The use of digital systems and data in global migration has seen a significant shift in recent years. While migrating, displaced, and refugee populations have historically been at the centre of state efforts to know, predict, and manage migration; a renewed kind of ‘knowability’ of how these systems interpret people on the move is observed, along with the emergence of big data analytics [1], artificial intelligence, and a swathe of new data sources about people on the move. The boundaries of what data types are relevant have expanded enormously. Migration data now encompasses a variety of data assemblages (supply chains of data), sustained by state, commercial, and multilateral digital systems. Data collected at borders is often understood in combination with urban data in destination countries. Further, information collected by commercial platforms is also increasingly repurposed to make sense of human movement patterns, which also includes the training of AI systems without proper consent mechanisms. Data collected on voluntary migration is susceptible to use by law enforcement agencies and authoritarian regimes to profile and interpret refugees to their detriment. The emergent network represents a situation where data becomes open and testable for a variety of uses, amenable to recombination, and shifting priorities or understandings of the people it makes known. There is a need to concertedly consider the mushrooming of this infrastructure, who directs its values and impetus, and most importantly, how power flows through these structures [2], and where it concentrates.

​

Current scholarship has highlighted the relationship between how the migrant or refugee is viewed, and the emergent data assemblages relied upon to build knowability [3]. State efforts to understand migration are placed within the purview of managing a spectacle of numbers [4]; often failing to account for the diverse migrant experiences and journeys that require attention in policymaking. By viewing migration as a ‘monolithic’ event, a granular reading of the individual migrant is often missing in state decision-making. We witnessed this practice during the Syrian refugee crisis, where the top-down management of the refugee flows by the concerned European governments often took the spotlight away from approaching the problem through the lens of the individual refugee. The visceral reality, complex identity, and vulnerable lived experience of the migrant is then overshadowed by such an impetus. It is no surprise that the data assemblages associated with efforts to manage migration take a reductive approach, viewing the individual migrant ‘as-risk’, rather than one ‘at-risk’. Another limb of this infrastructure, commercial actors, is moving swiftly to provide greater predictability through the reassembly of data generated for profit-making purposes. They operate in digital contexts that are agnostic to the lived reality of a group; or rather, whose contexts are concerned with this reality only insofar as it is one that can be sold or sold to. The private sector also plays a pivotal role in the creation of migration data, as part of a race to provide state actors with the necessary tools to manage migration. [5] The competition then becomes what tools can provide the greatest knowability and predictability [6] of human migration. This is sanctioned often at great cost to the migrant, citing reasons of national security and myriad data protection regulations that do not always apply to people on the move. Some of the most vulnerable people on the move globally—violently and involuntarily displaced refugees—face a complex barter that is hard to conceive of for most. Stateless and largely unprotected lives exchange crucial information for the most basic necessities. Much of the impetus along migratory or refugee routes, or in crisis states is viewed as a crisis of funding, a crisis of logistics. Multilateral data systems enable essential knowability in these contexts. But here too, the migrant remains disempowered when knowability is dependent on shifting interests or impetus for different stakeholders. Information created and collected to know and understand the nature of a crisis can swiftly become the next tool of discrimination, [7] harm, and violence.

​

This emergent section—of powerful and decision-making actors mediating the flow, use, and collection of data, as well as the deployment of technology associated with migration—reflects a problematic state of affairs. For the migrant, what reveals itself is a sort of circus of broad-based data collection and consequent actions [8] taken upon data. The migrant becomes a docile complier of requests, becoming both the spectacle and the spectator; yet remaining largely unseen amid varied interests and a visceral fight for self-determination or legitimacy. Thus, we find the digital ecosystem of migration at a crossroads; increasingly problematising and jeopardising those it must rather protect and offer refuge. This sort of power asymmetry is symptomatic of a global ecosystem that does not prioritise the most vulnerable stakeholder. Instead, it promotes the use of evolving technologies [9] by states and private corporations during emergencies and crises when people on the move have negligible power to negotiate for accountability in data collection. A characteristic consequence of the status quo is also the acute absence of the migrant’s impetus in the use, build, design, or deployment of these systems. There is a need to think critically about the possibilities that lie ahead. The alternative path at this crossroads may be one that creates room, repair, and value for those on the move. There is a need to breathe to life a digital reality that reflects lived reality, and data decisions that foreground and work for the missing stakeholder—the person on the move or the ‘rightsholder’ in this case.

​

This authorship’s journey to conceptualising pathways to build a digital ecosystem that meaningfully involves and serves the communities in question were both spurred by and grounded in existing community efforts. It is no revelation that people on the move rely heavily on technology and connectivity to make difficult journeys, to assimilate into new lives, and to stay connected with lost pasts. However, in the shadow of previously discussed aspects of the status quo in the design of migration infrastructures, we have additionally observed an emerging and concerted effort driven by community interest in various global contexts: to use and build data and digital technologies to serve the needs of people on the move. 

​

There are numerous examples of emerging digital systems that reflect participative technologies, responsive technologies mitigating lived harm, and privacy-preserving technologies responding almost directly to the emerging combination of powerful actors driving migration tech. A newer digital layer is observed—one that is beginning to and is increasingly primed to provide a certain bottom-up friction to the prevailing ecosystem. It is crucial to begin understanding what factors enable or deflect these efforts, what gaps they address, and how they may push the needle in rebalancing power dynamics for people on the move. This report explicates many such examples and proposes a working framework to begin understanding the phenomenon. Owing to the legacy of other technological ecosystems that have aged inequitably, and scholarship around it, this reading of the bottom-up digital layer in migration relies on foundations of participatory data governance, data stewardship principles, data justice, and data solidarity. The creation of this category has two primary goals: 1) to provide a vocabulary and lens by which to understand community technological resistance, resilience, responsiveness, and responsibility in migration; and 2) to further enable the identification of efforts and systems that may make up this layer and 3) takeaways on how different stakeholders can enable the use and creation of such bottom-up tech.