Technologies and Asylum Procedures

After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures across Europe, fresh technologies have become reviving these kinds of systems. Out of lie detection tools tested at the line to a program for validating documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of solutions is being found in asylum applications. This article explores how these technologies have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. This reveals how asylum seekers will be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unforeseen tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This kind of obstructs their very own capacity to understand these systems and to pursue their legal right for protection.

It also displays how these types of technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They help 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 accessing the programs of safety. It further argues that examines of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in to the disciplinary mechanisms for these technologies, by which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects exactly who 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 impact: www.ascella-llc.com/counseling-services-for-students even though they assist with expedite the asylum procedure, they also help to make it difficult for refugees to navigate these systems. They can be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to illegitimate decisions created by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.