Technology and Asylum Procedures
After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies are reviving these kinds of systems. Right from lie diagnosis tools examined at the edge to a system for verifying documents and transcribes interviews, a wide range of technologies is being utilised in asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these technology have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers will be transformed into compelled hindered techno-users: They are asked to adhere to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps also to keep up with unstable tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their capacity to steer these systems and to pursue their legal right for cover.
It also displays how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They help in the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a flutter of dispersed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by simply hindering these people from getting at the programs of protection. It what is the due diligence data room further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight into the disciplinary mechanisms of the technologies, through which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects who have are regimented by their dependence on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal expertise, the article states that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. There is a double impact: although they aid to expedite the asylum process, they also help to make it difficult to get refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They can be 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 will pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in erroneous or discriminatory outcomes.