Andrea Berger

Abstract

Refugee documentation has been entangled with international orders regulating mobility in national terms for quite some time. The Nansen Passport responded to the problem of stateless people and those with invalid or no passports. It fostered international coordination and institution-building for what has become the international refugee regime today (see Lui, 2004). Biometric documentation increasingly plays a role in border control and migration governance and in the modernisation of ID systems, more generally speaking. Hence, it plays a vital role in the question of how bordering and migration governance are being transformed in increasingly mobile times.

The thesis considers the shift from paper-based documentation to digital biometric documentation practices of international protection applicants in Germany to illustrate and understand broader transformations in borders and territorial-political orders, which I call orders of belonging. It explicitly addresses the neglected role that biometrics have come to play in the management of protection status applicants. The thesis explores the questions of why digital biometrics have become useful in administering asylum after Schengen in Germany and, second, the implications of how a digital biometric way of documenting differs from preceding ways of documenting people as refugees.

To answer these questions, the study investigated the emergence of a digital biometric documentation regime in the German asylum system after the Schengen Agreement during the 1985-2021 period. This period covers the entry of biometrics and identification in asylum law in Germany in 1993 and the expansion and digitally mediated use of biometrics in the registration of protection applicants in the policy reform of 2016. The appearance and systematization of biometric identification emerged together with the European migration regime following the Schengen Agreements in 1985. The thesis uses document analysis of programmes, media outlets, news reports, interviews, and observation at a refugee registration facility to address its central aims. The primary goals of the thesis are to situate the development of a digital biometric regime in the history of refugee and migration governance and to examine its distinctive workings inside the Schengen territory and more specifically within Germany. By undertaking this approach, the thesis aims to enrich our understanding of technological change in migration government by drawing out comparisons and lineages with previous constellations that often remain implicit in the critical literature on migration. In addition, the thesis brings together two sets of literature in this field which have for the most part remained distinct: historical studies on identity documentation and the work of Critical Migration, Border and Security Studies.

I argue that the digital biometric documentation of the protection applicants inside national territory can be understood as identity control. First, administrative actors use the identity documentation of applicants to monitor their movements. Second, and as a condition to the first, digital biometric documentation enables the control of protection status applicants’ identities across an expanding network of actors and sites of border control inside the territory. Together, identity control through digital biometric documentation practices can be understood as an intra-European documentation regime for governing mobility and exchanging information on people on the move. Third, digital biometric documentation of protection applicants competes with, and complements, the passport regime, which is based on an international order of mutually exclusive citizens, territories, and political orders.

By contrast to an affiliation with securitisation with territorial closure towards outsiders, this thesis's findings situate biometrics as an attempt to secure control of incoming people inside the territory and society, requiring the relative functional openness of borders and re-enforcing a tension between openness and closure within the European migration regime. The social securitisation of refugee subjects inside the Schengen territory contrasts with the overt and sometimes violent cessation and de-legitimisation of movements at the outer borders and in third territories. However, border rationalities, the reasoning for granting or withholding entry rights to certain social groups, morally legitimize the securitization of refugees within a territory. Based on the enactment of protection seekers as border subjects whose residence rights have yet to be finally decided, the digital-biometric documentation regime securitises protection seekers within the Schengen area and their society.

Keywords: Regime analysis, material-symbolic perspective, borders, identity documentation, digital biometrics, asylum, Germany.