Documenting the Undocumented:  Experimenting Europe at the Biometric Migrant Archive

I am currently working on a monograph titled Documenting the Undocumented, a critical ethnography of the biometric governance of asylum seekers and illegal migrants in the European Union. Interrogating the paradox of how “undocumented migrants” have been – and are – the most documented subjects in post-communist and post-fascist, privacy-obsessed Europe, the book explores how this documentation increasingly deployed biometric technology during the post-war dismantling of Europe’s internal frontiers. At the centre of these processes is Eurodac: a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation and regulation of Europe’s paperless migrants. By attending to both the biometric apparatus and its lived experience among Middle Eastern migrants (mainly Syrians, Iraqis and Yemenis), the research explores how the illegal migrant body emerged as a site for postwar European self-constitution, and how biometrics’ promise of turning migrant bodies into readable documents is transforming bodies, borders and the future of citizenship.
Eurodac was the first EU database to experiment with biometric identifiers and applies it most pervasively. Today, with more than six million fingerprints, it is on course to becoming the first EU database to collect facial scans from non-citizens as young as six. Legislation is also underway to make Eurodac interoperable with four other databases, to create The Common Identity Repository (CIR) by 2023. Once established, the CIR will become one of the largest biometric depositories in the world, holding identity records and biodata of approximately 300 million non-EU nationals.
The book examines Eurodac in a global context, as a bureaucratic technology and mode of governance that is becoming widespread in different states, transforms the meaning of the state, and is deployed beyond the state, in fields like banking, security, health, gaming, travel, and humanitarian aid allocation. At the same time, it examines the peculiarities of Eurodac as a European project, set in Europe, managed through European cooperation, informed by European anxieties, and applied on changing conceptualizations of the non-European. Exploring the dialectics in which the illegal migrant is produced in tandem with integrated Europe, the European biometric apparatus calls into question what Europe is, who Europe is, and where Europe is today.
Documenting the Undocumented deciphers the conceptual and spatial challenges in locating the contours of a biometric surveillance apparatus – an assemblage of policy decisions, electronic databases, operational sites, offshore processing locations, a visual regulation regime, and encoded bodies on the move – and investigates the transnational connections wherein intertwined surveillance and governance systems are operated, negotiated, and subverted. To do so, the ethnography moves between the EU capital Brussels, Izmir (a migrant-smuggling and counterfeit documentation hub), the Greek island of Chios (a biometric registration “hotspot”), and Berlin.
This ethnographic account of the current state of migration securitization provides an alternative historical and theoretical framing for the 2015 “migration crisis.” It rethinks the meaning of biometric governance, the content and boundaries of Europe, the politics of humanitarian intervention in the global north, and the experience and performance of migration at this historical juncture.