Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants
By Joanie Harmon
November 12, 2024
Q&A with Melissa Villa-Nicolas on her new book
In her new book, “Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants,” Villa-Nicholas investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship. Detailing the new trend of biologically mapping undocumented people through biotechnologies, she shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and the driving force behind Silicon Valley’s growing industry within defense technology manufacturing.
When Melissa Villa-Nicholas was a doctoral student at the at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she linked her research to her Los Angeles roots, with her dissertation on the fight to increase Latinx representation in the telecommunications workforce in the 1970s. Her dissertation became the 2022 book, “Latinas on the Line: Invisible Labor in Telecommunications,” published by Rutgers Press.
Villa-Nicholas, who recently joined the faculty this fall as an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and an affiliate of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and DataX, has expanded on the complicated histories of Latinx populations and technology with her second book, “Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants,” which was released in July 2023 by UC Press. “Data Borders” has received the 2023 Book Award for the McGannon Center from Fordham University.
Professor Villa-Nicholas focuses her work on Latino information and technology histories and practices in the U.S., critical information science, and the social construction of technologies.
“UCLA is a dream school to work at because it’s the place that everyone loves when you’re from out here,” says Professor Villa-Nicholas. “I was born in Torrance, and my family lives all over L.A. I’m excited to join the faculty and to bring my work here.”
UCLA Ed&IS: In what ways did your work on “Latinas on the Line” influence or inspire your broader research into Latinx contributions to technology and the history of information? How did this project shape your understanding of these topics and guide your future inquiries?
MELISSA VILLA-NICHOLAS: I had gotten into my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and like many students, was searching for a dissertation topic. I started to take courses on the history of technology and history of telecommunications. And then, I looked at my own life. I’m second-generation Mexican American. My grandparents came from Chihuahua a long time ago, and my mom and all of my aunts and uncles were telephone operators in Southern California in the 1970s. I realized this is a history of telecommunications that hasn’t been written. It’s a Latinx history of technologies that we need to offset the idea that Latinx [people] have a deficit around technology.
I started asking my family about their experience, how they got involved in the phone company, and saw it was connected to bigger structural change and telecommunication. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had a lawsuit against AT&T for unfair practices, hiring practices, and promotion. Essentially, AT&T had to start diversifying and giving women that were already in the company promotions. There was this huge shake-up in the early 1970s, right when my mom and my aunts and uncles were in their early twenties, looking for jobs.
AT&T started to recruit, especially locally in Southern California. It hit the other independent telephone companies as well, this major affirmative action movement. A lot of folks that might have not had an entrance into telecommunications before, suddenly could get these jobs. These were jobs that helped people come from blue collar to the middle class at that time in California, solid, well-paying jobs would pay for college, or a retirement fund.
It’s interesting to go back and see where everyone has their history in telecommunications. My grandpa had come to California to work with the trains. A lot of Mexican men got work with the trains … in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but he happened to get that work later on. He also went into telecommunications through airplane repair and train repair. In my book, I say Mexican men have an early relationship to telecommunications because … big data centers where Google puts a lot of the data storage and warehouses are built along the train lines, and the major telecommunications infrastructure is built along the train tracks of the early 19th century.
UCLA Ed&IS: In what ways did your first book influence or contribute to the development of “Data Borders”? How did the themes, research, or insights from that project shape or inform your approach to this later work?
VILLA-NICHOLAS: As a doctoral student and as a Latina, I felt I needed a technology history to be able to write about the present. I needed to write “Latinas on the Line,” [to see] where we were before, and where we are now.
In about 2010, big data and data mining was really taking off. Generative AI wasn’t quite there yet, but a lot of folks were taking on big data projects. During my Ph.D., I was concerned because I could see how big data was being built for purposes of surveillance. I got my first job as assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island, and as I was finishing “Latinas on the Line,” I started to see a lot of journalism and articles in library and information studies about how tech companies hold contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
For us in library and information studies, it became alarming because it includes LexisNexis and Elsevier, major data groups that we teach our students. Ideally, our students are going to go on to manage libraries and to teach [their] students how to use databases like LexisNexis.
