Loss and liability: Glitching immigration status as a feature of the British border after Brexit

This paper analyses glitches of digital status services to demonstrate that status errors are systemic features of the online design adopted by the Home Office. The stated rationale for this design is that the system must reflect current immigration status in real time. The paper shows that this aim is not achieved, and cites multiple examples of the holder’s identity and status getting lost in the system. It argues that the digital reform of immigration status replaced documentation (where a token of status is issued to its holder) with computation (where the holder’s identity and status are resolved in real time from multiple records which have no stable link). To illustrate this shift, the paper traces the design process of digital status services and situates it in the broader context of digital reforms implemented after Brexit, and legacy infrastructures that predate it. It then describes glitches of online status and shows they are systemic, because they result from the way the system is designed. Finally, it analyses Home Office responses to show the department’s refusal to accept liability for systemic errors which can result in effective loss of status. This raises questions of proportionality, as status holders are deprived of certainty about the status they hold and the ability to prove it, to enable real-time status checks – which in fact fail to reliably prove the holder’s identity or status in tens of thousands of cases.