After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these types of systems. Out of lie diagnosis tools tested at the edge to a program for verifying documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of solutions is being made use of in asylum applications. This article explores just how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into required hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with a series of techno-bureaucratic steps also to keep up with unstable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs all their capacity to browse these devices and to go after their right for cover.
It also displays how these types of technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They assist in the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering these people from being able to access the programs of coverage. It further argues that analyses of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms these technologies, through which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects who also are disciplined by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal understanding, the article argues that these systems have an natural obstructiveness. They have a double impact: while they assistance to expedite the asylum method, they also make it difficult with regards to refugees to navigate these systems. They can be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to illegitimate decisions of non-governmental stars, and asylum consultation ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their cases. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.