My colleague, Sarah Lamden, broke this open by saying, “ICE can basically use LexisNexis as a database to gather information about anyone in that database,” and LexisNexis had been gathering a lot of data, basically, about everyone. It was concerning for us because if we’re teaching students how to use LexisNexis, they’re creating profile IDs and we can’t ensure security or privacy for immigrants, and certainly not for undocumented people.
Along with that, a lot of journalists were finding that Amazon had a DHS contract and they were managing the information and data for ICE. And then there were these growing companies named Palantir and Anduril, who, it was being revealed, were building data mining programs around predictive policing, especially of communities of color. This was all coming out in 2016, 2017, and I was getting increasingly concerned.
During the Trump administration, [there was] open bidding to build the smart wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The smart wall is essentially a bipartisan project that both parties agree is a more peaceful initiative than a physical wall. It basically opened bids, especially to Silicon Valley companies, to build different types of technologies for surveillance and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the way the policy works, even up until now, is that type of surveillance can be applicable to 100 miles within any border, and that includes the ocean. That actually covers two-thirds of the U.S. population. These technologies being built along the premise of fear around immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border are also going to be applied to different defense systems, wars that we’re going into, and anywhere that’s considered a borderland.
My family moved out to Murietta, California, when I was younger, which has a border detention center. Temecula has a border checkpoint. We see border patrol daily. I’ve been around that my whole life. I saw my mom questioned by border patrol. What I want people to know is the way I feel and how families feel in this area, which is heavily surveilled by border patrol and ICE.
I don’t tell people how they should feel (though I do advocate for immigrant/ migrant data rights). I do include interviews with undocumented people who have been held in detention centers on their preference for rights. What I try to express in the book is that in the same way we can feel the geographic borderlands through affect and experiences, we need to feel the data borderlands to be aware of the expansiveness of the surveillance network on immigrants and migrants in which we reside by way of our data. These systems are being used on people that I know, but because it’s data and surveillance, it happens sort of invisibly. We don’t always know when our data or other people’s data is being exploited until years later.
As library and information professionals, we want to know how to prioritize the data of undocumented people, immigrants and migrants. If they’re part of library systems, they have the right to data privacy as well. We don’t always know when data is being gathered or where it moves because these algorithms are property of those companies. Even as citizens paying taxes that fund DHS, we don’t necessarily get to look into the proprietary algorithm of Anduril, Palantir, or Amazon.
UCLA Ed&IS: How will you incorporate this work into your teaching?
VILLA-NICHOLAS: There’s a lot of great work being developed out there, especially by Latinx scholars, so I’m excited to implement that and see where it takes us … about how surveillance and the borderlands are always present when we’re using different data systems, and looking at what scholars are saying.
Sarah Lamdan wrote a wonderful book called “Data Cartels,” about LexisNexis and Elsevier, and how they have the same net worth as Google because they have no overhead. Their bread and butter is basically our academic research, which they get paid for, but we do not. They also collaborate with DHS. It’s that kind of thing we’re going to mull through in information studies courses and tackle how we approach that in our careers and in libraries.
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION OF: “Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants”
Flame of the West
In 2019, Palmer Luckey held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Irvine, California, for his new technology defense company, Anduril Industries. Luckey had just come out of a tumultuous business relationship with Facebook, who had purchased his company Oculus, a tech company that came out with state-of-the-art 3-D virtual reality headsets. He was shifting his work toward a new vision: borderland defense technology. To cut the ribbon, Palmer had wanted to use his replica Lord of the Rings sword named Anduril that was carried by Aragorn in J. R. R. Tolkien’s popular novels, but he didn’t have time to sharpen it (Dean, 2019). Nevertheless, he drew on the Lord of the Rings mythos to convey the importance of this event:
“Anduril,” he said, leaning into the long Elvish vowels, “means Flame of the West. And I think that’s what we’re trying to be. We’re trying to be a company that represents not just the best technology that Western democracy has to offer, but also the best ethics, the best of democracy, the best of values that we all hold dear.” (Dean, 2019)
Anduril would go on to win a large bid from the Trump administration to bring together commercial technologies such as VR goggles, drones, and AI with the defense industry. Their experimental playing fields? The US-Mexico border. The aim? To capture immigrants crossing the border with the most advanced technologies developed in Silicon Valley, and to further build data profiles out of immigrant data.
