How AI is impacting who gets to cross borders
Artificial intelligence is revolutionising global mobility, from screening passport photos to pre-sorting visa applications.
Image by Desintegrator via Alamy
Every year, tens of millions of people apply for passports and visas, hoping to cross borders for work, family, education or escape – but many people do not realise that before a human official reviews an application, automated and AI-enabled systems can already play a role in assessing their identity and their documents.
As these systems proliferate across consular offices and ports of entry around the world, they are raising urgent questions about human oversight, which Dr Don Kilburg and Virginia Blaser, both retired U.S. diplomats with more than 60 years of combined public service experience, explore in their new book AI Use Cases for Consular Affairs.
Their careers included tens of thousands of visa and passport decisions, major overseas passport operations, fraud investigations, evacuations, citizen emergencies and the introduction of new technologies into diplomatic work.
“The question is no longer whether governments can use AI in consular work – they increasingly can. The question now is: Where do we draw the line – what should we never allow a machine to decide?” Kilburg explains.
The possibilities and opportunities of AI
The promise of AI freeing up human time in consular services is increasingly being realised, moving into government systems that millions of people rely on to apply for visas, obtain passports, prove their identity and seek help overseas.
In September 2025, cabinet-level officials from Australia, Canada, New Zealand the United Kingdom and the United States called for increased efforts to address irregular migration, document fraud and visa abuse, including ‘leveraging advancements in technology, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), wherever possible’. In practice, this could mean AI playing a growing role in how applications are screened, documents are checked and potential risks are flagged before a traveller ever reaches a border.
AI can help triage large volumes of visa applications, detect patterns associated with fraud and provide multilingual assistance to applicants and citizens.
In visa processing, automated triage systems can identify straightforward or lower-risk cases for streamlined handling while flagging others for closer review. They can analyse patterns across large volumes of applications and support fraud detection, helping officials prioritise cases before a human officer makes the final decision.
Yet applicants may still have limited visibility into why a case is routed for additional scrutiny or how automated tools have shaped the information presented to decision-makers.
Kilburg and Blaser are clear that in these cases, humans should always have the final say: “AI tools can structure and accelerate information, but they must never replace the officer’s authority and responsibility to adjudicate cases.”
The human backstop
But the same tools that make consular work faster can also shape what information officials see before making decisions that affect people’s lives.
The European Union has written this concern into law, classifying certain AI systems used in visa processing, migration and border control as high-risk and requiring safeguards including effective human oversight.
The authors warn that while automated systems can flag anomalies humans might miss, human responsibility is increasingly important: “When officers defer too heavily to algorithmic outputs, they risk becoming passive executors rather than active adjudicators. This can erode discretion and accountability.”
Kilburg and Blaser are not arguing against the use of AI, and in fact they see significant potential for it to reduce repetitive work, improve communication across languages, detect fraud and help officials manage large workloads.
But they argue that a human signature at the end of a process is not enough if the person making the decision has neither the time nor the freedom to question what the technology has put in front of them.
Drawing on his background in psychology and AI adoption, Kilburg warns of a subtler risk: “The danger is not simply that AI might replace the consular officer, but that it can become the default frame through which a case is seen. Human oversight only works when officers remain willing and able to question what the system puts in front of them.”
For Blaser, whose 34-year Foreign Service career included senior consular leadership, the issue ultimately comes down to accountability: “AI can help an officer see more, find something faster or spot a pattern that might otherwise be missed. But information is not judgment, and when a decision can change someone’s life, responsibility must remain with a human being.”
They see the real benefit of AI being that if it can take on more routine work, officials can spend more time on difficult cases that require judgment, empathy, context and human attention.
Ultimately, the authors remind us that in consular affairs, AI should empower human oversight and give public servants more time: “It is a means of amplifying the human heart of consular affairs. Done right, it will make services faster, borders more secure, and officers more effective. But its greatest achievement will be quieter: giving consular teams the time and clarity to be more present, more empathetic, and more humane. In that sense, the future of consular AI is not about technology – it is about people.”