Border Necrotechnics: Automation, Surveillance, and the Racial Politics of Migration Control

This open access book examines how emerging border technologies such as AI-driven risk scoring, autonomous surveillance towers, biometric identity systems, predictive analytics, and algorithmic decision tools reshape the criminalization and securitization of migration. Positioned at the intersection of criminology, critical migration studies, and socio-technical analysis, this book argues that AI and other autonomous surveillance technologies do not simply “manage” migration: instead, these tools actively produce racialized suspicion, legitimize expanded policing, and enable new forms of pre-emptive control over people-on-the-move, often leading to adverse outcomes including discrimination, racism, and even death. The term border necrotechnics describes the assemblage of automated systems, infrastructures, and practices through which states and corporations decide which lives are rendered killable, deportable, or indefinitely surveilled at and beyond the border.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, this book situates border AI and surveillance within a broader genealogy of punishment, racialized security practices, and the policing of global mobility. The author argues that AI systems automate historical logics of exclusion, embedding them in digital infrastructures that appear neutral yet replicate deep structural inequalities. Through ethnographic interviews and field observations it offers rare insight into how people experiencing forced displacement encounter emerging surveillance technologies firsthand.

Petra Molnar is Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, Canada, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.