Processing Alterity, Enacting Europe: Migrant Registration and Identification as Co-construction of Individuals and Polities

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of “alterity processing” to account for the simultaneous enactment of individual “Others” and emergent European orders in the context of migration management. Alterity processing refers to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into “European-legible” identities. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy and the Hellenic Republic from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that different registration and identification procedures compete to legitimize different chains of actors, data, and metadata as more authoritative than others. Competing procedures have governance implications, as well, with some actors being included and others being excluded. Furthermore, there is evidence that—despite procedural rigidities—applicants themselves propose alternative chains of actors, data, and metadata that are more meaningful to them. In this tension, it is not only the individual Other that is enacted but also specific bureaucratic orders cutting across old and new European actors and distinctive understandings of “Europe.” From a technology studies perspective, this article engages in a dialogue with the emergent debate on Hotspots, the scholarship about the infrastructural construction of Europe and political sociology.

Technologies, infrastructures and migrations: material citizenship politics

“…By partially redistributing the power of decisions from humans to technical artifacts and data networks, technologies and infrastructures used for migration control move any kind of protest or resistance from a moral plane to a technical one thus rendering the struggle difficult or almost impossible. Another effect of this action is that migrant subjects are relegated to 'people being processed' thus depriving them of their personal stories, ambitions and trajectories (Scheel 2019;Pelizza 2019). Thus, technologies and infrastructures in the name of migration control come with monitoring and disciplining consequences for migrant subjects, restricting and redefining their acts of citizenship and their identities as political subjects.…”

“…Thereby the management of 'data doubles' and migrants as a form of organizing the mobility of people and data revealed modes of infrastructuring migrants throughout the logistical processing of identities (Pollozek and Passoth 2019). Pelizza (2019) has focused on the EU data infrastructures for population management in the context of migration control. By building on Bowker and Star (1999), the author emphasized the enactment of data identities according to specific classifications which expect applicants 'to fit into categories and categorical values inscribed in information systems and administrative templates' (Pelizza 2019, 277).…”

“…Second, when considering the role of technologies and infrastructures, scholars have mainly focused on those technologies and infrastructures that are employed to manage and control migration (Pelizza 2019;Pollozek and Passoth 2019). In this way, technologies used and enacted by migrants themselves have not been taken into account.…”

Introduction

“…But they also play out when Member States appropriate the requirements to join the transnational DNA data exchange as responses to and articulations of their own visions of Europe and nationhood. Thereby, we also follow other scholars influenced by the tradition in the history of technology that explores the 'hidden integration' deriving from an analysis of new transnational polities as outcomes of large-scale techno-political attempts at European integration (Misa & Schot, 2005;Schipper & Schot, 2011;Pelizza, 2020). Studies in this tradition have focused on 'infrastructural Europeanism', by investigating European transportation, energy, water and communication infrastructures, and studying how particularpotentially conflicting-visions of Europe become enacted (Pelizza, 2020).…”

State work and the testing concours of citizenship

“…Papadopoulos, ). As Annalisa Pelizza has said, “migrant registration and identification” can be seen as the “co‐construction of individuals and polities” (Pelizza, , p. 1). Seen in this light, migration control and the calibration of people's citizenship enable what Timothy Mitchell has called “state effects” to exist and persist (Mitchell, , ).…”