After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies have become reviving these types of systems. Via lie diagnosis tools examined at the edge to a program for confirming documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of systems is being utilised in asylum applications. This article explores just how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. That reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unstable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their particular capacity to browse through these devices and to pursue their legal right for safeguards.
It also displays how these types of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They help the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering all of them from being able to view the channels of proper protection. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be put together with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of those technologies, in which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects who also are disciplined by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal expertise, the article states that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. There is a double result: find more although they help to expedite the asylum method, they also make it difficult for refugees to navigate these types of systems. They are simply positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to bogus decisions manufactured by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they will pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.
