Enacting Digital Government Services for Noncitizens: The Case of Migration Services

Abstract

Historically, e-government approaches have focused on citizens as the most important audience for government information and services. This focus is appropriate for most traditional public services. However, a large number of service users are noncitizens, including, for example, people applying for immigration services. Theoretically and practically, there are interesting differences between government services targeted to citizens and migration services. Some of these differences are due largely to the rules and laws that apply in each case, but there are also differences related to the fact that the majority of users of migration services are not citizens and they are very diverse in many respects. For instance, in the case of noncitizens the audience and their needs can be as broad as their different nationalities and different contexts they reside in. This chapter identifies and explains some of these differences and also a few similarities. It considers the variables from Fountain’s technology enactment framework and includes some additional environmental conditions based on a previous extension of that initial model, applying them to the case of immigration services for border workers in the south of Mexico. Based on this analysis, this chapter suggests a preliminary reinterpretation of the technology enactment framework and highlights the differences between e-government services for citizens and for noncitizens, in order to propose a discussion about a group of users that has not been thoroughly analyzed in the literature, but which is important for scholars and practitioners to consider.