After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures across Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these kinds of systems. By lie recognition tools analyzed at the border to a system for validating documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of systems is being employed in asylum applications. This article explores how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. This reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and keep up with unforeseen tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their particular capacity to get around these devices and to pursue their right for cover.
It also illustrates how these kinds of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They aid the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of distributed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering these people from accessing the programs of coverage. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of the technologies, through which migrants will be turned into data-generating subjects just who are regimented by their reliability 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: when they assist to expedite the asylum method, they also generate it difficult with respect to refugees to navigate these systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental stars, and This Site ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.