After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures around Europe, fresh technologies are actually reviving these types of systems. Coming from lie diagnosis tools tested at the line to a system for validating documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being applied to asylum applications. This article explores just how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers will be transformed into obligated hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and keep up with unpredictable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their particular capacity to work these devices and to go after their legal right for security.
It also shows how these kinds of technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They help the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering them from getting at the programs of protection. It further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be combined with an insight in to the disciplinary mechanisms of them technologies, in which migrants will be turned into data-generating subjects whom are regimented by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal expertise, the article states that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. There is a double result: although they help to expedite the asylum method, they also help to make it difficult meant for refugees to navigate these systems. They may be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental actors, and services offered by a juilliard therapy center ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their circumstances. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.