That’s according to experts who spoke at a March 11 Fordham event. Governments are increasingly relying on AI and machine learning to handle visa applications, refugee claims, naturalization requests, and the like—raising concerns that citizenship could become commodified, said Kevin Jackson, Ph.D., professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business. 

AI Could Make Immigration More Transactional 

AI-based systems tend to be transactional and “prioritize applicants who can maximize economic utility for a nation-state,” he said. “Are we seeing a fundamental shift in the meaning of citizenship and the moral worth of individuals due to the rise of AI?”

He and his research assistant, Emma Foley, a Gabelli School graduate student, presented two ethics case studies: In the United Kingdom, an AI system for screening visa applicants reflected past pro-Western bias and discriminated against people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, reinforcing racial and economic disparities in global mobility, Foley said. That system was suspended about five years ago after legal challenges. 

And an AI-powered initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), proposed in 2017, drew criticism for its “extreme vetting” of immigrants in America, monitoring everything from social media use and employment records to religious affiliations, Jackson said. 

The project, also dropped following legal challenges, “highlights how AI-driven immigration systems can redefine the moral worth of migrants by preemptively classifying them as threats on one hand or as assets on the other hand,” he said. “Making AI immigration decisions open to public scrutiny and to legal appeal are important.” (Today, DHS says it uses AI responsibly across a variety of functions.)

AI, Immigration, and Social Justice

Jackson and Foley spoke at Fordham’s International Conference on Im/migration, AI, and Social Justice, organized in concert with Sophia University in Japan and held at Fordham.

Faculty and graduate students, as well as alumni experts and others, spoke about how AI can enhance immigration processes but also about the potential perils.

Communication professor Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., suggested that AI might be used to provide legal assistance for migrants as they negotiate immigration processes, given the lack of enough lawyers to serve them. But even then, “It actually demands more human involvement.” 

“You’re going to need humans who are understanding of how trauma works, who are able to be there culturally and emotionally for someone as they interact with a chatbot to figure out their legal fate,” he said.

Retaining the Human Touch

Another presenter, Sarah Blackmore, LAW ’14, is a senior associate with Fragomen, an immigration services firm. She noted that AI can be helpful in immigration by streamlining administrative work and repetitive tasks like processing immigration applications, freeing up staffers to focus on “the more complex cases that need a human touch.”

That human touch is needed when, for instance, someone’s asylum case could hinge on fine nuances of translation and emotion and context, she said. “With AI, it’s really important, especially for sensitive things, that there is always this human oversight,” she said. 

She was answering a question by Carey Kasten, Ph.D., professor of Spanish, who noted that “so much of immigration law and asylum laws … have to do with the way you tell your story.” 

‘I Am Afraid’

A key element in those stories is fear—particularly, fear of gender-based violence, “one of the main factors pushing people out of their countries,” said Marciana Popescu, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service and co-director of Her Migrant Hub, an online information hub for women seeking asylum. Women are nearly half the population of globally displaced people, and 40% to 46% are under 18, she said during her own presentation. 

In her own work with migrants, the three most common words she has heard, she said, are “I am afraid.” She ended with a plea: “I am asking you, dear colleagues, that are looking into AI—think of AI as a tool that can expand sanctuary. This comes from the voices of the women, because it is [their stories that matter]most.”

Their focus is women and children who came to New York City from Mexico and found their way to the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service in East Harlem. There, they received holistic support that not only met their immediate needs but also empowered them to improve their circumstances, help others, and be leaders.

The agency “has been doing really effective work with diverse communities in a very complicated city and … developing power in a community that is typically disempowered,” said Fordham theology professor Brenna Moore, Ph.D. She and Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish at Fordham, are co-authors of Mutuality in El Barrio: Stories of the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, out this month from Fordham University Press. A book launch takes place May 20.

Creating Pathways Out of Poverty

The Little Sisters of the Assumption, a Catholic order, founded its East Harlem agency in 1958 to create opportunities for families to escape poverty. The first executive director was Sister Margaret Leonard, GSS ’67, who codified the agency’s idea of mutuality.

It called for forming mutually enriching relationships with clients, “eschewing a binary framework of helper and helped in an effort to cocreate new realities in East Harlem that benefit all parties,” the book says.

