After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures across Europe, new technologies have become 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 solutions is being made use of in asylum applications. This article is exploring how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. That reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into required hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series her latest blog of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with capricious tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their particular capacity to run these systems and to pursue their legal right for security.
It also displays how these kinds of technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They accomplish 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 getting at the programs of safeguard. It further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of those technologies, through which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects exactly who are regimented by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article states that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double impact: whilst they assist to expedite the asylum procedure, they also generate it difficult meant for refugees to navigate these types of systems. They may be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to bogus decisions created by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their circumstances. Moreover, they will pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.