Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship 321 role is fairly vicarious. Wider sets of controversies are raised, instead, by introducers who are entrusted to “validate” personal-acquaintance-based identity claims for all those the State should have already registered, because they indeed are citizens from a legal standpoint, but it failed to because of administrative, budgetary, political, and/ or logistical constraints. In this scenario, the introducer bears an exceedingly cumbersome responsibility, which calls into question issues of cultural mediation, group belonging, reliability (at the intersection between trustworthiness and accuracy), and the potential for corruption. Despite the ties they may have developed with their community, and despite (or precisely because of) their seniority, introducers might not have personally met their introducees in a long while. When that is the case, it seems important that the automated biometric identification systems (ABIS) the introducers avail themselves of can cater for e.g. voice recognition (Alharbi and Alshanbari 2023) or iris scans (Abdulrahman and Alhayani 2023, 2644) – in addition to facial recognition, or to the fingerprints which once represented the exclusive domain of automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS). Fingerprints are severely inaccurate in contexts of poverty, lifelong manual labour, and “periphery” (so obviously typical of borderline situations) where, for instance, ‘[c]apturing fingerprints, especially of manual laborers, is a challenge […] because of the rough exterior of fingers caused by hard work’ (Ramanathan 2015, 11). There are also dozens of reported cases of migrants who prefer to burn their fingertips or dip them in acid as they are approached by border agents, or even as they start their journey via, say, the Mediterranean (e.g. Allen 2009; Feng, Jain, and Ross 2009; Grant and Domokos 2011; Krasny 2011; Merrick 2021); one may somewhat sympathise with the despair, atrocities, and fearof-deportation that lead to their choice: whenever being known might equate to granting authorities a leeway to deport, remaining off-record is preferable at any cost (Reidy 2017; Trenholm 2016). Altering fingertips is not uncommon among nonmigrant criminals, either (FBI 2015). Less relevantly but quite curiously, there are even people who are born without fingertips due to a genetic mutation (Groeger 2011; Sarfraz 2019). There is also advice issued against fingerprints hygiene-wise (Lodinová 2016, 96; Robbin 2022), to the extent that disinfection of appliances via UV-C technology is recommended – all the more so within or around refugee camps and assembly points, where epidemics of transmissible diseases are regrettably a constant. Granted: voice biometrics is not going to prove necessarily easier to collect (it arguably requires more voluntary input and more stable health conditions from the individual), hygienic/healthy for all parties involved (the next pandemics are forecasted as resulting from further coronaviruses), or univocal to match (tools’ sophistication in spotting falsified tones or misleading accents does not suffice yet, and concerns have been raised with regards to group discrimination – González Hautamäki et al. 2017; Jansen et al. 2021). And yet, fingerprints do not deserve to be