Bordering is a practice. In Israel and Palestine, you can see this practice of division and dehumanization enacted daily. The creation and recreation of this division is more dynamic than rigid understandings of borders would seem to indicate. Physical walls, for example, can be expanded to hem people in, but when coupled with a vast, increasingly automated surveillance infrastructure, the border can be made to extend well beyond a dotted line on a map or a crossing point separating one state from the next. Raluca Csernatoni, an expert on European security and defense, evocatively writes that “the increased use of drones to police borders has resulted in the decentralization of the border zone into various vertical and horizontal layers of surveillance, suspending state power from the skies, and extending the border visually and virtually.”11 As Professor Ayelet Shachar writes in her book The Shifting Border, “Our gates no longer stand fixed at the country’s territorial edges. The border itself has become a moving barrier, an unmoored legal construct.”12 One of the ways that borders have been shifting is a phenomenon called “border externalization,” or the transfer of border controls to foreign countries.
Surveillance technology is central to this. Technologies that manage migration, whether retinal scans or automated AI lie detectors at airports, all collect data, make decisions, and report to the state the necessary information on potentially unsafe migrant bodies, rendering them into security objects and data points to be analyzed, stored, collected, and rendered intelligible. And in an environment of narratives emphasizing risk, terrorism, and the need to keep Western countries safe, new forms of control emerge. For journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of the award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory, this is yet another instance of “digital orientalism,” echoing the work of Palestinian theorist Edward Said—treating certain groups with suspicion by definition while others are welcomed with open arms.13
Countries with the largest defense and security sectors, such as the United States, Israel, and China, are transferring this technology and these practices to governments and agencies around the world. The same goes for multilateral organizations such as the European Union. The Transnational Institute (TNI) itself has been working on these issues for decades, thinks about externalization as a “carrot and stick” approach, creating financial and policy incentives for third party actors, and often poorer nations, to push established borders further and further from their geographic location.14 Often framed as cooperation, externalization replicates power hierarchies, with impoverished countries like Niger doing the dirty work of the EU to stem migration, sometimes with Israeli surveillance technology. As writer and activist Harsha Walia reminds us, these practices work to perpetuate border imperialism, where powerful actors like the United States and the European Union wield tremendous geopolitical power and financial influence over countries in Latin America, Africa, and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Shameful imperial and colonial histories play out in new ways, simultaneously causing mass displacement and actively working to stifle it. A greater number of people on the move that apparently need to be controlled means more lucrative high-tech projects for the private sector to develop.
Israel is a major player here, with Israeli security companies among the most successful—and profitable—in the world. The country’s world-class weapons industry is consistently tested out on Palestinians and then marketed as “battle tested”; consequently, as journalist Antony Loewenstein argues, “the Palestine laboratory is a signature Israeli selling point.”15 Israel has actively supplied weapons to myriad repressive regimes, including South Sudan, the Ceauseşcu regime in Romania, the Assad regime in Syria and Russia’s military support for the regime, Sri Lanka, and the Duvalier regime in Haiti, among many others.16 Elbit’s Hermes drones are even patrolling the Canadian Arctic for environmental monitoring. And right after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Elbit stocks rose by 70 percent—war is indeed profitable.17
One of the reasons why externalization works is that it plays into the global weakening of international norms that protect the right to seek asylum. In a complicated geopolitical reality where people on the move who are seeking protection are caught in the middle—without access to lawyers, humanitarian aid, or even doctors—people who have the right to seek safety are actively prevented from being able to do so. Powerful countries band together in a performance of common victimhood, falling back on blatant Islamophobia and racism against African migrants and Muslim “invaders” in particular to justify increasingly hard-line policies of surveillance and exclusion. Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who has spent years documenting surveillance technologies used against Palestinians, argues in his 2023 book The Palestine Laboratory that the threat of being overrun justifies experimentation, often first in Israel and then in US and the EU. These are not new ideas. In the 1980s, cultural theorist Stuart Hall cautioned against authoritarian populism, which often stokes fears around immigration, terrorism, crime, and left-wing subversion.18 This brand of populism contributes to the increasing normalization of technology as a mechanism of control and, more specifically, as an antidote to being overrun by the unwanted and dangerous—a way to see, control, monitor, and exclude. We must also pay attention to particular sites of experimentation that center on groups with fewer protections available to them, such as people in experiencing humanitarian emergencies or encountering the migration management bureaucracy. Surveillance capitalism, meet disaster capitalism. Migration data is already being politicized to justify greater interventions in support of threatened national sovereignty, weaponized by far-right groups that continually wage wars on migration. And the private sector, meanwhile, stands to make a quick buck.
Journalist Todd Miller and others have been writing about the rise of a multi-billion-dollar border industrial complex, the confluence of border policing, militarization, and corporate investments.19 This industry is fast and growing, projected to have a total value of around $68 billion by 2025—higher than the annual GDP of most countries—with the largest increases in global biometrics and AI projects.20 Big money is involved in the management of borders, as private security companies make major inroads with lucrative contracts, procured by governments, for shiny new tech experiments presented as the only surefire way to strengthen border security.21 From vast private prison complexes on islands like Nauru and Christmas Island, where Australia sends its asylum seekers, to American company BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, being a major shareholder in eleven border and surveillance industry companies.
The private sector is in charge of much of the development of new technologies, and states and governments, wishing to control the flows of migrant populations, benefit from these technological experiments. This type of experimentation also shows whose interests matter most, as states prioritize and legitimize the types of interventions peddled by the private sector at conferences like the World Border Security Congress in the form of increasingly disturbing tech “toys” like drones, robo-dogs, and radars.22 In an ongoing global war on human movement, states prioritize these tools instead of funding solutions to combat racism at the border or improve fairness in asylum proceedings. All these technological experiments are situated in a broader historical system of control, bolstering a lucrative industry where private sector players set the agenda with virtually nothing by way of meaningful governance and oversight. Furthermore, the private sector is often the first to oppose any regulation or oversight, stating concerns about the stifling of innovation and the infringement on the fulfillment of Silicon Valley fantasies. The aim is a free-for-all in the sandbox of tech development, a techno-solutionist utopia, opening up spaces of unrestricted tracking and surveillance.