That meant listening to migrants’ stories, offering mental and spiritual support, and unlocking their strengths over the long term. Sometimes it meant bringing them together so they could address common problems, like mold in their public housing. Former clients often return as volunteers and staffers or serve other New York City organizations in leadership roles.

What mutuality is not, Kasten said, is “looking for immediate effects.”

“It’s willing to be in conversation with someone for years and understanding that sometimes it does take that long,” she said. “The things that people are asked to do when they come to this country don’t take just a week.”

Success Stories of Migrants

Eight Fordham students worked on the book project, gaining research experience by helping Moore and Kasten with interviewing migrants the agency served over the past few decades. The students included theology, Spanish, and communications majors, as well as students in the Graduate School of Social Service. Most migrants quoted in the book used pseudonyms.

The interviewees included Sonia, a onetime teenage mother whom the agency helped navigate prenatal care, develop parenting skills, and enroll in a pre-nursing degree program. The nuns also called upon her to provide nursing care to another Little Sisters client in her building.

And they stuck with her through crises—like being jailed on a false accusation from her child’s father, who had beaten her. The sisters prayed and sang hymns outside the jail overnight, giving her hope until charges were dropped the next day. She later moved to Florida, married, raised three children, and became head nurse in a hospital’s radiology department—at one point, overseeing the care of an ailing relative of Sister Margaret, who Sonia said is “like family.”

Another young mother, Yolanda, gained parenting skills through the agency and later joined its staff after earning her bachelor’s degree. “They began supporting me, motivating me,” she says in the book. In the words of another client: “They make you see what you don’t see in yourself.”

“I will be a supporting researcher to senior fellows who have a lot of experience,” Matteucci says about the appointment, which begins in August and is based in Washington, D.C. “I’ve respected Carnegie’s work for a long time and used a lot of their work in my own research. I’m excited to be surrounded by these scholars.”

The fellowship provides the framework for Matteucci to advance her research in nuclear policy, an area of study she became interested in as an intern in the Center on National Security at Fordham Law during her sophomore and junior years.

“They work in the broader realm of international security,” explains the international relations and Spanish major who is graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “I was doing research related to counterterrorism and cybersecurity and there’s a lot of overlap with nuclear policy.”

From the Center for National Security, she was recruited by Sandia National Laboratories, the nuclear arms lab based in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She served there as an international nuclear safeguards and security intern for nearly 18 months.

Today, Matteucci is interning with two nongovernmental organizations at the United Nations, where her focus has shifted from strategy to disarmament.

“It’s very different from the work I did at Sandia, where the focus was often on nonproliferation and strategic concerns,” she says. “I’m in the process of informing myself. Being in the field, you have to understand all of it.”

Matteucci says she aspires to a life of public service that may include government work. She notes the need for more women in leadership positions and more critical thinkers on the subject of nuclear policy in a country that has “one of the largest arsenals in the world.”

“When you learn about nukes and the strategic environment,” she said, “you inevitably learn about conventional weapons as well. So it gives you the full scope, which is why I consider it such a useful lens.”

In April, Matteucci traveled on a Fordham-funded trip to Geneva for the U.N. Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2020 Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, attending as part of a youth delegation. She and her peers spent a week speaking with ambassadors and monitoring proceedings in the General Assembly. Matteucci also interviewed representatives from NGOs as part of her research for an independent study at Fordham.

“It was clear that states are preparing for the eventuality of cooperation on disarmament,” she says. “This is both timely and hopeful. With dialogue lacking in most political spaces—even the nuclear field is quite partisan— it is exciting to see people searching for common ground.”

Her passion for international policy began in high school with a debate case on unilateral intervention in foreign conflicts. After that, she says she “was hooked.”

Matteucci has presented at multiple conferences and was the first undergraduate student accepted into the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative course at the National Nuclear Security Administration. She has also contributed to the Journal of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and other publications.

A blues pianist who regularly sings and performs, Matteucci enjoys attending live concerts with her father who plays Spanish classical guitar.

One of her best memories? When she played the same piano graced by the talents of her idol, the legendary Herbie Hancock, at a jazz club in Spain while studying abroad in her junior year.

“It was the coolest moment of my undergraduate years!” she says.

–Claire Curry