Border Security Meets Black Mirror: Perceptions of Technologization from the Windsor Borderland

ABSTRACT

This article combines findings concerning institutional discourses with knowledge of frontline officials and non-officials gleaned from qualitative interviews with border services officers (BSOs) and travelers living and working in the Windsor, Ontario, Canada borderland to discuss the technologization of modern Canadian borders. Findings generated from interview data reveal that both frontline officials and non-officials experience a border where the personal narrative and performativity of the embodied subject traveler is increasingly irrelevant, with officer decision-making supplanted by information contained in databases. Findings also explore various dangers associated with increased simulation and cyborg work, including database errors having demonstrable consequences on the mobility and rights of human beings; the colonization of the lifeworld of BSOs by digitized risk technologies ultimately rendering officers incapable of asking questions, looking for indicators, and making informed decisions on the basis of anything other than databases; and the associated human rights, privacy, and legal implications that are potentially wide-ranging and extremely troubling.

KEYWORDS:

• Border security
• technologization
• borderlands
• simulation
• Canada Border Services Agency

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Canada Border Services Agency also administers two “off-site” locations in Windsor, including the Ambassador Bridge Commercial Offsite for commercial vehicle inspections, and also an inland immigration and intelligence office.

2 Windsor residents travel to Downtown Detroit so often that Transit Windsor operates a special Tunnel Bus that shuttles Canadians across the border and back throughout the day, seven days per week.

3 The researcher worked as a student border services officer through the Government of Canada's Federal Student Work Experience Program from 2008–2009.

4 It is likely that current officers were hesitant to participate in the project given CBSA did not give its formal approval for the study and given the researcher's institutional research ethics board mandated the use of strong warnings in study recruitment letters regarding the potential career consequences associated with participating in the study.

5 Documents obtained from the now-defunct Port of Entry Recruitment Training (POERT) program are still applicable for two primary reasons. Firstly, the new OITP is built on the foundation of POERT and adds the duty firearm training component on the foundation of POERT training while also incorporating applicable policy changes. Secondly, according to CBSA corporate documents, the vast majority of BSOs currently on the frontline were likely trained using iterations of the late-2000s POERT documents obtained by the researcher (CBSA 2008, 2016a).

6 The researcher applied for (and received) a NEXUS membership to gain context for this study.

7 Automated primary inspection kiosks are employed primarily at major international airports in Canada. Land border crossings in Windsor do not currently employ automated PIKs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship [number 752-2014-1805].