AEF Gabbrielle Johnson

APPLIED ETHICS FORUM  ·  DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

‘Precarious predictions in automated immigration decision-making’
Gabbrielle Johnson (Claremont McKenna College)
Thursday 28 Mar 2024  •  5:00pm–7:00pm  •  LIBR–201

Abstract: As U.S. immigration courts face insurmountable caseloads, there’s a rising temptation to rely on automated decision-making. Where individuals lack typical legal protections, mere predictive accuracy increasingly becomes the standard. In this talk, I argue that the allure of so-called ‘precarious accurate predictions’—i.e., those where predictive accuracy masks the problematic nature of the underlying reasoning patterns—poses significant ethical and procedural risks within immigration law. Drawing on insights from philosophy of mind and psychology, I highlight two ways in which these predictions falter under scrutiny: through their reliance on stealth proxies and their susceptibility to illusions of depth. These in turn establish two currently unsatisfied desiderata for a robust integration of predictive analytics in legal decision-making: that predictive models address proxy discrimination beyond statistical correlations and realize causal-explanatory connections between features. The talk ends by underscoring the urgent need for a critical re-evaluation of the prospective use of automated predictions in legal processes, and cautions against their expansion into domains like criminal justice, where they threaten to erode established rights and safeguards.