After the COVID-19 pandemic halted many asylum procedures around Europe, new technologies have become reviving these kinds of systems. From lie recognition tools analyzed at the border to a system for validating documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of technologies is being applied to asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these solutions have reshaped the ways asylum procedures will be conducted. It reveals how asylum seekers will be transformed into forced hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series of techno-bureaucratic steps also to keep up with capricious tiny changes in criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their particular capacity to work these systems and to follow their right for safety.

It also displays how these technologies are embedded in refugee governance: They aid the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of distributed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering them from accessing the programs of protection. It further argues that examines of securitization and victimization should be combined with an insight in the disciplinary www.ascella-llc.com/ mechanisms of the technologies, in which migrants happen to be turned into data-generating subjects who also are regimented by their dependence on technology.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and comarcal know-how, the article states that these solutions have an inherent obstructiveness. They have a double effect: while they aid to expedite the asylum process, they also produce it difficult with regards to refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They are positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes these people vulnerable to bogus decisions created by non-governmental actors, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their situations. Moreover, they will pose new risks of’machine mistakes’ which may result in inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.