Questioning the South Korean Smart Border: A Critique of Surveillance Racism, Biometric Identity,and Anti-Immigration

Abstract

This paper examines the border as an assemblage of surveillance technologies that exert a contentious claim to algorithmic accuracy based on race-embedded biometric data processing. I offer the term surveillance racism—a regime of normalization in which the technical reification of race for the biometric database configures anti-migration and anti-refugee discourses for the well-being of a population or nation. I put forward the border as a biopolitical enclosure in which biometric monitoring through security and risk calculations of threat to the state generates, propagates, and maintains discourses of racism. A discussion of South Korea’s Integrated Border Management System uncovers the workings of a biopolitical enclosure that is committed to constructing a claim about the survival of the Korean nation pitted against the peculiar racial category of unhealthy immigrants from non-Western, developing countries.