Digital immigration status: From logics of inscription to logics of control

Immigration status governs access to land and resources, and demarcates the lines of economic, social, and political inclusion. In modern societies, it is determined by the state through what Sarah Horton (2020) calls a practice of ‘bureaucratic inscription’. First, a decision is issued to grant status to an individual, or to deny it. Second, relevant documents are issued to evidence this status. What happens when such practices of bureaucratic inscription go digital? I argue that the shift from paper documents to digital solutions reconfigures its socio-political function in border regimes. The specific impacts of digitization depend to a great degree on exactly how digital status is designed and configured. In general, however, the digitization of status transforms border management from practices of inscription, where status can be granted and then evidenced with a document, towards practices of control where, even if granted, status is a provisional arrangement of code and data. Digital status may remain inaccessible to its holder and, instead, require authorization each time it needs to be evidenced. Given that the process of authorization is a further opportunity for the state to capture and record data, such dynamics of control unfold at three different scales. First, control is exercised at the microscale of an individual person as access to status is authorized or denied during status checks. Second, there are mesoscale effects as digital transformation changes operations of border bureaucracies – from increased involvement of private enterprises to mundane impacts on caseworking cultures. Finally, control is also exercised at the macroscale of a society, as data harvested through status checks are then used to inform the wider apparatus of immigration control.