After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies have become reviving these types of systems. From lie detection tools examined at the border to a program for confirming documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being utilized for asylum applications. This article explores just how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into obligated hindered techno-users: They are asked to abide by a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with capricious tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their particular capacity to steer these devices and to follow their legal right for safeguard.
It also displays how these kinds of technologies will be embedded in refugee governance: They facilitate the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering these people from opening the programs of security. It further states that examines of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of them technologies, by which migrants will be turned into data-generating subjects who all are self-disciplined by their reliance on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article argues that these technology have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double effect: the counseling services offers even though they assist with expedite the asylum method, they also generate it difficult intended for refugees to navigate these systems. They may be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions created by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, that they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.