After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies have become reviving these types of systems. From lie diagnosis tools tested at the edge to a program for confirming documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technology is being used in asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. This 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 also to keep up with unforeseen tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs the capacity to run these systems and to follow their legal right for cover.
It also shows how these kinds of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They assist in 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 them from getting at the channels of safeguard. It here further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms these technologies, by which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects whom are self-disciplined by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal know-how, the article states that these systems have an natural obstructiveness. They have a double effect: when they assist to expedite the asylum procedure, they also help to make it difficult to get refugees to navigate these systems. They are simply 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, that they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.