Digital technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous gateways and necessary tools to access crucial aspects of socio-economical life, a process further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The management of human mobility is central area where this transformation is taking place.
This paper explores how migrants understand, experience, and navigate these processes in contemporary European settings. Specifically, the study analyses data collected in multiple sites across Italy in 2023-2024 through interviews with migrants, NGO workers, legal advisors and other border stakeholders. It focuses on post-2015 Italy, whose position at Europe’s Southern border and its role as a key migratory route has made it a place of experimentation for border practices innovation, especially in the aftermath of the 2015 “refugee crisis”. In its complex assemblage of long-established paper-based processes and newer datafied practices, the digitalized bureaucracies of the 21st century frontier has ripple effects on migrants’ lives, their sense of identity and belonging, and processes of integration. Drawing from the fields of STS, data justice, and the biopolitics of biometrics, I seek to expand the theoretical conceptualizations of the migration-technology nexus beyond the existing focus on data protection and surveillance to include migrants’ embodied experiences of the new, dispersed and datafied frontier.