After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these systems. Coming from lie diagnosis tools tested at the boundary to a system for validating documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of solutions is being made use of in asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures happen to be conducted. This 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 unpredictable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their very own capacity to steer these systems and to pursue their legal right for proper protection.
It also illustrates how these types of technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They aid the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering them from accessing the channels of safeguard. It further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of such technologies, through which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects who are self-disciplined by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article states that these solutions have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double result: although they help to expedite the asylum process, they also generate it difficult just for refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are simply positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions of non-governmental actors, and counseling services for students ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.