After the COVID-19 pandemic stopped many asylum procedures throughout Europe, new technologies are now reviving these systems. Via lie diagnosis tools tested at the line to a program for confirming documents and transcribes selection interviews, a wide range of systems is being used by asylum applications. This article is exploring just how these systems have reshaped the ways asylum procedures are conducted. That reveals just how asylum seekers will be transformed into required hindered techno-users: They are asked to conform to a series here of techno-bureaucratic steps and to keep up with unpredictable tiny within criteria and deadlines. This obstructs their very own capacity to get around these systems and to go after their legal right for coverage.

It also illustrates how these technologies happen to be embedded in refugee governance: They help the ‘circuits of financial-humanitarianism’ that function through a whirlwind of distributed technological requirements. These requirements increase asylum seekers’ socio-legal precarity by hindering all of them from accessing the channels of protection. It further argues that examines of securitization and victimization should be coupled with an insight in the disciplinary mechanisms of them technologies, through which migrants will 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 knowledge, the article argues that these systems have an inherent obstructiveness. There is a double effect: whilst they help to expedite the asylum method, they also produce it difficult for refugees to navigate these kinds of systems. They can be positioned in a ‘knowledge deficit’ that makes them vulnerable to illegitimate decisions made by non-governmental stars, and ill-informed and unreliable narratives about their cases. Moreover, they will pose fresh risks of’machine mistakes’ that may result in incorrect or discriminatory outcomes.