After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies are reviving these systems. From lie recognition tools analyzed at the border to a program for validating documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technology is being employed in asylum applications. This article is exploring how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals just how asylum seekers are transformed into obligated hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series click of techno-bureaucratic steps and keep up with unstable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their particular capacity to work these systems and to pursue their right for safeguard.
It also shows how these kinds of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They aid the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by simply hindering these people from accessing the stations of proper protection. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of these technologies, in which migrants will be turned into data-generating subjects who also are disciplined by their reliance on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal know-how, the article states that these technologies have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double impact: even though they aid to expedite the asylum procedure, they also make it difficult meant for refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions made by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their instances. Moreover, they will pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.