Smart Ellis Island? Tracing techniques of automating border control

Seuferling, Philipp (2024) Smart Ellis Island? Tracing techniques of automating border control. New Media & Society, 26 (9). 5039 - 5058. ISSN 1461-4448

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Abstract

The buzzword “smart borders” captures the latest instantiation of media technologies constituting state bordering. This article traces historical techniques of knowledge-production and decision-making at the border, in the case of Ellis Island immigration station, New York City (1892–1954). State bordering has long been enabled by media technologies, engulfed with imaginaries of neutral, unambiguous, efficient sorting between desired and undesired migrants—promises central to today’s “smart border” projects. Specifically, the use of “proxies” for decision-making is traced historically, for example, biometric or biographic data, collected as seemingly authentic and neutral stand-ins for the migrant. Techniques of selecting, storing, and correlating proxies through media technologies demonstrate how public health anxieties, eugenics, and scientific technocracy of the Progressive Era formed the context of proxies being entrusted to enable decision-making. This pre-digital history of automation reveals how the logics and politics of proxification endure in contemporary border regimes and automated media at large.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/nms
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications
Date Deposited:	18 Apr 2024 14:09
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2024 18:13
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122661

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