As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing.
As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In this book, Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity—and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.
Matt Mahmoudi is Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, where he works on racialized borders in digital cities. He has led Amnesty International's research on biometrics from New York City to Palestine and coedited Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence.
"A brilliant analysis of how digital urban technologies operate to border and exploit racialized communities across the world. Locating Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry in a longer history of enclosure, containment, and extraction under racial capitalism, Migrants in the Digital Periphery calls on us to resist and refuse the violence of ones and zeros. This is urgent reading for our digital times."—Ida Danewid, Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy, University of Sussex
"A must-read for anyone interested in technology, inequality, and immigration. Matt Mahmoudi reveals how algorithms and AI reinforce dynamics of racial capitalism and digital exclusion, opaquely shaping the fates of immigrants from New York to Berlin."—Angèle Christin, Associate Professor of Communication and Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar, Stanford University
"Offers rigorous and sobering insight into the ever-expanding infrastructures of the digital border that threaten cities of refuge as sites of hope and welcome. Delving into the datafication of everyday life, Mahmoudi shows how digital technologies are regularly and ordinarily mobilized to secure, but also to disguise, the racial ordering and bordering of cities."—Myria Georgiou, Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Mahmoudidemonstrates the complex relationship between techno-determinism as a concept and the government's complicity with Silicon Valley. An original and important book."—Eleanor Drage, co-host of the podcast The Good Robot and Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge
272 pp.6 x 9
9780520397019$29.95|£25.00Paper
Feb 2025