After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies are now reviving these types of systems. By lie detection tools tested at the border to a program for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being employed in asylum applications. This article explores just how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. That reveals just how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into pressured hindered techno-users: They are asked to comply with a series why not check here of techno-bureaucratic steps also to keep up with capricious tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their very own capacity to run these systems and to pursue their legal right for security.
It also displays how these types of technologies are 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 by hindering these people from getting at the programs of security. It further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of those 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 argues that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. There is a double impact: whilst they assist to expedite the asylum procedure, they also produce it difficult meant for refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are really positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes all of them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions manufactured by non-governmental stars, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their conditions. Moreover, that they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.
Comments by Леонид Романов