neutral nor objective. It is fundamentally shaped by the racial, ethnic, gender, and other historically rooted inequalities prevalent in society—often exacerbating these inequalities. Significant responsibility for ensuring a just future lies especially with those nations that, in the past and the present alike, benefit from the power structures that now determine the terms of technological innovation, often with little regard for the vast majority subject to those innovations.
Labor exploitation is also alive and well, fueling data centers and content moderation hubs for tech giants like META in places like East Africa and Latin America. These key physical infrastructures house the computing powers of the West while running on the cheap labor of workers who are never permitted to leave their countries. The development of technology also reinforces power asymmetries between countries and influences the public’s thinking about which countries can push for innovation, while other spaces—such as conflict zones and refugee camps—become sites of experimentation and exploitation.
The commitment to technological supremacy also obscures other possible solutions. The hubris of Big Tech and the allure of quick fixes do not address the systemic causes of marginalization and forced migration—centuries of imperialism and colonialism and the ongoing destabilization of so many regions.
Techno-imperialism in a dying world
Border imperialism maintains the status quo of power relations. As writer Harsha Walia argues, the West dictates who is allowed to move across which borders, hiding policies of apartheid under platitudes of rooting out terrorism and protecting states against “surges” or “crises” of migrants, all the while benefiting from their cheap labor and economic benefits for the so-called Global North. Border technologies exacerbate the divisions between those who are able to enter freely via an e-gate at the airport by way of a powerful passport and those who are deemed unwelcome and dangerous, relegated to data subjects in this techno-imperialism of exclusion.
Yet, as the planet further degrades and instability grows around the world, human movement is inevitable, especially from Majority World regions facing the brunt of inaction on the climate crisis. In the face of historical inequalities that have allowed only some people the ultimate freedom of movement through powerful passports and the ongoing extraction of resources and human labor, human movement serves as a type of reparations. Instead of using technology as a way to turn people on the move into problems to be solved, migration could be seen as a point of empowerment and practice of agency—a powerful reminder that “we are here because you were there.”
This blog is part of OGR's ongoing Technology & Human Rights series.