Rather than taking for granted the emergence and
implementation of data-driven automated technologies as
smooth tools of migration governance, I analyze how the
discursive and political narration of intelligent borders is
central for the socio-technical renderings of data-driven border
and migration policing. To this end, I analyze the
implementation of data-driven and semi-automated
technologies to authenticate and recognize asylum seekers'
identities and claims in the context of asylum administration
and migration control in Germany, with a particular focus on
the practice of forensic smartphone data extraction. First, I
argue that discourses of intelligent borders produce smartphone
data as representative of a person's history of flight and
persecution, affecting a shift in asylum proceedings and
decision-making that impacts political and legal personhood.
Second, I show that current discursive framings of migration as
a crisis in Europe make possible the proliferation of machine
learning technologies in which invocations of intelligent
borders reify migration management as a system of governance
and administration that functions seamlessly. Third, I argue
that local instances when data-driven and computational
technologies emerge allow us to interrogate moments of failure
and contestation and reveal the longer development of the legal
and political convergence of racial securitization and migration
as constitutive of the (partial) consolidation of power in the
European border regime. As such, media technologies like the
smartphone function to mediate contestations and struggles
over the freedom of movement, recognition, and belonging.