Elise Moreau
In a crowded corridor of a refugee aid center in Marseille, Samira, a 32-year-old Moroccan woman, scrolls through her phone. The screen flickers—a frozen page of a local government website where she’s tried, for the seventh time this month, to register for digital identity verification. Without it, she cannot enroll her child in school, schedule a health appointment, or apply for legal status. Her fingertips tremble—not from the cold, but from the quiet erosion of her dignity.
In today’s Europe, where digital infrastructures underpin almost every right, from social protection to political participation, women like Samira are caught in a paradox: physically present, legally invisible, and digitally erased.
The New Face of Exclusion in a Digitized Europe
Across the continent, the digitization of public services—once hailed as a beacon of efficiency and transparency—is becoming an invisible wall for hundreds of thousands of migrant women. According to Eurostat, as of early 2025, nearly 68% of women in irregular or transitional migratory situations in the EU lack access to a validated digital identity.
The issue is not only technical—it’s structural. Biometric authentication systems, such as France’s Alicem or Germany’s eID, require documentation that many migrants do not possess or cannot easily update. Language barriers, algorithmic bias, and bureaucratic opacity amplify this digital exclusion, creating a caste of “non-citizens” in an age where data defines belonging.
When Being Offline Equals Being Unprotected
Experts from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) have warned that this digital invisibility reinforces gender-based inequalities. Many migrant women are single mothers, caregivers, or survivors of trafficking. Lacking digital access translates into missing court dates, losing child support, or forfeiting the right to housing or work permits. In Berlin alone, local NGOs report that more than 40% of the women they assist cannot access basic services due to digital obstacles.
This is not just a failure of policy—it is a breach of human dignity, one byte at a time.
Algorithms Without Empathy
Despite the EU’s proposed AI Act, which aims to regulate high-risk systems, there is little in the legislation that directly addresses the impact of algorithmic governance on migrant populations. The rhetoric of “inclusive AI” often omits the very groups it affects most. Platforms designed without feminist, intercultural or trauma-informed perspectives perpetuate harm.
And so, the digital gap becomes not just a technical fault line, but a democratic fault line, where one’s ability to “exist” legally, economically or socially depends on an email, an app, a QR code—often inaccessible or unusable.
The Right to Be Counted, Seen, and Heard
From Palermo to Brussels, grassroots movements are pushing back. Projects like Women Without Barriers (France), Code for Inclusion (Germany) and the Digital Dignity Network (Pan-European) are training migrant women in digital literacy, challenging opaque bureaucracies, and proposing feminist frameworks for digital citizenship.
Their message is clear: being connected is not a privilege—it is a right. And citizenship in the 21st century must begin by dismantling the digital borders we cannot see.
Reclaiming the Narrative
To speak of “inclusion” while maintaining systems that exclude by design is not just hypocrisy—it is violence dressed as modernization. When migrant women are denied the right to exist online, they are not only excluded from services; they are written out of the social contract.
Europe, often proud of its humanist legacy, must ask itself: what kind of democracy thrives when silence is coded into its algorithms?
Behind each digital form denied, each error message received, and each login screen that fails to recognize a face—there is a story. A mother. A dream. A future. Journalism’s task is to ensure these stories are not buried beneath data flows and policy memos.
Élise Moreau, French investigative journalist and international correspondent at Phoenix24. Specialist in European affairs, gender equity & digital democracy.