Petra Molnar on Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Mass migration presents a challenge to democracy in multiple ways. Chief among them is that anti-immigrant sentiment often plays a major role in the advance of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. We've seen this play out in the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised a dramatic crackdown on immigration and the mass deportation of millions.

But the scale of today's migration may be dwarfed by what's to come. How has the movement of people affected the politics driving the development of surveillance, biometrics, big data and artificial intelligence technologies? And how do these technologies employed at borders and in governments themselves drive policy and change the way we think about the movement of people?

Today's guest has spent years traveling the world to study how technology is being deployed in border regions and conflict zones, and she's written a book about it. Petra Molnar is a lawyer and an anthropologist and the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Petra Molnar:

My name is Petra Molnar, I'm a lawyer and an anthropologist and the author of my first book, which is called, "The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

Justin Hendrix:

I'm so pleased to speak to you today, Petra. In this book, you say before you went to law school, you worked at refugee shelters in Toronto, often on the 11 p.m to 7 a.m. graveyard shift. You talk about how that was a formative time for you, not least because you almost got fired, as you say, for buying a box of diapers for a baby girl whose family had just arrived from Colombia. Talk to me about how you got into this line of work. How did you find your way to that job? How did you find your way to the curiosities that became the subject of this book?

Petra Molnar:

That's such a nice place to start, thanks for picking up that thread. I've always been interested in migration issues, partly because of my own migration experience in my families, but I never really thought I would be a lawyer or an academic working on these issues. I meandered my way into it, like many of us do, through twists and turns that bring us to where we are, but I think it's always important to reflect on how we got here, and perhaps for me it was a motivation to try and understand how power operates in society and why certain communities on the margins are always the ones that are disenfranchised. And I ended up working as what we in Canada call a refugee settlement worker, essentially like a frontline service provider at shelters to assist people who are newly arrived, largely through chance.

Honestly, I was trying to find work in the migration sector, it was a job that came up and the graveyard shift was one of the few available ones. So yeah, I ended up working the 11:00 p.m To 7:00 a.m. doing security, cleanup, checking people in, interacting with newly arrived refugees. And it was pretty much as frontline as you can get, and in a way, I think it also probably solidified my move towards trying to understand these things from a legal perspective, but it also showed me both humanity and inhumanity in the system too. There were so many amazing people trying to help one another, but there was also so much kind of daily banal violence, like the story you reference, and that's something that stayed with me after all these years. But it was such a small thing, making the choice to make sure that a baby girl has enough diapers, and yet there was a policy that you could only give out a certain number of diapers per day, and I just was like, "Why? Why is it like this?" And I think in a way, this question of why continues to animate the work that I do today to try and understand how people are moving and the kind of pressures of the system that they're facing.

Justin Hendrix:

In the introductory note to this book, you write, "Borders are violent, yet they are also spaces of tremendous resistance and solidarity, often in very unexpected ways." You go on to say, "Borders, both real and artificial, they are what historian, Sheila McManus, calls, 'An accumulation of terrible ideas created through colonialism, imperial fantasies, apartheid, and the daily practice of exclusion.'" Can you talk to me a little bit about what you've learned about the scale of human migration, where are we headed? I've seen so many different estimates of what to expect over the next decades, some of them seem cataclysmic, I've seen numbers as many as a billion people may have to walk north, or south, or east, or west, depending on where they're at, and part due to climate change and part due to conflict, what can we expect?

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, I always struggle a bit with how to answer a question that's very forward looking like this because I think on one hand it is becoming clear that human migration is going to exponentially increase. We are already seeing that as a result of environmental degradation, ongoing conflict, genocide, apartheid, there's a lot of human movement that is happening and will be on the rise. But then on the other hand, human movement has always been with us. People have been migrating since time immemorial, and so I think it's also important to not look at the rising trends of migration from a place of crisis or fear, or seeing migration as a threat, but rather perhaps as a result of policymaking and the choices that are being made by powerful actors today. I think that's where that quote from Sheila McManus really reminds us that there are these broader logics that play, that animate why people move, why they have to move, and what this is doing to our present-day reality and future forecasting.

Justin Hendrix:

A big part of this book, of course, is talking about technology, the amount of money there is to be made and stopping, managing mitigating, surveilling, otherwise interceding in human migration. How should we understand this global industry? How big is it? What are the ways that you think about the taxonomy of actors in it?