This event symbolizes the evolving new threshold in borderland technology. The US-Mexico borderlands, always in cultural, political, and geographic flux, have shifted once again. Unlike the past, when new borderlands were drawn from the US-Mexico War of 1846–48, or the construction of a physical border wall, or burgeoning maquiladoras from the globalized economy of the mid-twentieth century onward, this change has cast the borderland as ubiquitous, digital, and often invisible to the eye. This emerging borderland stems from the partnership of various arms of the Department of Homeland Security, alt-right-leaning Silicon Valley startups, government agencies (such as state motor vehicle departments), and unfortunately for us, consumers like you and me.
I name this trend the data body milieu. Data body milieu is the state of borderland surveillance that brings all people, citizen and immigrant, into an intimate place of surveillance where our data lives together and defines us in a data borderland. It places Latinx immigrant data at the center of technological innovation and development. In describing these data borders, I’m concerned with the liminal state in which almost every US resident lives: we cannot feel, describe, or point to when that data is in movement in favor of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), border patrol, and their parent the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This interstitial border is always at play and yet rarely perceptible. In these emerging data borders, state, technological innovation, and data organization subjects coexist in a way that leads to the surveillance, capture, and deportation of undocumented people, without those subjects necessarily aware that they are interacting.
A New Virtual Border Threshold
In March 2018, US Congress approved $400 million of the 1.3-billion-dollar budget for the 1,954 miles of virtual border wall, also known as a “smart” wall (Davis, 2019). It was estimated by the Office of Biometric Identity Management that DHS will be conducting 180 million biometric transactions a year among 260 million unique identities by fiscal year 2022, with that number rising every year that passes (Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology, 2021). The virtual border wall was approved without the fiery debate about the physical border wall. But the rhetoric included promises that went beyond the physical border wall: Not only would immigrants be kept out of the United States, but they could now be known, documented through digital technology’s biological mapping. The promise of the virtual border wall goes beyond the brick-and-mortar wall: It promises to solve the Latinx immigrant threat (Chavez, 2008)—a threat that reaches beyond the idea of citizenship in the United States into a source of anxiety concerning nonparticipation in producing data that is crucial for digital capitalism.
With the virtual border wall, technology accomplishes what ICE, the border patrol, white nationalists, English-only policies, Proposition 187, and voters in the borderlands could not accomplish over centuries of attempts to reverse the influx of the Latinx population in the US borderlands; a promise of technological futurity that arose with more gusto in the 2010s, when border technology proposed a United States with a controllable immigrant influx at the border.
We are increasingly seeing Latinx immigrants in borderlands referred to as data and engaged as the object of mobilizing information technology and defining citizenship inclusion. Recent investment in the collection of biodata on the border and around the “belonging” of citizenship is a highly profitable grab around different groups of immigrants, Latinx undocumented people, permanent residents, and Latinx citizens (Cagle, 2017). The surveillance of Latinx immigrants and development of technology around Latinx bodies is not new (Chaar-López, 2019); but the scale and networked circulation of that data has changed. As data gathering increases, US citizens and Latinx immigrants become more intertwined in the borderland milieu that historian Oscar Martínez originally theorized, into what is now a state of data body milieu.
This book is about the emerging state of borderland surveillance that brings all people, citizen and immigrant, into an intimate place of surveillance where our data lives together and defines us in a digital borderlands. This surveillance places the Latinx immigrant body at the center of technological innovation and development and an emerging industry at the crossroads of Silicon Valley and ICE. Companies such as Quanergy Electric, Anduril, BI2, Palantir, Amazon, LexisNexis, and DNA testing companies all have a stake in gathering data of undocumented people at ports of entry, borderlands, detention centers, and immigrant-populated cities— and subsequently US citizens as well. While surveillance and contentious relations along the US-Mexico border are not new, what is new is both the scale at which data is gathered and the move to biological data—from retina scanning to DNA testing.
Silicon Valley’s move to design technology around Latinx immigrants is building on a long history of surveillance projects networked into and justified around communities of color as a perceived threat to white and citizen safety. Data body milieu is the name I give this recent trend, but it is always interconnected and built onto the ways in which surveillance and technologies have been encoded with bias, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism to benefit normative and acceptable states of citizenship.
