In 1904, the United States Commissioner-General of Immigration hired 75 ‘Mounted Inspectors’ to guard all of America’s borders.

These men provided their own horses and were given little supervision beyond an order against swashbuckling’.

Border control technology has come a long way since. A quick internet search will bring up glossy websites inviting you to events such as ‘Global Border Control Technology Summit 2 - The Premier Event for the International Border Control Industry’. It’s a big business!

The European front runner in this game is FRONTEX. Its job is to link, co-ordinate and harmonise national border control forces of EU member states, integrating the police, military and secret services.
FRONTEX is highly independent and its growing power is exercised without transparency or parliamentary control.

Alongside national border security agencies, its officers carry out an increasing number of anti-migrant operations. According to the European Commission, FRONTEX participated in capturing and rejecting 53,000 people at EU borders in 2006/07. Imagery of a ‘war’ against the ‘threat’ of “illegal migration” legitimises its use of military equipment for the task.

These forceful border control operations are responsible for multiplying migrant deaths. Such harsh 'security’ measures don’t address the causes of migration, but force migrants to pick more dangerous routes [see Hazel Healy’s article in this section].

Nevertheless, FRONTEX presents its activities as a “humanitarian engagement against criminal human traffi cking”. Recently, the European Commission proposed a “Border Package” in which FRONTEX will function as the central coordination hub in the EU border regime. An all-encompassing European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) will spy on migrants from their journey’s start point all the way to Europe, while a biometric identifi cation system will control all movements into and out of the EU. This data-gathering program would be one of a kind worldwide.

Leave aside for a moment the human rights implications and the history of control technologies trialled on migrants being applied to the general population. Due to its complexity, there must be doubts over
whether EUROSUR will actually function. The likely failure of authorities to effectively control borders though databases and computer controlled biometrics will open other areas of technology. Old-school patrol guards and barbed wire could be a thing of the past in some places. “Automated kill zones” seem the way forward.

Defence News’ Barbara Opall-Rome reports that “initial deployment plans for the See-Shoot system call for mounting a 0.5-calibre automated machine gun in each of several pillboxes interspersed along the
Gaza border fence.” IDF commanders have insisted that the system will only fire with human authorisation during the “initial phases of deployment”, but according to the manufacturer’s spokesman they ultimately envisage a ‘closed-loop’ system in which targeting takes place without human intervention.