Petra Molnar:

What we're really talking about is what my colleague and friend, journalist, Todd Miller, calls, "The border industrial complex." It has become a massive global industry, multi-billion dollars at that and rising exponentially every year, of these private sector actors who are presenting solutions to the so-called problem of migration. And again, to me, this was probably one of the most surprising things that I have come to learn over the years of working at the intersection of technology and then migration, just how baked in the private sector interests really are. Not only is it obviously highly, highly lucrative for large actors that maybe listeners are familiar with like Palantir, Elbit Systems, other big companies, but also really small medium-sized enterprises that nobody has ever heard of.

But there's also this other side to it, maybe the more philosophical side where it also is so powerful in terms of how private sector actors can paint the picture and have this normative power on what we innovate on and why. And to me, ultimately it is about trying to understand this power economy, the fact that private sector interests are the ones who are driving not only the bottom line, but also what we innovate on and why. And again, it makes kind of sense when we start looking at it from the perspective of what logics animate how migration is thought about. And if states think that people on the move, refugees, migrants are a threat, they're frauds, they're terrorists, they must be controlled and they are a problem, then the private sector comes in and says, "We have a solution to your problem." And that solution is a robo dog, or a drone, or an algorithm. So then it starts perhaps making sense why we're innovating in this way, in this really sharp high-risk border tech way as opposed to maybe using AI to identify racist border guards or to understand immigration decision makers. The technology always becomes weaponized towards people on the move and communities that are on the margins, and that's where the private sector kind of interests really comes in. It ultimately is about who holds the reins of power in these spaces that determine what we innovate on and why.

Justin Hendrix:

You talk about so many different technologies in this book, from biometrics to lie detection, to voice verification, to the algorithms that are making visa choices and determining who gets in a country and who's kept out. You point out that Israel is a particular hotbed of entrepreneurship on how to build border and surveillance technologies.

Petra Molnar:

Israel is a major player in this global economy on border tech and surveillance, and I felt really compelled to talk about it as a case study in the book precisely because it is the epicenter of so much of the thinking and the innovation that then gets repurposed at the border. And I was in the occupied West Bank in the spring of 2023 to try and see firsthand some of the impacts of this kind of surveillance, these technologies of apartheid really that are first and foremost tested on Palestinians and then sold to European Union actors or the United States government. Because we have, for example, Elbit Systems Towers that are in Arizona. Elbit Systems is an Israeli company that has tested out technology on Palestinians and then sold it off, for profit of course, for the border surveillance industry.

But again, to me it's also about trying to understand these issues from as broad of a perspective as possible and to try and introduce these geopolitical actors in this growing web of influence and power in all of this, and I think not talking about Israel would be a huge mistake because it really is the epicenter of so much of the tech development and deployment. It also makes me think of the work of journalist, Antony Loewenstein, who had a book come out called, "The Palestine Laboratory." Earlier this year, or the work of Mona Shtaya, she's a Palestinian digital rights activist. People have been trying to document this kind of technological oppression for years, and what we're seeing now is that the tech oppression that happens in Palestine is then repurposed for the border.

Justin Hendrix:

You also point out that those technologies have been repurposed against Israeli citizens who protest the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, and that's the thing with border tech or technologies of surveillance, rarely do they stay in their intended context. And I think it's so important to make space and pay attention to what happens on the margins like at the border or of course in occupied territories like in Palestine, but that's the thing, the technology that's tested there doesn't just stay there, and then to get turned on to citizens of a particular country or in the instances of border tech, we're seeing similar technology used against protesters, for example, or even facial recognition stadiums. Or perhaps the most telling example that really stayed with me was when in the spring of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced that they wanted to use robo dogs at the US-Mexico border, and the press release is still publicly available where you can see this kind of flashy announcement of robo dogs becoming part of the arsenal of border tech. A year after that, the New York City Police department on TikTok announced that they wanted to use robo dogs on the streets of New York. One was even painted white with black spots on it like a Dalmatian, talk about normalization of technology.

Justin Hendrix:

I think I've mentioned on this podcast before, that in my Brooklyn neighborhood, we often hear the whir of the NYPD drone making rounds out of the 67th precinct. This points to another theme that you're raising in the book, of round the intersection of government efforts to introduce digital public infrastructure to the kind of technology solutions that governments provide. You look to Africa in particular. Kenya is one place where there's a massive effort to digitize services and provide more modern substrate for government. How does public infrastructure, digital public infrastructure, digitization, how does that intersect with the issues you're concerned with here?

