After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies have become reviving these systems. From lie recognition tools analyzed at the line to a program for verifying documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technology is being made use of in asylum applications. This article is exploring portals of the board of directors for advising migrant workers just how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures happen to be conducted. This reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into obligated hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unstable tiny within criteria and deadlines. This obstructs all their capacity to find the way these devices and to pursue their legal right for cover.
It also demonstrates how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They assist in 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 all of them from accessing the programs of safety. It further argues that analyses of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of such technologies, in which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects who all are regimented by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal expertise, the article argues that these systems have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double effect: while they assist with expedite the asylum process, they also make it difficult with regards to refugees to navigate these systems. They may be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental celebrities, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they will pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.
