This article provides an overview of the collection and uses of data in relation to European border regimes. We analyse the significance of these developments for the governance of refugee populations and make the case that within the current policy context of European border control, data functions to systematically stigmatize, exclude and oppress ‘unwanted’ migrant populations through mechanisms of criminalisation, identification, and social sorting. This, we argue, highlights the need to engage with data politics in a way that considers both the politics in data as well as the politics of data, highlighting the agendas and interests that advance the implementation of these technologies, privileging justice concerns on terms that go beyond techno-legal solutions, and positioning those who are most impacted by developments at the forefront of discussions.

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Biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. This panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees. It asks how biometric data are constituted, what their limitations and biases are, how biometric technologies challenge traditional notions of the physical border, in whose interest and with what implications for migrants and refugees. In particular, in bringing together a multidisciplinary group of international experts to develop a critical, comparative and empirically grounded dialogue, the panel explores the consequences of this ‘machinic life’ for the lives of actual people, migrants and refugees who navigate actual and digital borders in the quest of a better life. As such, the panel engages with crucial themes of processes of bordering, extractive logics and commercial dimensions of biometric flows and algorithmic sorting, discrimination and exclusion, and human agency and autonomy. Ultimately, all papers are concerned with the broader intersection of data, computation and justice.

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