After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures across Europe, fresh technologies are now reviving these types of systems. Out of lie detection tools examined at the boundary to a program for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being used in asylum applications. This article explores just how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures happen to be conducted. That reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into compelled hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series Read More Here of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unforeseen tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs the capacity to find the way these systems and to go after their legal right for coverage.
It also demonstrates how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They help the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by simply hindering these people from being able to access the programs of proper protection. It further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be put together with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of such technologies, in 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 know-how, the article states that these technologies have an natural obstructiveness. They have a double impact: while they aid to expedite the asylum method, they also produce it difficult with respect to refugees to navigate these types of systems. They are simply positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions made by non-governmental celebrities, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their instances. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.