Networks of Apprehension and the Everywhere Border

Networks of Apprehension and the Everywhere Border Timothy Marr (bio) Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry around Immigrants. By Melissa Villa-Nicholas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 224 pages. 85. 00 (cloth). 29. 95 (paper). Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond. By Ana Muñiz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 254 pages. 85. 00 (cloth). 29. 95 (paper). Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier. By Camilla Fojas. New York University Press, 2021. 208 pages. 89. 00 (cloth). 28. 00 (paper). Border Frictions: Gender, Generation, and Technology on the Frontline. By Karine Côté-Boucher. Abingdon, Oxon, 2022. 220 pages. 170. 00 (cloth). 52. 95 (paper). Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land. By Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 224 pages. 102. 95 (cloth). 26. 95 (paper). In 2021 a controversial photograph was circulated depicting a US Border Patrol agent astride a horse lunging to push back a Haitian migrant near the Rio Grande. The ensuing furor about this prominent incident of violence featuring traditional equine border control contrasts with the invisibility of the multifarious technological means of what the US Army Military Intelligence Museum calls "the Electronic Cavalry" to contain the movement of migrants (Schaeffer 31). Since the new Department of Homeland Security consolidated the regulation of borders, immigration, customs, and transportation in the wake of 9/11, border operations have increasingly relied on a network of surveillance fed through forms of systematic data collection developed in collaboration with private corporations and academic institutions. As with the horse, which End Page 127 harks back to earlier so-called frontier history, these developments contrast with Donald Trump's calls for building of a physical wall between Mexico and the United States to prevent undocumented passage across the territorial border. The five books under review dramatize how bordering has been so transformed by evolving technological capacities to track and sort that, as Anil Kalhan has argued, it occurs everywhere, even if it is "selectively permeable" (Muñiz 22). These practices expand the border that Gloria Anzaldúa calls "La Linea, " or the "thin edge of / barbwire, " from a 1, 954-mile geographic boundary line into a digital infrastructure that extends both into and beyond the boundaries of the nation, transforming the bodies of both noncitizens and citizens into data gathered, circulated, and monitored in the interest of the state. "The border becomes ever more hardened physically, " Ana Muñiz argues, "as it becomes more fluid digitally" (36). These surveillance systems and enterprises, developed out of military and entrepreneurial innovation, promise the techno-optimist fantasy of a seamless border so vigilantly watched that it cannot be transgressed. Attempts to mediate mobilities across the border through surveillance technology reverses the myth of the open frontier by celebrating how federal officers patriotically enforce a closed border through new webs of apprehension. The word apprehension has the dual meaning of both the seizing of a body on behalf of an authority and signifying the grasp of understanding. These works reveal in different ways how interlocking systems of surveillance infrastructure transform bodies into data in ways that empower the state with new capacities of both racializing and apprehending migrants. In the process these books also help us to decode and make more transparent—to apprehend better—the technological, cultural, and social dimensions of these processes of bordering and their resulting injustices. They explore the processes that Louise Amoore has recently called "The Deep Border, " which make individuals knowable to the state by refracting them into expanding clusters of attributes, further accentuated through machine learning, that effectively borders migrants by algorithmically inferring both their compliance and their threat. The concatenating correlations of artificial intelligence (AI) effectively deterritorialize the boundary by rendering border control into a problem of data management. 1 The complex lived realities of migrants—their experiences and aspirations—are compressed into a quantitative measure of risk profiled in a record available for present and future political exclusion. The rise in speed and power of computing has produced a data-driven neoliberalism in which meaning is calculated and reality is certified through reductive correlation by artificial intelligence. . .