Book Review: The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Guest post by Dr Natasha Saunders. Dr Saunders is a Lecturer in International Relations and International Political Theory at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the ethical challenges posed by digitised border controls.  

Review of: The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Petra Molnar (The New Press, 2024) 

The Walls Have Eyes is the culmination of years of fact-finding about how digital borders and bordering enact violence on those considered undesirable, and advocacy on behalf of victims of this violence. While digital technologies such as biometrics, passport e-gates, and the databases on which they rely facilitate speedy, ‘seamless’ travel for those with the ‘right’ passports and sufficient income, these and other border technologies expose those from the majority world to physical and psychological violence. Petra Molnar takes the reader on a journey across the world’s borderlands to expose the depth and reach of digital technology in migration control and the financial and ideological interests driving the border industrial complex and its digital turn. 

The Walls Have Eyes, thus, attempts to counter the multiple layers of invisibility that, by design, shroud the violent realities of border control from view. Through her “storytelling and story sharing”, Molnar adeptly makes visible otherwise invisible technologies of control and the financial and geopolitical connections driving them. At the same time, she highlights the stories of the diverse people attempting to cross through these borderlands and render their experiences comprehensible. The chapters can be read individually, but reading the whole book is the best way to understand how a vast digital web of control is being constructed in which we are all coopted – migrant or not. 

Each chapter begins in a particular borderland but quickly expands out to trace connections between bordering technology, and financial and political interests. In the book’s first chapter we travel from the Sonoran Desert with its mobile watchtowers, drones patrolling the skies, and survival beacons wired into Customs and Border Patrol, further within the US to see how these bordering technologies bleed into the interior in the form of predictive policing, DNA databases and social media monitoring in which citizens as well as migrants are caught.  Later, chapter 6 begins in the West Bank city of Hebron, tracing the tech created by Israel’s largest defence company Elbit Systems (who built the watchtowers we first encounter in the Sonoran Desert) through the West Bank to control the movement and daily lives of Palestinians under occupation. We then follow Elbit Systems, Cellebrite – an Israeli “digital intelligence leader” – and others to Defence Exhibition Athens, where vendors from all over Europe gather to sell their wares. Molnar takes the reader through the exhibition, stopping at stalls showcasing the latest in border tech experimentation: from Robo Dogs, to AI powered rifles atop surveillance towers, to AI lie detectors – many of which are funded by the EU’s Horizon research programme – showing the reader the types of interventions states seem most interested in pursuing.   

 
Understanding how border control is becoming increasingly digitised, and how this process requires the data that we all produce on a daily basis, including in non-migration contexts, is a vitally important task. However, the nature of digital bordering technology, shrouded in secrecy that often accompanies ‘national security’ and protections of Intellectual Property mean that it is difficult to know exactly how algorithmic decisions are made, what of our data is being used, and how. Beyond this, however, Molnar ably shows how the world’s borderlands are deliberately maintained as legal grey zones – or “blackholes” – facilitating the kind of technological experimentation “that would not otherwise be allowed in other spaces or tested out on citizens” (65). Chapters 2, 3, and 7, thus, broaden our focus to the dynamics of migrant criminalisation (Chapters 2 and 3) and the politics of fear and securitisation (Chapter 7). The combination of these security logics, Intellectual Property protections, and the complexity of AI and algorithmic decision-making, makes resistance to such technologies difficult. But importantly, resistance is not impossible.  

Resistance is the focus of the book’s final chapter. Here, Molnar surveys a range of ways in which such systems of violence and oppression are being resisted, beginning from “the recognition that we are all connected – and that we are all implicated in the systems that divide and conquer” (194). Technology can be coopted and/or codesigned by those who are themselves on the move – shifting the focus of digital technology in migration away from an obsession with exclusion and control, toward remedying abuses, rectifying bias and discrimination, and facilitating safe movement. Lawyers engage in strategic litigation on the use of such technology – not only to remedy biased or incorrect decisions in individual cases but also to expose government use of such technology and discover how it works. Individuals and groups – including workers at tech companies – engage in divestment strategies to raise the cost of involvement in the border industrial complex for companies who may prefer the public not know of such activities. 

Each chapter is also, however, centred on how these border technologies are experienced by those most vulnerable to their violence. What comes through powerfully is what Molnar most hoped to show: that “at the heart of policies and technologies are always human stories” (6). But this is a task fraught with its own potential for violence. Readers should, therefore, not skip the Author’s Note: a series of extremely valuable reflections on the profound ethical challenges of working in the world’s borderlands, with people exposed to border violence, and how to share their stories ethically. These are lessons that students, volunteers, academics and journalists should all pay heed to. 

Ultimately what the reader gets from The Walls Have Eyes is a frightening window into the shadowy world of border control, the powerful financial and political interests behind its proliferation, and the harms these seemingly more ‘benign’ technological solutions inflict. What Molnar is not able to provide is an in-depth, detailed explanation of how each technology works. However, to expect such an explanation would not be reasonable given the constraints to understanding outlined above. But Molnar does an excellent job of explaining why an alarm needs to be raised about the techno-solutionism that increasingly characterises border control, and provides some avenues for thinking through how we might respond to this alarm. 

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