ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what biometric technologies are and how they operate in the context of border controls. Subsequently, I identify a control bias in the existing literature on biometric borders, which tends to misrepresent the former – through the neglect of migrants’ practices of subversion – as omnipotent control apparatuses. What is needed to avoid the trap of a control-biased analysis is an approach that accounts for migrants’ capacity to contest border controls. Since the literature on the diagnosed gap between official migration policy objectives and actual policy outcomes does not offer such an approach, I turn to the AoM literature.