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, this was another kind of important gloss to try and at least marginally cover in the book, and that is the kind of intersection between, like you say, this government push to digitize and create technological efficiencies in the system, and what that's doing on the ground. And digital identification systems were a really interesting case study, both in terms of trying to understand how governments are somewhat obsessively introducing digital ID, like in Kenya for example, with the Huduma Namba case or the Aadhaar system in India, while not paying attention really to what's happening on the ground and how already marginalized groups like the Nubians in Kenya, for example, or the Somali Kenyans were further disenfranchised by not being able to be part of the system through a variety of different discriminatory reasons, for example, being registered accidentally in a refugee database as opposed to a citizenship database. Or even something as simple as collecting biometric identification like fingerprints and not being able to do that from agrarian populations just simply because of working in a field and your fingerprints being degraded.

It's all of these kind of manifestations of these digitized systems that don't actually map onto the complexity of human lives, and it was really fascinating to be in Kenya and be at the Somalia border in communities like Garissa for example, where you have Somali Kenyans and also Somali refugees totally being shut out of these government identification systems. And so there's also this kind of element too of governments really mapping onto this global push that more data is better, identity must be digitized, we need more information on our people, and yet actually that not playing out in the intended ways on the ground.

Justin Hendrix:

You published this book of course before the 2024 US election took place. The outcome appears set to radically increase the kind of efforts the United States government is engaged in to control immigration, to potentially deport millions of immigrants, to militarize the border. I want to ask you a little bit about how you're thinking about the US, how you're thinking about what we can expect in these coming weeks and months. I also want to point out you do make clear that this is not a simply kind of Donald Trump phenomenon. We've had a huge increase in the investment and technology at the border. The infrastructure, the development of various kinds of "Smart border technologies" has been something that the Obama administration, the Biden administration, had put a lot of money into. You say sometimes Democrats make those investments to try to argue that somehow it's more humane.

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, and thank you for putting it that way because I think it's obviously crucial to pay extremely close attention to and critique the Trump administration or the upcoming Trump administration's moves to use surveillance, and AI, and technologies to further its aims of mass deportations, keeping track of people, all the things that they've been signaling. But so much of this predates this current political moment, and absolutely, the democratic administrations have actually been the ones who have vastly expanded the smart border and border tech usage in the United States, both under the Obama presidencies and also the Biden administration.

Other scholars like Jeffrey Boyce and Samuel Chambers, they've been making the same argument that actually the increase of smart border technology has further weaponized border surveillance and actually even led to an increase of deaths at the border, and this was all done under the Democrats. But however, I think it's fair to say that given at least the signaling of the incoming Trump administration on immigration, what they will be able to do is use this vastly expanded border surveillance infrastructure to their benefit, to then be able to actually operationalize a lot of what they're promising. It is to be seen how much of this is actually going to come into fruition, but given again the signaling around deportation, surveillance, data sharing, weaponization of police departments to be able to gain access to data and surveillance equipment in unprecedented ways, I think we are definitely going to see an exponential increase of perhaps how existing technology is going to be used and potentially also brand new technology that might make its way even to other borders like the Canada-US border, for example.

Justin Hendrix:

I suppose there are many people right now thinking about resistance, thinking about what will happen in the United States if in fact millions of people are targets of deportation orders. In your book, you write that there's a resistance movement to unjust forms of management of human migration across the world. You point out the different kinds of horror, of course, that is present at many situations, but also the beauty and ingenuity of people who are trying to find ways to maintain their humanity, seek their own best outcomes, their own best life. How do you think about the idea of resistance when it comes to borders these days?

Petra Molnar:

Absolutely. I've been so lucky to be able to work at, and visit, and spend significant time across so many different contexts, different borders, different crisis zones. At first blush, it can seem quite bleak and dystopic, but I will tell you at every single border, in every single situation, there were people who make the choice to help, to show up for one another, to resist the vast power differential, the technology, the unjust policies. Whether it's 70 or eighty-year-old Samaritans who are dropping water in Arizona, they could be retired on the sun lounger, but instead they're driving these giant Jeeps like to try and assist people in the Sonora desert. Or journalists who are risking their lives, reporting what's happening in Greece, or in Israel, or Palestine, civil society, trying to come up with creative ways to resist and contest the technology that's harming people. There are so many ways that I think communities and individuals are trying to find their way back to each other and to come up with mechanisms of resistance that are ultimately about seeing one another as human beings first rather than numbers, or figures, or facts, or threats, as is often the case with conversations around immigration and this kind of weaponization of our differences against one another.

