After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies are now reviving these systems. Via lie recognition tools tested at the border to a system for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technology is being applied to asylum applications. This article explores how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers happen to be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to abide by a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and also to keep up with unforeseen tiny within criteria and deadlines. This obstructs the capacity to find the way these systems and to pursue their legal right for safeguard.
It also illustrates how these technologies are 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 all of them from getting at the channels of proper protection. It further argues that examines of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms worth mentioning technologies, in which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects so, who are disciplined by their reliance on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal expertise, the article states that these technology have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double result: counseling services for students when they assist to expedite the asylum process, they also make it difficult to get refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are simply positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to illegitimate decisions made by non-governmental stars, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their cases. Moreover, they pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.
