affective borders, technological borders and the shifting border
In the spring of 2020, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced nationwide lockdown. Hundreds of migrant workers from neighbouring countries had to go home, walking for days on foot only to find themselves barred at their own border — many low-wage Nepali labourers were stopped at the border after Nepal restricted all movement from India. In another case, a boat with 400 refugees from Bangladesh was turned away from the Malaysian border and abandoned to float on sea for weeks without aid. Neither inside nor outside, the ‘distrusted’ body floats between legislative boundaries.
Harald Baulder, a geographer, on the issue of migration observed that the imagination of open borders is a faint, amorphous image, arising on a distant horizon where the concrete terms of what an open-borders world would look like is not yet discernible. Yet, open border politics are already practiced by migrants and activists on a daily basis — not utopian but part of an ongoing struggle for change. In the affective border , borders are inscribed onto bodies themselves, in so far as one looks different by race, sex, or religion from accepted norms. Selective security screening, randomised background checks and the tactics of ICE patrols show that some bodies are perceived as a carrier of disease while trusted bodies, complete with legal citizenship and a valid passport, can pass.
Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen
While convention superimposes precise lines on a map to delineate boundaries between nation-states, using policy and law as enforcement, in reality borders are not fixed lines but rather floating ones. In an essay on pandemic borders titled ‘The Disorder of Things’, Umut Ozguc observes that borders are an affective experience produced by our everyday movements, personal narratives and semiotic codes that define our relations with the world. Borders carry weight, deployed as a tool to regulate the flow and migration of people, labour and capital. As Arundhati Roy aptly put it, COVID lockdowns around the world and the closing of borders worked like a chemical experiment, suddenly illuminating hidden things. As the rich guarded themselves in gated communities, large metropolitan cities pushed migrant workers, their labour force, out of the city’s legislative boundaries. In the age of the pandemic, such workers are seen as unwanted accrual, health threats and ‘disposable’ bodies.
Border enforcement recognises that rigid lines cannot fully control the flow of bodies. As a result, ‘the border’ can be framed through many lenses, including the technological or bureaucratic border, an expanding and shifting boundary that regulates flow and migration. With the increasing use of technological tools at security checkpoints, it is becoming clear that privacy is contextual — ‘distrusted’ bodies do not experience the same standard of privacy as those with a more legal status. The use of biometric tools in refugee camps, AI detectors, algorithm automation in visa application processes and United Nations’ use of blockchain tools to profile asylum seekers are all methods of surveillance that maintain borders. With COVID-19, many visa application agencies have implemented a medical exam to further determine eligibility to cross a border. In a sense, the exam classifies and analyses the body — a biological border between the test subject and the nation-state, the coveted destination. Migration management in the pandemic allows enforcers to test emerging tracking and surveillance technologies in the name of containing the virus.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 27
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