That gives me a lot of hope because definitely over the years when I worked for six years or so on this book, there were times where it got pretty bleak and I thought, "Oh my God, there's just no way out. The future is robo dogs, and drones, and things like this." But I actually don't think that's the future, I think the future is finding ways towards one another and actually making space for these mechanisms of resistance too.

Justin Hendrix:

I suspect that's right. Somehow we'll have to, as a species, push through this. Probably do it in piecemeal ways, and some places may be more enlightened about it than others, but it strikes me at a certain point if some of these predictions about the scale of human migration in response to climate change and all of the various kind of political and military conflicts that arise in its wake, if any of these numbers are even close to correct, cameras, algorithms, robots is probably never going to be the right answer to this. It's going to have to be some form of figuring out how to accommodate the needs of our fellow humans who are fleeing untenable circumstances.

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's also about reminding ourselves that yeah, we have a lot more in common with one another than we realize, and also given the instability in the world, it's not as unimaginable that all of a sudden a community that's been stable might actually be at the forefront of a conflict or at the forefront of mass forced migration. With environmental degradation moving right into places like the United States and Europe, and I think again, this is going to be an issue of our time, but this is I think one of my major concerns with this kind of unbridled technofolutionism, if we can call it that, this kind of use of technology to further create barriers between one another and almost erase the complexity and the differences that make humans so interesting to each other.

Algorithms want to put us in boxes, technologies want to erase this kind of complexity and also erase responsibility that we have to one another. If immigration officers can rely on an algorithm to say it's a decision that was rendered by a computer, not by a human, therefore, I somehow don't have to look another person in the eye and actually stand by the decision that I'm making, right? There is this kind of veneer of division that technology creates between ourselves, and I think if anything, these are the kind of assumptions that we have to question and query as we move forward and as we do see more and more people who are going to be forcibly displaced.

Justin Hendrix:

There are references throughout this book to tech companies. They range from Google, to Amazon, to Facebook, to Palmer Luckey's Anduril, different firms like NSO Group and Israel, many others that are part of this border industrial complex. What would you say to workers there? You chronicle, of course, that worker resistance to involvement in oppressive border surveillance activities has been an important piece of the resistance generally to the buildup of this complex. For instance, OpenAI has just announced a partnership with Anduril to work on drone technology, what would you say to the workers?

Petra Molnar:

Yeah, the workers I think are such an essential piece because that is where all the power around innovation comes from. The kind of decisions that get made in terms of what we innovate on and why largely come from the private sector, and we need workers to feel empowered to be able to stand up to companies and say, "No, we don't want to work on projects like this." Amazon workers have protested, Microsoft, Google workers against Project Nimbus, for example, which is a project that was used in Israel against Palestinians. I think there is so much more space for solidarity building, but it is difficult because we, I think, all tend to work in silos. We have the lawyers over here, the civil society over there, policymakers behind their closed doors, the private sector workers cut off from everyone, and we really need to build more bridges.

And it is also a bit about education and educating oneself about what is actually happening to the technology that you are developing and where it's actually ending up. And sometimes when I talk to the private sector, I ask some cheeky questions. I kind of go around the room and say, "Who's a data scientist? Who's interested in Python? Who codes? Who's ever been to a refugee camp?" Not a lot of people. "Who's ever had to sit in front of a judge and face a sentencing algorithm? Who's ever had to apply for welfare?" That's not to say of course, that there isn't diversity in the tech sector, of course there is, but it's more about the kind of differences in lived experience between the people who sit around tables and develop the technology, and then as the technology moves through the life cycle and starts actually hurting and impacting real communities, there is this massive divide, and we all need to do a better job of perhaps finding ways to one another and talking to one another about what's actually happening.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, one quick way that some of the people in those situations that you spoke to could do that is by reading this book, they'll encounter many such characters. Maybe I'll ask you about a couple of those individuals. There's so many different characters in this book. One of them is Little Nasr who you took a drive with, and I love the description of when he comes on the scene, you say, "A dust cloud appears and a small form runs towards me."

Petra Molnar:

That's a story that has really stayed with me, but in total honesty, I really struggled whether or not to even include it in the book because it also required me to become part of the story, and I know I'm the author of the book, but I really didn't want to take up too much space. But after talking with friends and colleagues about it, I felt compelled to include it because I think it is quite illustrative of the kind of broad ramifications of this kind of technological violence. So Little Nasr was from Syria, and he was a teenager, but he looked about seven years old. He has been living with severe scoliosis, and he arrived in Greece with a group of adult men, some of his family relatives and others who joined the group in Turkey to try and claim asylum in Europe.

