Digital migration regimes: Technologies of control in postwar europe

The joint presentation traces the historical transformation from surveillance statism to surveillance capitalism, arguing that the latter’s data-extractive logic was incubated within postwar state bureaucracies. Schmidt reinterprets Shoshana Zuboff’s thesis by locating the origins of surveillance not in Silicon Valley but in the digitalisation of migration control during the mid-20th century. Building on James C. Scott’s concept of legibility, he shows how the high-modernist state rendered populations knowable and governable through data. Postwar computerisation extended this vision: the Ausländerzentralregister AZR in West Germany and the Zentrales Ausländeregister ZAR in Switzerland became early laboratories of digital governance, targeting foreigners as experimental populations. These systems fused bureaucratic and technical infrastructures supplied by corporations such as IBM and Siemens, prefiguring the architectures later monetised by private platforms. Mähr’s second part reconstructs the socio-technical interfaces through which Swiss migration control was computerised. Drawing on a 1976 photograph from Basel’s Kontrollbüro, he analyses the rollout of 3270-class terminals from 1973 as part of a workflow optimised for speed and throughput. The ensemble of keyboard, screen, and paper-based note-taking reduced query friction and multiplied search frequency compared to earlier card indices. Telephones acted as parallel access channels in a pre-network era, while printers—though absent from the image—anchored paper as the administration’s exchange medium, supporting batch routines such as occupational listings and performance reports. A gendered division of labour placed women in operator roles and men in supervisory positions, stabilising large-scale, routinised checks. Through analysis of the ZAR manual and its transaction codes (e.g., AR01/AR02), Mähr shows how codified predicates institutionalised population-level querying across some eight million records, enabling segmentation and individual inspection to coexist. These interfaces—terminals, telephones, printers, manuals—collectively produced legibility at scale and prompted early Swiss debates on data protection, access, consent, and purpose limitation. Overall Argument:The presentation demonstrates how the infrastructures and work routines of Cold War migration bureaucracies laid the groundwork for contemporary data regimes. Interface affordances such as low friction, batch profiling, and ambient access generated systemic effects—frequency, scale, codification, gendered operations, and rule formation—that bridged the statist and capitalist phases of digital surveillance.