Unstable controversy: Illegibility and the automation of Canadian visa decisions

Abstract This article examines the controversy surrounding Canada's Chinook visa processing tool to explore how sociotechnical illegibility is produced and sustained during public disputes over border automation. While state secrecy is often cited as the main obstacle to understanding security technologies, we argue that illegibility is also produced through competing interpretive frames advanced by actors with divergent political agendas. Drawing on STS, controversy studies, and frame theory, we analyze how public actors—including immigration lawyers, journalists, politicians, and universities—translated Chinook variously as a case of procedural injustice, AI overreach, racism, and linguistic discrimination. Rather than clarifying the devices’ role in rising visa refusals, these competing frames deepened confusion about what Chinook is and how it operates. Combined with obfuscation, this fragmentation reinforces state narratives about such devices. The result is persistent illegibility that impedes public contestation, even as automation reshapes immigration control. In contrast to scholarship foregrounding critiques of algorithmic governance through the study of controversies, we foreground the epistemic limits of controversies for generating knowledge about security devices. We conclude by calling for scholars to support publics in engaging in more robust sociotechnical literacy to better navigate the political, technical, and institutional dynamics of automated bordering.