Meet the Author Series: Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry to Know Immigrants & Responses

This lecture investigates the emerging state of borderland technology that brings all people into an intimate place of surveillance where data resides and defines inclusion and exclusion to citizenship.

Villa-Nicholas shows how Latinx immigrants are the focus and driving force for surveillance and technology design by Silicon Valley’s emerging industry within defense technology manufacturing. A murky network is revealed that gathers data on marginalized communities for purposes of exploitation and control that implicates law enforcement, border patrol, and ICE, but that also pulls in public workers and the public, often without their knowledge or consent.

Enriched by interviews of Latinx immigrants living in the borderlands on their daily use of technology, and their caution around surveillance, this work argues that to move beyond a heavily surveilled state that dehumanizes both immigrants and citizens, we must understand how the data is being collected, aggregated, and correlated with artificial intelligence, and push for immigrant and citizen privacy information rights along the border and throughout the United States. Dr. Villa Nicholas also reviews responses to this surveillance state.