Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship 337 7 Borderline Citizenship, Fourth Scenario: Nomadism 7.1 Traditional Nomadism Traditional (i.e. “periodic” and “on-the-road”) nomadic movements are as old as humanity itself. Today, uncontacted and unmapped populations aside, pastoral and peripatetic itinerants mainly traverse the Sahel, Maghreb, and Mashreq regions, with minor manifestations in Central and Latin America as well as Central and South-East Asia, Iran, and some Pacific archipelagos. They pose challenging security dilemmas for the jurisdictions concerned, for the protection both of and from nomadic individuals; their univocal identification could perhaps help reduce these inconveniences. To address these peculiar migrations from an identity-onboarding standpoint, one may conceive of infrastructure that either “follows” the nomads or waits for them at regular intervals – needless to remark, the second solution presupposes that nomadic movements repeat themselves cyclically and adhering to the same seasonal patterns as well as routes. The role of meta-introducers here could be that of keeping governments informed about expected deviations of forthcoming nomadic movements from the expected routes and seasonal periodic patterns. In the first case (“following” the nomads), one shall prefer mobile devices, while in the second case identification stations should be permanently placed along the way. Data-wise, either solution is fraught with jurisdictional apportionment issues. Provided that nomads’ identification is understood as a form of supranational collaboration between impacted countries, the data infrastructure that underpins said stations can be thought of as international territory, no matter where it is located – just like an airport. A regional community of States would officially recognise the infrastructure and endow it with some form of transnational legal status. Shared infrastructure relies, in turn, on shared standards for data transfer: be it a mobile app (e.g. Rios 2023) or a permanent station, the solution should incorporate one function for domestic data processing and another function for data transfer across all those jurisdictions that joined the remote onboarding project. Any transfer scales up the likelihood of data breaches and data leakages, so that only the “minimum core” should be shared among all parties; this is essential, as jurisdictions globally still tend to dismiss the momentousness of data breaches as a public normative issue (Vecellio Segate 2020). Further, as these nomadic movements can take time, one shall make sure to capture e.g. biometrics whose validity does not decay with aging, and to re-check for newborns or deceased on nomads’ way back. This paper is mainly concerned with cross-border phenomena, including crossborder nomadic movements, but some of the challenges in technologically recruiting