After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures throughout Europe, fresh technologies have become reviving these types of systems. From lie detection tools analyzed at the line to a program for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being included in asylum applications. This article is exploring how these technologies have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into obligated 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 obstructs the capacity to navigate these systems and to follow their right for safeguard.
It also demonstrates how these types of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They assist in the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering all of them from opening the channels of proper protection. It further argues that analyses of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of these technologies, through which migrants will be turned into data-generating subjects who all are self-disciplined by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article argues that these solutions have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double result: whilst they assist with expedite the asylum method, they also make it difficult pertaining to refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental actors, and hop over to this website ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.