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The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
FINALIST FOR CANADA'S 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD
A chilling exposé of the inhumane and lucrative sharpening of borders around the globe through experimental surveillance technology
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was training “robot dogs” to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Four-legged machines equipped with cameras and sensors would join a network of drones and automated surveillance towers—nicknamed the “smart wall.” This is part of a worldwide as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to A.I.-driven technology to “manage” the influx. Based on years of reporting from borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story—a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market. With a foreword by former U.N. Special Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes, foregrounding the stories of migrants and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.
A chilling exposé of the inhumane and lucrative sharpening of borders around the globe through experimental surveillance technology
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was training “robot dogs” to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Four-legged machines equipped with cameras and sensors would join a network of drones and automated surveillance towers—nicknamed the “smart wall.” This is part of a worldwide as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to A.I.-driven technology to “manage” the influx. Based on years of reporting from borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story—a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market. With a foreword by former U.N. Special Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes, foregrounding the stories of migrants and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2024
24 people are currently reading
2220 people want to read
About the author
Petra Molnar
2 books16 followersPetra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights.
A former classical musician, she has been working in migrant justice since 2008, first as a settlement worker and community organizer, and now as a researcher and lawyer. She writes about digital border technologies, immigration detention, health and human rights, gender-based violence, as well as the politics of refugee, immigration, and international law.
Petra has worked all over the world including Jordan, Turkey, Philippines, Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Palestine, and various parts of Europe. She is the co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a collective of civil society, journalists, academics, and filmmakers interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and a Faculty Associate (and former Fellow) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Petra’s first book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in The Age of Artificial Intelligence, is published with The New Press in 2024.
A former classical musician, she has been working in migrant justice since 2008, first as a settlement worker and community organizer, and now as a researcher and lawyer. She writes about digital border technologies, immigration detention, health and human rights, gender-based violence, as well as the politics of refugee, immigration, and international law.
Petra has worked all over the world including Jordan, Turkey, Philippines, Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Palestine, and various parts of Europe. She is the co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a collective of civil society, journalists, academics, and filmmakers interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and a Faculty Associate (and former Fellow) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Petra’s first book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in The Age of Artificial Intelligence, is published with The New Press in 2024.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 27, 2025
3.5 A good book to pick up if you care about this topic (that’s my experience and I am very glad I did read it) or for people that are making decisions (perhaps like voting) based in part on immigration and border security policies. Should people care about this issue a lot more than they do?? For sure! Will immigration become only a bigger and bigger topic as time goes on, populations age, and climate disasters drive people to different places? For sure. So yeah if you are up for that, pick it up.
If you are in Canada this won’t help you on the policy front cause they all have the same policy which is shilling money to these private companies 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
My problem with it is that there was a non zero number of places when I went to look at the citation, but nothing was there. There were a lot of citations and the author does have expertise in this field, so that may not bother you, but it just irks me when I can’t find the thing. Additionally, the layout felt all over the place - making it not the easiest to read as far as my focus was concerned, it was otherwise very accessible so maybe just tackle it in small bites if you can’t jump between topics.
It’s also depressing and dystopian as Orwell’s Hell so there is that. There is a little bit of hope at the end and the orgs Petra is connected with made my reading experience much less depresso espresso when I looked into them after finishing.
There is my Diagnosis. Prognosis. Treatment.
If you are in Canada this won’t help you on the policy front cause they all have the same policy which is shilling money to these private companies 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
My problem with it is that there was a non zero number of places when I went to look at the citation, but nothing was there. There were a lot of citations and the author does have expertise in this field, so that may not bother you, but it just irks me when I can’t find the thing. Additionally, the layout felt all over the place - making it not the easiest to read as far as my focus was concerned, it was otherwise very accessible so maybe just tackle it in small bites if you can’t jump between topics.
It’s also depressing and dystopian as Orwell’s Hell so there is that. There is a little bit of hope at the end and the orgs Petra is connected with made my reading experience much less depresso espresso when I looked into them after finishing.
There is my Diagnosis. Prognosis. Treatment.
November 8, 2025
This book is excellent - a must read for anyone interested in migration, human rights, and surveillance. The author expertly balanced real human stories of migration with information about the technologies being used to monitor and police at the border. It was also truly global, with examples of the ways that sophisticated surveillance technology are being deployed at borders in Europe, North America, Africa, and the Middle East.
August 5, 2024
A brilliant, chilling account of how artificial intelligence is infiltrating border surveillance techniques across the globe. Border robot dogs, AI risk assessments, drones, etc are creating increasingly depersonalized and inhumane landscapes where the movement of people who are migrating is being tracked and deterred via technology. This rise of technology gives the illusion that AI is objective and unbiased, when in reality, Molnar reveals how it is designed and implemented with dangerous biases that are putting people in deadly and precarious situations. From the Southern Arizona border, to Palestine, to the shores of Greece, walls are constantly expanding and creating extreme profits for the private sector at the expense of people who are migrating.
