Isabella Martinez-Aleman

01

“Unauthorized” ~ A Discourse on the Abuse of Immigrant Identity Data

Do you trust your government? Not many Americans do.

Presently, American legislation surrounding collection, processing, and storage of data emphasizes a paradigm of choice, like choosing to opt-in or opt-out of cookies. An individual must be identifiable to access essential services and the protection of fundamental rights. Choice loses its power when the options are 1) comply or 2) face social exclusion. So it is necessity that makes an asylum seeker at the United States (US) border hand over their information to law enforcement, not choice. The state exploits the vulnerability created by need through the construction of systems that allow unfettered informational control. To be sure, there have been many atrocities that contributed to an erosion of the individual-state relationship. Inconceivably, we’ve endured an insurrection, a pandemic, and an extreme rise in internal terrorism in the last five years alone… In this paper, however, I will inspect a force that’s been eating away at Americans’ trust in government for decades. That is, digitalization and its relationship with personal identity.

“E-government,” another name for digitized government services, can be used to expedite everything from marriage licenses to asylum appointments. It has become popular in response to the efficiency failures of paper-based, or analogue, systems and increased access to mobile technology. Data is the necessary outcome of this repositioning to a digital environment; it should be our central concern as governance structures rely more and more on its surveillance and accumulation.

What is at stake as we move towards digitalization?
Identity is a relational concept; it links how we perceive ourselves to the ways others perceive us. Therefore, relationships are key in its development. In fact, human beings can only thrive in environments where they feel safe from violations to their sense of self. United States (U.S.) Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor explained privacy as “the ability to share information but determine who can see this information and how it will be used.” Controlling our personal information creates a physical sense of security. We are, and have been for decades, sacrificing the fundamental comfort of privacy, or “the right to one’s personality.”

In today’s world, data is the information on which digital personality is built. It comes as no surprise that the majority of Americans today are concerned about how the goverment uses the data it collects about them. The Pew Research Center reported a 7% increase in concern from 2019 to 2023 in its survey of 4,272 U.S. adults. 78% of these participants trust themselves “to make the right decision” to protect their personal information. However, the majority (61%) feel that these decisions are unlikely to make a meaningful difference in the misuse of their data.

The U.S. has become an unsafe environment for identity formation due in part to the obscurity surrounding its data production, including the collection, processing, and transfer of information. The landscape of immigration is where we can observe the harms of unfettered government control over personal information most clearly. This analysis centers the experiences of undocumented immigrants because they clarify that loss of user control and expansive data production work together to create population-wide harm.

Positioning Subjectivity
I must acknowledge certain beliefs imbued in this work as they will be crucial to understanding the analysis. Firstly, citizens and non-citizens deserve equal protection under the law with regards to their privacy and control over digital identity. I unpack the reasoning behind this statement in Sections II and III. Secondly, the United States is complicit in abuse within and past its borders. A large percentage of migrants come from countries which due to American intervention have unsupportable economic and security conditions. As I explained above, this produces a necessity that legal immigration pathways cannot accommodate. Thirdly and in the same vein, the majority of migrants only explore unsanctioned immigration options because legal immigration routes are inaccessible and inconsiderate of immediate need. The Cato Institute put it in simple terms: “Trying the legal immigration system as an alternative to immigrating illegally is like playing Powerball as an alternative to saving for retirement.”

Road Map
The guiding principle of this analysis is that if we can create humane systems for managing the data of our most vulnerable populations, then we all benefit. In Section I, I illustrate the impacts of E-Verify on Florida communities to reveal the harms that arise from government-controlled data production. In Section II, I explore how immigrants lose control of their information and become subjects to an expansive data production regime, honing in on necessity as the catalyst for data collection. In Section III, I dig into the guiding principles in today’s data management systems, observing the imbalance of power underneath it all. In Section IV, I narrow in on a possible technological improvement: user control over personal data made possible through Blockchain data management systems.

Please contact me to read beyond the introduction.