After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures across Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these systems. Coming from lie diagnosis tools examined at the border to a system for verifying documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technologies is being employed in asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these technologies have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. This reveals how asylum seekers will 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 changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs all their capacity to run these systems and to follow their legal right for security.
It also displays how these technologies will be embedded in refugee governance: They assist in the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering all of them from getting at the programs of protection. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be put together with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms these technologies, by which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects who all are disciplined by their reliance on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal understanding, the article argues that these technology have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double effect: although they aid to expedite the asylum process, they also help to make it difficult intended for refugees to navigate these types of systems. They are really positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental actors, and click ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.