This book does not encapsulate all immigrant experiences across the United States and is not comprehensive of the Latinx immigrant experience. I’m focused on the US-Mexico border, the Latinx immigrants traditionally targeted in political rhetoric by way of US anxieties along that border (Mexican and Central American), and the communities built around migrations and residencies from that launch point. There should be work that focuses further on the ways in which surveillance technologies and the developing data body milieu sets its gaze on different immigrants, and how these forms of policing are interconnected.
Another group drastically impacted by these developed and emerging surveillance technologies are the Indigenous nations that live along the border. Native Americans live and have lived in the ever-changing borderlands since before colonization, and they experience surveillance projects intensely themselves. Most recently, the Integrated Fixed Towers, built by Elbiet systems, Israel’s military defense company, have been forced onto the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona. Those Indigenous groups are harassed by CBP daily, and their own lives have changed in the span of one lifetime, the borderlands so militarized that their previous more fluid movement and community from Mexico to the United States has lost its flexibility and severed their previous community network (Jaacks, 2020; Parrish, 2019).
Internet scholar Safiya Noble (2016) observed the seemingly “neutral” technologies of our everyday lives as deeply intertwined in the power dynamics that are embedded in our social structures. Noble lifted this veil by naming these “algorithms of oppression”: she searched for “Black girls” on Google and found solely pornographic images on the first page of results of the web and image search; she found the same for Latina and Asian girls (Dave, 2022; Noble, 2018). She described the bigger picture here: technologies in our everyday lives are not neutral and value free but indeed reflect the anti-Black and misogynist social structures that have been established in the United States. Now that same racism, sexism, and class inequality is built into algorithms— algorithms that determine home loans, medical coverage, and other everyday life necessities. African American Studies scholar Ruha Benjamin (2019) calls the benign and often altruistic ways in which these technologies are developed, designed, and delivered into consumers’ hands the New Jim Code, justified through the necessity of progress. We will see those justifications used to embed data border technology into everyday systems of information frequently throughout this book.
The contemporary surveillance state is a messy network, like that box of old electronic cords that you have in your garage. This immigrant data surveillance state is a large ball of tangled mess that works together to connect and network in data that determines everything from our medical coverage and eligibility for loans to our movement across borders. This book attempts to pull on some of those wires and untangle this mess that is the contemporary surveillance state that organizes around Latinx immigrants along the US-Mexico border. I circle around questions such as: How are most people in the United States now connected to ICE systems of surveillance? How are technologies designed around Latinx immigrant data? How are US residents’ data bodies living outside of our physical bodies? Also important to this study is: How are most people experiencing a borderland by way of their data, consciously or not?
One purpose of this book is to promote and accelerate immigrant data rights as a part of new necessary movements for immigrant rights overall, by demonstrating what this intimate digital surveillance state centered on Latinx immigrant (and perceived immigrant) data looks like, how it operates, how it builds on what came before and moves beyond, how it classifies and categorizes, how it expands beyond just Latinx people, how it is commercialized and consumed. I weave personal stories of growing up in the physical borderlands as a second generation Mexican American Latina to illuminate the contrast of the disembodied and embodied data borderlands. I’m concerned with the question: What does it mean that many people’s data is in a constant state of correlation to ICE systems of surveillance, but they can’t feel those borderlands? I continually reflect on my experience growing up in borderlands, and I bring in Latinx immigrant experiences of the borderlands to both put the body back in the data body and contrast the data border experience that is so pervasive in everyday lives.
My intention is to describe what is going on with the emerging commodified surveillance state and push toward immigrant data rights. But my hope is to tell the story of how I ended up networked into immigrant surveillance. The story of how you are networked into immigrant surveillance and deportation. The call to action for this story is to lead with undocumented immigrant data rights in policy by pivoting with parable in the concluding chapter, by ending with immigrant experiences of the borders and imagining techno-futures. Pivoting from story, I hope immigrant experiences of crossing the border, their awareness of the constraining technology of surveillance, and their imaginings of alternate borderland techno-futures act as a parable to counter the larger story structure in which we find ourselves.