If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine a border, what image comes to mind? Most of us would think of barbed-wire fences planted firmly on frontier locations. From the Great Wall of China to the Berlin Wall, fortified barriers have long served as powerful symbols of sovereign control. Today, however, a new trend has emerged: the growth of invisible borders. These are borders that rely on sophisticated legal techniques to detach migration control functions from a fixed territorial location. The unmooring of state power from a fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border.
Unlike a reinforced physical barrier, the shifting border is not fixed in time and place; it is comprised of legal portals, surveillance tools, and AI-powered risk assessments rather than brick-and-mortar walls. The black lines we find in atlases no longer coincide with the agile locus and focus of migration control. Instead, governments can shift the location of the border both outward and inward, gaining tremendous capacity to regulate and track individuals before, and after, they reach their desired destination. The flexible tentacles of the shifting border were once deployed primarily to monitor people on the move, escaping poverty and instability. Today, everyone, including citizens of wealthy democracies, are potentially within its ever-extended reach.
Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments were enthusiastically embracing biometric ePassports. These look like traditional passport books but contain an embedded electronic chip that encodes information about the passport bearer. Such embedded information includes a digital photo that can be verified against vast, unseen databases. While the chip deployed in biometric passports is “passive”—it does not transmit or track any information—it is possible to imagine a more Orwellian future whereby “active” tracking devices are involved. What’s more, global entry fast-tracks, which are already popular with trusted travelers in Asia, Europe and North America, rely on biometric identity verification using face, fingerprint or iris recognition—rather than traditional border inspection. Government officials foresee a future whereby arriving and departing passengers will not require any travel documents at all. Instead, biometric borders will come to play a key role in the politics of mobility management, turning the bodies of migrants and travelers into the sites of regulation of movement and risk prediction.
