Epistemic Prerequisite for ‘Remote Control’? Risk As a Governance Tool in European Border Control

The use of actuarial knowledge in risk-based regulation promises a rationalised allocation of scarce resources to desired ends as it enables targeted interventions only in the riskiest of phenomena, i.e. those featuring a high product of probability and impact of harm. Mature in the traditional domains of sciences and technology studies, risk-based regulation has only recently diffused to the migration domain. So far, analyses of the emergence of risk heuristics within migration governance systems are rare. The paper offers an advance in that direction by examining the drivers, substance, and functions of risk-based border controls in the European Union. By the help of Fiona Haines’ typology of risk knowledge (2013) it identifies a changing interactions between actuarial, sociocultural and political risk knowledge in EU migration governance since the formation of the Schengen area, in which the former has become increasingly dominant. The paper then reconstructs the ideational and structural conditions which have favoured the emergence of actuarial risk as governance tool in EU border controls, based on document analysis and interviews with decision-makers. I argue that actuarial risk knowledge is a epistemic prerequisite for digital borders and ‘remote control’ migration governance because a) these policy mechanisms rely on the ability to filter out “risky” groups before the fact without hampering the mobility of others; and b) the ideational underpinnings of actuarial risk calculations enable and legitimise a regulatory shift away from the judicial management of admissions towards a precautious governance of migration uncertainties that abstracts from individual cases.