Toward a Rhetorical Account of Refugee Encounters: Biometric Screening Technologies and Failed Promises of Mobility

ABSTRACT

This essay brings together scholarship in biometrics and disability studies with conversations in transnational rhetorical studies to build a theoretical framework that examines the (re)emergence and (re)circulation of biometric screening technologies and attends to the role of technologies in theorizing an ethics of encounter. I argue specifically that tracing biometrics—discursive, material, and technological practices—reveals how such discourses and their promises materialize on bodies of refugees and shape their encounters as “others and other-others.” Using this framework, I analyze rhetorically cultural artifacts that circulated following the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States to demonstrate how biometric screening discourses of progress have participated in immobilizing refugees physically and exacerbating conditions of biopolitical control and debilitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Biometric technologies
• debility
• encounter
• ethics
• immobility

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Adela C. Licona for commenting on earlier versions of this essay, the anonymous reviewers for the constructive feedback and enthusiastic responses to this project, and Jacqueline Rhodes for welcoming this essay into Rhetoric Society Quarterly. This essay was adapted from the author’s dissertation project.

Notes

¹ The agencies involved are: The Federal Bureau of Investigation Next Generation Identification, the Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System, and the Department of Defense Automated Biometric Identification System.

² Jasbir Puar’s term which I mobilize to highlight the role of biometric technologies in exacerbating conditions of biopolitical control.

³ To Sara Ahmed, others are those who are marked as different and live within the national body. Other-others, on the other hand, are those who are different but “may yet be expelled from the national body” (106).

⁴ Because the scholarship on biometrics is grounded in a variety of fields, such as science studies, technology studies, security studies, surveillance studies, and within some disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including, recently, rhetorical studies, scholars have studied its emergence and circulation from a wide range of perspectives.

⁵ Pugliese calls this act of overlooking the other side of biometric technologies as “an infrastructural calibration of whiteness” (64) or how whiteness comes to be structured in a biometric age. Like Pugliese, Gates argues that facial recognition technologies are violently reductive and create disembodied digital identities. She critiques how the media and the US government have valorized such technologies, representing them as neutral and objective, and insists that facial recognition technologies are “designed to target specific types of faces and bodies” (106).

⁶ Dolmage observes the new measures being taken to “impede [the] movement [of bodies] and to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable [and he therefore] examines some of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration and of immigration restriction in an effort to understand these spheres rhetorically” (1). Linking discourses of immigration to other biopolitical discourses of control, eugenics, race, and disability, Dolmage shows how immigration has always been about controlling bodies and inciting violence based on issues of race, gender, ability, sex, and so on. To this end, Dolamage argues that our terms of engagement as rhetoricians must change in this age “of rhetorical spin.” Specifically, he argues that our terms of engagement with what is circulating in the public sphere must change to account for how “messages can be camouflaged, how our attention might be diverted from one message by another, how a message desires a particular form of engagement to retain its power, and so on” (2).

⁷ In defining the term debility, Puar writes, “Debility is thus a crucial complication of the neoliberal transit of disability rights. Debility addresses injury and bodily exclusion that are endemic rather than epidemic or exceptional, and reflects a need for rethinking overarching structures of working, schooling, and living rather than relying on rights frames to provide accommodationist solutions” (xvii).

⁸ To describe practices of violence enacted on bodies in two different geopolitical locations (Ferguson and Palestine), Puar uses the term debility, through which she describes an alternative form of biopolitical control or what she calls the biopolitics of debilitation. By connecting practices of violence in two different geopolitical locations (Ferguson and Palestine), Puar observes that the events in Ferguson are examples of the “desire to overkill black men and women by shooting them multiple times” (x), whereas the events in Gaza, the 51-day siege by the Israeli government in particular, reflect a desire to “shoot to maim rather than to kill,” a practice that is humanitarian on the surface because it saves lives (x). She explains that both practices “are part of the deliberate debilitation of a population—whether through the sovereign right to kill or its covert attendant, the right to maim—and are key elements in the racializing biopolitical logic of security. Both are mobilized to make power visible on the body” (x).

⁹ Bringing together scholarship on biometrics and disability studies complicates discussions on biopolitics that rely on the Foucauldian notion of the “right of death and power over life” (Foucault 133). Specifically, Puar’s notion of “the biopolitics of debilitation” provides an alternative form of biopolitical control that emphasizes “debilitation and the production of disability […] as biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim” (xviii).

¹⁰ Examples of such violent encounters include knowledge practices intended to merely celebrate women’s diverse voices and experiences (Dingo, Networking); compare cultures and nationalities, reducing them into discrete, static entities (Hesford and Schell); treat contexts across different locales and regions as fixed locations (Wang); position readers or critics (and those read about or represented) as spatially distant, as saviors (Puar, Terrorist), as neoliberal subjects (Dingo, “Turning the Tables”), or as cultural travelers (Hesford, “Cosmopolitanism”) who would feel unimplicated or uncritically implicated in what is circulating in different geopolitical contexts. Such encounters, or what Wendy Hesford calls “uncritical cosmopolitanisms” (“Cosmopolitanism” 53) necessitate new methods and methodologies of reading, writing, and analyzing that deliberately unravel the operations of globalized power in light of geopolitical mobility.

¹¹ In response to President Trump’s order, the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote a joint memorandum to President Trump on 23 October 2017 titled “Resuming the United States Refugee Admissions Program with Enhanced Vetting Capabilities,” agreeing with the content of the order as to the unviability of existing screening technologies and promising to work diligently and collaboratively to enhance the security system and ensure the safety of the US homeland  (Tillerson et al. 1).

¹² The Biometric Entry-Exit System was initially proposed by Congress members in 1999 as a part of the immigration reform, but it was not implemented despite the several deadlines set since that time. This system has garnered a great deal of attention post-9/11 and conversations about its implementation (re)surfaced, although it was not implemented post-9/11. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States issued a report post-9/11 in which they proposed a tangible implementation of the biometric entry-exit system. They argued that “A modern border and immigration system should combine a biometric entry-exit system with accessible files on visitors and immigrants, along with intelligence on indicators of terrorist travel” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Sec. 12.4). Today, the Biometric Entry-Exit System is (re)surfacing in substantiation of arguments against resettling refugees.

¹³ CIS is “an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit, research organization [that was founded in 1985 and that has] pursued a single mission—providing immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and concerned citizens with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States” (“About the Center”).