Technology and Asylum Procedures
After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies are now reviving these kinds of systems. By lie detection tools tested at the boundary to a program for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technologies is being used by asylum applications. This article is exploring how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into obligated hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unforeseen tiny within criteria and deadlines. This obstructs all their capacity to browse through these systems and to follow their right for safety.
It also illustrates how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They facilitate the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering all of them from being able to access the stations of coverage. It find more further states that studies of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of such technologies, through which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects who also are regimented by their reliability on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal knowledge, the article argues that these technologies have an natural obstructiveness. They have a double effect: while they assist to expedite the asylum method, they also produce it difficult just for refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to bogus decisions made by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their circumstances. Moreover, that they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.