The UK has recently completed a significant transformation of its immigration and identification system through the introduction of a digital-only immigration status system. As of 2025, physical immigration documents have largely been replaced by what are known as ‘eVisas’ and the Home Office’s digital status verification infrastructure, fundamentally changing how migrants access and demonstrate their immigration status in everyday life. This talk will provide an introduction to the UK’s digital immigration system, explaining how the new platform and share-code mechanisms operate in practice. It will outline how digital immigration status is managed through interconnected digital infrastructures involving not only the Home Office, but also employers, landlords, universities, and other third parties responsible for verifying immigration status. Drawing on research conducted with Dr Marie Godin and 40 in-depth interviews with migrants across the UK, the talk will also examine how migrants have experienced and navigated the transition to digital status. While the Home Office presents eVisas as a secure and efficient alternative to physical documents, the findings reveal highly uneven experiences shaped by migrants’ legal status trajectories and differing levels of social, economic, and digital capital.
Building on scholarship on digital borders, identification, and everyday bordering, the talk conceptualises the UK’s eVisa system as a form of digital everyday bordering. It argues that the digitalisation of immigration status reorganises relationships between migrants, the state, and third-party actors, creating new forms of dependencies. As migrants are required to actively manage and repeatedly prove their status through digital platforms, system failures and unequal access to resources generate new forms of vulnerability and exclusion. Combining an overview of the UK’s digital immigration system with empirical insights from migrants’ lived experiences, this session will examine how digital technologies are reshaping everyday encounters with bordering practices in the context of a hostile environment.
About the Speaker
Derya Ozkul is an Associate Professor in Sociology and a Co-Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Derya has served as the Principal Investigator of the ‘Digitising Identity’ project, which forms the basis of this talk. She has published extensively on the politics of migration and displacement, including a comprehensive research report titled ‘Automating Immigration and Asylum’. E: derya.ozkul@warwick.ac.uk
