Systems and Asylum Procedures
04/12/2023
After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies are actually reviving these kinds of systems. By lie diagnosis tools examined at the line to a program for verifying documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of systems is being utilised in asylum applications. This article explores just how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. It reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into required hindered techno-users: They are asked to adhere to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps and also to keep up with unforeseen tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs the capacity to get around these systems and to follow their right for cover.
It also displays how these kinds of technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They assist 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 being able to view the channels of proper protection. It click further argues that studies of securitization and victimization should be along with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of the technologies, through which migrants are turned into data-generating subjects exactly who are self-disciplined by their reliance on technology.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal know-how, the article argues that these solutions have an natural obstructiveness. They have a double result: while they assist to expedite the asylum process, they also produce it difficult to get refugees to navigate these types of systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to bogus decisions of non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their circumstances. Moreover, they pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.
