Digital Borders: Navigating Mobility and Inequality for Migrants from Authoritarian Regimes

In the Anthropocene, human activity has fundamentally transformed global systems, with the digital revolution being a major force behind these changes. This revolution has reshaped human mobility, influencing how people cross borders, form connections, and engage with migration infrastructures. Recent studies have introduced the concept of Digital Migration Infrastructures, highlighting how digitalization has redefined migration processes (Preiss, 2022). However, limited attention has been given to how these digital infrastructures impact migrants from authoritarian regimes.

This paper explores the role of digital platforms and infrastructures in the lives of transnational migrants from politically repressive states, focusing on how they either perpetuate or challenge existing inequalities. Migrants from authoritarian regimes navigate restricted digital environments, limiting their access to essential resources, job opportunities, and political participation, which exacerbates their marginalization in host societies. Furthermore, these migrants frequently operate within closed digital networks where information and opportunities are confined to their own communities, hindering broader social integration.

The central argument of this paper is that digital technologies act as both enablers and barriers. While they provide new opportunities for transnational mobility and communication, they simultaneously reinforce inequalities through surveillance, censorship, and exclusion from global platforms. Migrants from authoritarian regimes must often contend with restricted digital environments that further limit access to crucial information.

The methodology combines qualitative approaches, including preliminary fieldwork data from semi-structured interviews with Chinese migrant communities in Italy and participant observations of how migrants use digital platforms. An extensive literature review will support the preliminary findings, offering insights from migration studies and political sociology. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of how digital tools reshape labor markets, social networks, and political agency for migrants from authoritarian states.