I
Thinking infrastructurally about migrants typically short-cuts to the stresses and strains they bode for a site’s infrastructures, i.e., the added demands they impose on water supplies, transportation, energy, healthcare and the social protection systems, be that site a city, region or nation.
Attempts at itemizing the benefit side of having migrants–by virtue of added economic growth and increased tax revenues–look more and more feeble these days in the face of calls for degrowth and populist pressures against more government.
Shift this frame of reference, however, and matters start to look very different.
II
Historically, diasporic immigration worldwide has had its irreversible impacts. (Think: the transoceanic slave trades.) One such irreversibility has been that immigrants and infrastructures have developed together, with worldwide as the level and unit of analysis.
Rather than a priori stressors on existing infrastructures, a better point of departure is the evolution of: water supplies with respect to immigrants, energy supplies with respect to immigrants, telecommunications with respect to immigrants, and so on. Indeed, infrastructures and immigrants render each other visible and tangible–unavoidably really-existing for themselves and the rest of us–in ways that the noticeably immaterial labor of speechifying anti-immigrant politicians and pro-immigrant advocates does not.
III
So what? In reality, pro- and anti-immigration policies have rarely been articulated in practical terms when it comes to shifts in the many different configurations of interconnected critical infrastructures, again worldwide.
The idealized concatenation of sequential and reciprocal interconnectivity–migrants leave home and arrive at their destination, and once there, interact with others–has been (if it weren’t always) much more complicated. Mediated interconnectivities of traffickers and remittances along with pooled interconnectivities (think: EU directives on border management) have complicated matters even more.
For example, the focus on shifting interconnectivities takes on increasing importance in the digitalization of border management, not least of which in the operation of Frontex, the EU’s primary agency in this area. It is argued that, via digital technologies (including AI), national borders are being securitized and militarized. Surveillance is broadened and changing dramatically. “Europe has long been implementing border and migratory policies that focus on externalising European borders as far south as Senegal or as far east as Azerbaijan” records the same report (https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2023/08/Risking-Lives-report.pdf). Another report finds:
The removal of rescue boats and the increase of the utilization of drones is used by Frontex to detect and prevent migratory flows at an early stage, as migrant vessels are recognized in pre-frontier areas. In fact, the Frontex Situation Centre is a unit in charge of monitoring the external borders and the pre-frontier areas of the EU (European Parliament, 2018). The investment in drones has increased considerably in parallel with the deterrence of external rescue operations and the withdrawal of some naval missions in the Mediterranean, as it happened in the case of the Operation Sophia. Therefore, vessels that are capable of helping migrants and asylum seekers are replaced by drones that can only observe. In consequence, the agency has not the obligation to intervene neither rescue them.
https://centredelas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WP_DronesFrontex_ENG.pdf
And yet, the complexity remains when the focus is on digital interconnectivites. A third report concludes:
Overall, the wide range of applications for new technologies implies that each one should be investigated independently, taking into consideration its development context and the unique requirements of the stakeholders who develop and use them. This report, therefore, debunks a totalising, black-and-white perception of the uses of new technologies. New technologies can be used for various purposes ranging from including migrants’ and refugees’ preferences in their settlement processes (as in the case of some preference matching tools) to profiling them through risk assessments or monitoring them through invasive tools such as electronic monitoring. While the former can benefit migrants by having a say in their migration and settlement trajectory, the latter can have extremely harmful impacts on them. It is, therefore, crucial to examine each use of new technology in its own right, considering its design and implementation processes and their legal and social impacts.
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/automating-immigration-and-asylum-uses-new-technologies-migration-and-asylum-governance-europe
Indeed, digital surveillance and recognition systems are very much a mixed bag of shifting pros and cons at the case level (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517211006744).
Yes, these cases of shifts in interconnectivity can themselves be inter-related, but by definition they cannot be reduced to one and the same case (there are, after all, separate nodes in even the most tightly coupled network.)
IV
So too when it comes to thinking infrastructurally about the diasporic communities of immigrants worldwide. Undertake a thought experiment. Assume today was able to send a macro-message to world’s diasporic communities of half a century ago. What would we say to them? At best, it would be about what not to do by way of their infrastructures, right? No more building this and that; but instead not losing more of those and these.
And when those of 50 years ago understandably shoot back and ask, “Just how is that to be implemented when it comes, say, to the digitalization you are talking about?,” is there any doubt whatsoever our replies would center around what’s taken to be ideal today with respect to the interconnectivity shifts, albeit in no way detailed enough for their cases?
If worldwide is your unit and level of analysis, then complex, thankfully, is as simple as it gets.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 