Automating Boundaries: Information as a Regime of Border Control

The automation of US border enforcement began through experimental practices such as the case of the electronic fence. Initially designed to help police the geopolitical boundaries between North and South Vietnam, this intrusion detection system shows how the cybernetic border relies on human-machine configurations that striate land and bind subjects through quantification, computation, and probability. The electronic fence was embedded with imperial and racial orderings that translated control and border making across space. At a local level, the system was part of an overhaul of Immigration and Naturalization Service procedures through routines of informational inputs, processing, and outputs. These processes both relied on and made possible an informational sensory regime whereby citizenship and territory are made.