Digital Footprints - Identity, Technology and Migration Management in Italy

This paper examines the lived experiences of migrants navigating digitalized border practices in post-2015 Italy, focusing on how technology shapes their identities, emotions, and processes of integration. In an era where digital technologies mediate access to essential socio-economic resources, migrants face a rapidly evolving landscape of border control. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this transformation, embedding digital tools more deeply into migration processes, from biometric data collection to online asylum applications. Drawing on interviews conducted in Italy in 2023-2024 with migrants, NGO workers, activists, legal advisors, and other border stakeholders, this paper explores the intersection of human mobility and technology. Italy, a key step in the Central Mediterranean route and an important part of Europe’s southern frontier, has witnessed a dramatic shift in border management since the 2015 refugee crisis. This transformation combines long-established bureaucratic procedures with emerging digital systems, creating a hybrid environment where paper-based systems coexist with data-driven tools. The paper integrates theoretical frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), data justice, and biopolitics to deepen our understanding of the migration-technology nexus. Rather than focusing solely on issues of data protection and surveillance, it highlights the embodied and emotional experiences of migrants. How do they perceive their sense of self and agency when reduced to data points? How do digital practices affect their emotions, such as sense of belonging, disempowerment, and exclusion? Through personal narratives, community projects, and local activism, the paper reveals how these digitalized systems can be both alienating and enabling, depending on migrants' access to technology and their ability to navigate bureaucratic structures. This paper also reflects on the challenges of applying interpretive methodologies to the study of digital borders. While the increasing use of digital tools in border management may promise more objective and efficient systems, the emotional and subjective dimensions of migrants’ experiences complicate this assumption. By foregrounding personal stories, the study illustrates how technology impacts the lived realities of migrants, offering new insights that challenge conventional understandings of legality and rationality in border policies. In addition, the paper tackles the methodological and ethical dilemmas of researching a politically sensitive and high-risk domain like border control. The central challenge lies in balancing the desire to foreground migrants' voices with the potential risks of exposing vulnerabilities that could lead to harsher treatment by authorities, especially in an environment where immigration policies are becoming more punitive. I explore how researchers can navigate the complexities of representing marginalized groups, particularly when research findings might be co-opted for purposes beyond the researcher's intentions. This reflection encourages a deeper examination of the responsibilities of the researcher-activist in the age of digital borders, where the lines between research, advocacy, and policy are increasingly blurred. Author: Alba Priewe