After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, fresh technologies are actually reviving these types of systems. Coming from lie diagnosis tools tested at the line to a system for confirming documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of solutions is being used in asylum applications. This article is exploring what is the due diligence data room how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. That reveals how asylum seekers are transformed into pressured hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with a series of techno-bureaucratic steps also to keep up with capricious tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their capacity to navigate these devices and to follow their right for safeguards.
It also shows how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They assist in the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity simply by hindering them from being able to access the channels of safety. It further states that analyses of securitization and victimization should be combined with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms these technologies, in 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 knowledge, the article states that these solutions have an natural obstructiveness. There is a double result: when they aid to expedite the asylum process, they also produce it difficult designed for refugees to navigate these systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions created by non-governmental stars, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their cases. Moreover, they will pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.