June 17, 2025
“Countries continue to make their priorities clear: containment, surveillance, and deterrence at the expense of human rights and dignity… spending vast amounts to contribute to a growing, multibillion-dollar industry, while migrants go without access to lawyers, psychosocial services, and sometimes even food and water.”
“The West conveniently obfuscates the fact that it is because of centuries of imperialism and colonialism and the ongoing present-day destabilization of so many regions that people are forced to flee their homes in the first place.”
“The West conveniently obfuscates the fact that it is because of centuries of imperialism and colonialism and the ongoing present-day destabilization of so many regions that people are forced to flee their homes in the first place.”
February 22, 2025
Petra Molnar brings years of experience as a lawyer and researcher to this exploration of how technology is changing migration--especially how it is used to control and oppress the weakest and most vulnerable migrants and refugees. Molnar writes with the heart of one who really believes that everyone has dignity but who has seen great injustice. The subtitle indicates an emphasis on AI, but the book highlights much more than that. Invisible to many of us, technological innovation is creating the possibilities of a hyper-vigilant state that sees and controls our actions. We don't seem to mind this being applied to control to the weakest, most vulnerable people who are on the move, but maybe we should. While this book is disheartening, especially in the current global political climate, Molnar does end the book with some strategies of resistance to these changes. Recommended.
May 27, 2024
There are books that radicalise you and/or revolutionise your thinking; Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes has done both for me. I have been thinking in abstract ways about borders (and map-making) for a long time; anyone from the “Global South” who has ever crossed a border or applied for a visa knows the violence of borders. Molnar’s book turns the abstract into real stories about people on the move, about how they’re brutalised by the powerful—particularly, in today’s world, through the use of dystopian technology.
It’s difficult, incredibly painful, to read about how the most vulnerable among us—people fleeing war, or instability, or economic conditions created or exacerbated by the very same powerful nations mentioned above, those of the “Global North”—encounter high walls, barbed wire, robodogs, biometric registration and scanning, and cameras on surveillance towers; people smugglers—coyotes, or whatever name they may use regionally; rubber bullets, teargas, the Greek coast guard that flips their boats over or tows them back into international waters; camps and detention centres that are open prisons, where one only gets food if one consents to have one’s iris scanned; the Turkish border patrol that strips, searches and beats migrants, terrorising them with dogs; EU-funded or facilitated death camps in Libya; death, humiliation, trauma, and injury; and for these vulnerable people to very rarely find the asylum and sanctuary they seek. It is the most horrendous thing, and it is going on right under all of our noses, every day. We really only hear about the worst cases of abuse or death. It is horrendous, and it is real. All of us understand the very human desire to seek safety, refuge, a better life for ourselves and loved ones; half the world faces terrible barriers when they do.
Molnar has done a stellar job in shining a light on all of this, and on the huge and powerful complex of states and private actors behind it. Truthfully, I found myself in an abyss of despair towards the end of the book; it feels hopeless, the mountain insurmountable, the whole problem insuperable, rooted as it is in old imperial structures and colonial power differentials—which, as we know, continue to be as active today as they ever were. But Molar ends the book on a note of hope in resistance: there are small and large ways to resist, and it is happening. Molnar herself is doing the work, and many others are. So is this book; and in opening the eyes of readers, it serves as a call to arms.
A sobering and incredibly necessary read. Many thanks to The New Press and to NetGalley for early access.
It’s difficult, incredibly painful, to read about how the most vulnerable among us—people fleeing war, or instability, or economic conditions created or exacerbated by the very same powerful nations mentioned above, those of the “Global North”—encounter high walls, barbed wire, robodogs, biometric registration and scanning, and cameras on surveillance towers; people smugglers—coyotes, or whatever name they may use regionally; rubber bullets, teargas, the Greek coast guard that flips their boats over or tows them back into international waters; camps and detention centres that are open prisons, where one only gets food if one consents to have one’s iris scanned; the Turkish border patrol that strips, searches and beats migrants, terrorising them with dogs; EU-funded or facilitated death camps in Libya; death, humiliation, trauma, and injury; and for these vulnerable people to very rarely find the asylum and sanctuary they seek. It is the most horrendous thing, and it is going on right under all of our noses, every day. We really only hear about the worst cases of abuse or death. It is horrendous, and it is real. All of us understand the very human desire to seek safety, refuge, a better life for ourselves and loved ones; half the world faces terrible barriers when they do.
Molnar has done a stellar job in shining a light on all of this, and on the huge and powerful complex of states and private actors behind it. Truthfully, I found myself in an abyss of despair towards the end of the book; it feels hopeless, the mountain insurmountable, the whole problem insuperable, rooted as it is in old imperial structures and colonial power differentials—which, as we know, continue to be as active today as they ever were. But Molar ends the book on a note of hope in resistance: there are small and large ways to resist, and it is happening. Molnar herself is doing the work, and many others are. So is this book; and in opening the eyes of readers, it serves as a call to arms.
A sobering and incredibly necessary read. Many thanks to The New Press and to NetGalley for early access.
