Global Compact on Migration adopted in 2018 was adjusted to reduce the focus on rights and increase the focus on control (de Chickera, 2018). Legal identity and rent-seeking Leaving the rhetoric of development, rights, or national security aside, a central feature of many of the new identification projects appears in practice to be rent-seeking. The sudden availability of biometric technology has created a supply-driven push for the latest technology to solve the challenges of weak identification systems. The technology companies describe themselves as ‘solution providers’, and have taken the SDG legal identity target as an endorsement of their own products (see, for example, Lee, 2015; Bouverot, 2016; Gemalto, 2019). Safran-Morpho, the supplier for a biometric voter registration system in Côte d’Ivoire, even claimed – in the face of reports of more than 1,000 deaths immediately before and after the 2010 elections – that the new biometric voters’ register had ended the civil war (Safran-Morpho, 2014). The language of technological fix is pervasive. The World Bank emphasises the potential savings and revenue from efficient identification systems (Clark, 2018; World Bank, 2018d); a report by McKinsey on digital identification similarly argued that ‘Digital ID can lead to significant reductions in direct costs and improved efficiency for both private and public institutions’ (White et al., 2019). While savings have clearly been made in some contexts, the new identification systems have greatly increased up-front costs, for uncertain long-term benefits. In the more-studied field of electoral registration, the cost of elections has dramatically escalated in those countries that have invested in a biometric voters’ roll (Cheeseman et al., 2018; Debos, 2018; van der Straaten, 2019), although it is argued that in the right conditions the expected gain could exceed the cost (Gelb & Diofasi, 2016). There are also registration systems where the entire project has been abandoned: an early effort to create a digital national identity card in Nigeria left the data of sixty million Nigerians in the hands of the French company Sagem, for no national benefit (Manby, 2018a, p. 255). A later iteration of the Nigerian effort was supported by Mastercard, providing a financial services company with preferential access to large numbers of people who were legally obliged to enrol in the register (Mann, 2018). A survey of African identity authorities in 2018 thus reported that ‘vendor lock-in is the biggest cause of dissatisfaction with technology vendors’ (Burt, 2018); that is, proprietary software prevents a government from changing supplier, leading to ever higher costs. South Africa’s former statistician-general has accused Africa’s leaders of slumbering while ‘the paucity of systems thinking in Africa is mortgaging the continent holus bolus to the owners of digital capital’; and warned ‘about the sins of technology and money, which potentially would leave those technologically deficient behind’, so that value created by Africa is appropriated by others (Lehohla, 2018, 2019). There are efforts to prevent the more egregious examples of price gouging and unnecessary reinventions of the wheel. The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), supported by the Gates, Omidyar and Tata foundations, aims at reducing costs by creating an ‘open source’ platform avoiding proprietary software (Jain, 2019). The ‘Open CRVS’ initiative developed by Plan International and partners offers an open-source digital civil registration system that is designed to be easy to customise and operate without great technical expertise, in environments where other resources -- such as connectivity -- may also be 10