The Border is an Algorithm: Digital Borders, EU Migration Discourse, and Colonial Power under the New Pact

In the European Commission’s storytelling, the border is no longer a geographical edge: it is an assemblage of screens, databases, and promises of speed, cleaner categories, and smarter control. This thesis follows that narrative arc as it is authored throughout the formation of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. It interrogates how institutional communications transmute digital migration governance into common sense, presenting it as a practical necessity, a humanitarian reassurance, and a modernisation of statecraft. Approaching institutional communication as a site where political futures are scripted, this study unifies Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with a decolonial lens. CDA observes recurring patterns of naming, modality, and metaphor, uncovering how solutions are framed as inevitable, how technologies are endowed with agency, and how accountability is redistributed into automated procedures. Decolonial theory unmasks the legacies carried within this lexicon: the persistence of Eurocentric hierarchies, the coloniality of power, and the quiet conversion of human mobility into a data object to be extracted and sorted. To ensure transparency, the study operationalises a strategy-and-indicator framework, documenting interpretive decisions in analytic memos. The empirical foundation is a purposive corpus of nineteen European Commission Press Corner texts from 2016 to 2025. Read diachronically, these documents trace a metamorphosis from emergency to routine: moving from ‘crisis talk’ that stifles debate to a technocratic register that presents the digital border as infrastructure and administrative inevitability. The findings reveal a stable repertoire of legitimation. Crisis narratives elevate pre-emption as prudence, technocratic vocabularies translate political contestation into system maintenance, and humanitarian assurances provide moral insulation, reframing intensified surveillance as care. The migrant subject is transformed into a calculus of risk, while the algorithmic border is naturalised as progress. This thesis examines the discursive mechanics through which digital bordering is made governable, and the power residing within its strategic silences.