March 10, 2025
This was both an academic read and a personal read too. I have been waiting for the publication of this book ever since I first heard of it still in draft mode a few years ago. At the time, I remember thinking it sounded like an important and necessary book. The technological innovations and political machinations that have since occurred in border surveillance have made it an even more urgently needed publication.
Petra Molnar has put herself out there, on the frontier’s frontline, to make sure that those with lived experiences of border violence suffered at the hands of surveillance technology have voices, and that those voices are not only recorded and published, but hopefully also heard and even learned from. No small task.
Molnar pulls it off with brio, by combining historical and geographical explanations of various border technologies used with supporting political rhetoric. She also does an excellent job of highlighting the contradictory roles and messages of public and private sector players, as well as the extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated and built into the technology. But the true magic is how she weaves in the gut-wrenching real stories that she witnessed first-hand throughout her book, transforming an expose on surveillance technology with purpose into a very intimate look at the consequences and costs of such bordering.
The Walls Have Eyes is a very telling account of what occurs to people on the move, both at the borders they wish to cross but also well before and after their attempts to reach better and supposedly safer living conditions for themselves and their families. Given that most indications are trending towards an increase in political and environmental migrations in the coming years, Petra Molnar’s meticulous dissection of border technology should be required reading for anyone working in or near immigration and border security as it humanizes that realm quite effectively. If you have the chance to attend a virtual or in person event at which Petra Molnar is a panellist, which I have had on a few occasions, you will be inspired by how engaging she is as well as how she verbalizes her work. In the meantime, read The Walls Have Eyes and be mesmerized by her written words, and how she gives a voice to those people on the move whose journeys have been so violently interrupted.
A solid 5/5 on my scale. A very necessary and superbly executed book!
Petra Molnar has put herself out there, on the frontier’s frontline, to make sure that those with lived experiences of border violence suffered at the hands of surveillance technology have voices, and that those voices are not only recorded and published, but hopefully also heard and even learned from. No small task.
Molnar pulls it off with brio, by combining historical and geographical explanations of various border technologies used with supporting political rhetoric. She also does an excellent job of highlighting the contradictory roles and messages of public and private sector players, as well as the extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated and built into the technology. But the true magic is how she weaves in the gut-wrenching real stories that she witnessed first-hand throughout her book, transforming an expose on surveillance technology with purpose into a very intimate look at the consequences and costs of such bordering.
The Walls Have Eyes is a very telling account of what occurs to people on the move, both at the borders they wish to cross but also well before and after their attempts to reach better and supposedly safer living conditions for themselves and their families. Given that most indications are trending towards an increase in political and environmental migrations in the coming years, Petra Molnar’s meticulous dissection of border technology should be required reading for anyone working in or near immigration and border security as it humanizes that realm quite effectively. If you have the chance to attend a virtual or in person event at which Petra Molnar is a panellist, which I have had on a few occasions, you will be inspired by how engaging she is as well as how she verbalizes her work. In the meantime, read The Walls Have Eyes and be mesmerized by her written words, and how she gives a voice to those people on the move whose journeys have been so violently interrupted.
A solid 5/5 on my scale. A very necessary and superbly executed book!
July 25, 2024
“A chilling exposé of the inhumane and lucrative sharpening of borders around the globe through experimental surveillance technology.”
Molnar’s writing unfolds as a dystopian horror story but is far from fiction. This is very real and happening every day to people worldwide. I had a basic level of related knowledge going into reading and left with so very much more. Despite being gripping, this was tough to read. Molnar does conclude with hope.
File this book under:
Eye-opening,
Timely,
Thought-provoking,
Necessary.
Molnar’s writing unfolds as a dystopian horror story but is far from fiction. This is very real and happening every day to people worldwide. I had a basic level of related knowledge going into reading and left with so very much more. Despite being gripping, this was tough to read. Molnar does conclude with hope.
File this book under:
Eye-opening,
Timely,
Thought-provoking,
Necessary.
May 16, 2024
Humans commit despicable acts upon other humans whom they see different. Different colour, different sex, different language, different accent. I will never understand humans.
This is thoroughly researched and studied with heavy writing which may make it difficult for some readers to get through.
The author is obviously very passionate and commendable. Very few people would do the work of which is spoken about in this book. Faith in humanity restored.
This is thoroughly researched and studied with heavy writing which may make it difficult for some readers to get through.
The author is obviously very passionate and commendable. Very few people would do the work of which is spoken about in this book. Faith in humanity restored.
January 13, 2025
Disturbing snapshot of current policies and attitudes with personal reflections.
"Technology is often presented as being neutral, but it is always socially constructed. All technologies have an inherently, political dimension, whether it be, for instance, about who counts and why, and they replicate biases that render certain communities at risk of being harmed. Consequently, what we are really talking about when we talk about borders is a human laboratory of high-risk experiments."
"Technology is often presented as being neutral, but it is always socially constructed. All technologies have an inherently, political dimension, whether it be, for instance, about who counts and why, and they replicate biases that render certain communities at risk of being harmed. Consequently, what we are really talking about when we talk about borders is a human laboratory of high-risk experiments."
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews