Technology and Asylum Procedures
After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, fresh technologies are reviving these systems. Out of lie recognition tools examined at the edge to a system for verifying documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of systems is being utilized in asylum applications. This article is exploring how these technology 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 also to keep up with unpredictable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their very own capacity to get around these devices and to go after their legal right for safeguards.
It also illustrates how these kinds of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They aid the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of spread technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by simply hindering all of them from interacting with the channels of protection. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be combined with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of technologies, in which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects who also are disciplined by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal know-how, the article states that these technologies have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double effect: while they aid to expedite the asylum method, they also help to make it difficult to get refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are really positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions of non-governmental actors, and here ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their situations. Moreover, they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.
