After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures across Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these kinds of systems. Via lie diagnosis tools analyzed at the edge to a system for validating documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technologies is being included in asylum applications. This article explores just how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with 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 work these devices and to pursue their legal right for safety.
It also displays how these types of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They facilitate the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering them from getting at the stations of protection. It further argues that examines of securitization and victimization should be put together with an insight into the disciplinary www.ascella-llc.com/asylum-procedure-advice mechanisms of technologies, through which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects who are disciplined by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article argues that these technologies have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double effect: even though they help to expedite the asylum procedure, they also generate it difficult to get refugees to navigate these types of systems. They may be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to bogus decisions of non-governmental stars, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their situations. Moreover, they will pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.