At this point, this was a few years ago, Greece has now been in the news for illegal pushback operations, essentially rounding up people who are applying for asylum and pushing them back into Turkey, which is illegal because people are supposed to be able to claim asylum on European territory. And this was also during Covid when I found out about Little Nasr arriving in Greece, and he was a child in this group, and they were quickly running out of water and food and essentially being caught in this surveillance dragnet. It was only going to be a matter of time before the authorities found them and pushed them back. And essentially we had to make a decision like someone had to go get him and I, through my own twists and turns, now possess a Canadian passport, and it's a powerful passport. And so I thought, if anybody should be doing this, going up there to this child, it will be me because I have this powerful passport that I can avail myself of, and I decided, okay, I'm going to go up there.

And so I picked him up, and through a variety of twists and turns, made it down to Athens and in the end reunited Little Nasr with his uncle. And since he's been doing well, and he eventually ended up getting asylum in Greece, but the rest of his group was not so lucky, and essentially 48 hours after we arrived, they were pushed back, and violently at that. And to me, this story, it brings together a lot of the themes of the book, so maybe the importance of choice and showing up for one another, but also the way that technology and surveillance weaponizes the border and ensnares people who are exercising their internationally protected rights. And to me, including it was perhaps a way to try and humanize the situation for readers, to not just talk again about numbers and individuals, but really trying to speak to the human impact of this unbridled innovation at the border. And Little Nasr is a full-fledged individual, just like you and I and everyone. He was obsessed with Cristiano Ronaldo, and loved playing soccer, and really wanted to have octopus for the first time. And that really stayed with me, we all are such fully-fledged individuals, and I think in the border kind of system of again, creating all the divisions between one another, we sometimes lose sight of that.

Justin Hendrix:

I'll ask about just one other individual, your name in the book, whose story you get into, a person called Negasi.

Petra Molnar:

So Negasi is another friend, I guess I could say at this point, who found his way to Europe after many, many years of, again, very many twists and turns. And I met Negasi as part of a group of asylum seekers and people on the move who were living in essentially a squat in Brussels, in Belgium. And it was a really beautiful community because again, it was such a great example of people showing up for one another in these adverse circumstances. It was this building that had all of these different rooms. There was not only a kitchen and a living room, but also like a dancing hall, and a wine cellar, for example, and people were living there together in this community. And we spent time together trying to understand again how people's roots and migration experiences were changed through technology. And Negasi in particular reflected on the kind of dehumanization of a lot of the technology, the kind of fingerprinting and iris scanning and was being reduced to a data point rather than being seen as a real human. Which is another theme that I try and explore throughout, the fact that these technologies reduce us to data points rather than again holding space for the kind of complexity that's inherent in human lives and in human migration specifically.

Justin Hendrix:

You end this book by talking about the necessity of remaining vulnerable. As an observer, you've traveled to these border places, you've seen the real human toll of these situations, yet you say, "You've done your best not to grow a thick skin, to allow yourself to feel the emotions that come along with the things you observe." Can you tell me a little about what that means to you?

Petra Molnar:

That's so interesting that you asked me that question because yesterday I was talking to a group of law students specifically about this. The way that I think being and sitting with your emotions and the kind of impact that doing work on migration and in refugee issues has on you is actually a bit of a superpower. I think sometimes when I mentioned this anecdote in the book, it was something that a well-meaning colleague said to me after I remember I lost a deportation case in Canada and I was really distraught about it. She said, "Oh, don't worry, you'll grow thicker skin." But I thought, "I don't want to grow thicker skin because I want to feel the injustices of the system and I don't want to be complacent to the way that things are." And I think operating from a place of openness and kindness to one another and allowing again for the emotions to be there with you is a very important antidote to the kind of dehumanization narratives that have become so common, and also this kind of walling ourselves off from one another again.

To me, it's part of my practice and it was when I was litigating in court and it is now as an academic and a writer, I think it actually is something that can also be an antidote and a mechanism of resistance, choosing to be vulnerable and present and also aware of the kind of emotional impacts that this work has. Not to say that we should be trauma dumping on one another and all this kind of stuff, it's also responsibility that we carry to make sure that we work on ourselves as well, and I'm very open about the fact that I regularly see a therapist, for example, for work-related events, I think that's part of my professional responsibility too. But again, I think it all comes down to the choices that we make in terms of how we show up for one another, and that's a choice that I continue to make.

Justin Hendrix:

This book's called The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Petra Molnar, and it's available in all places where good books are sold. Petra, thank you so much for speaking to me.

Petra Molnar:

Thank you, thank you so much for having me.

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