Technologies and Asylum Procedures

A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Mature Research Many other, Refugee Studies Centre, College or university of Oxford

Increasingly, technologies and methods are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These kinds of range from biometric matching engines that evaluate iris tests and fingerprints to websites for asylum seekers and refugees to chatbots to help people register protection situations. These tools are designed to make that easier for states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially numerous systems are slowed down due to the COVID-19 outbreak and raising levels of pressured displacement.

Nonetheless they raise a host of human privileges concerns. Included in this are privacy issues, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or machine errors that may lead to discriminatory outcomes. Additionally they pose significant conflicts to migrant workers and asylum seekers, who are often times already disenfranchised and insecure.

Ozkul’s analysis explores many ways in which fresh technologies may be used to verify details and narratives of migrants, allowing them to quicken their asylum application method. It also looks at the ways through which these technology can create a certain informational space around migrant workers, and how they will configure their subjecthood. Following Foucault, this girl argues that such algorithms are both territorial and institutional. For example , eye scanning methods can be seen when an institutional technology, because they require the migrant to enter a specific territory in order to be recognised; while advice algorithms are industrial and global in their effects, configuring content as consumers.

As a result, they enact a particular form of hegemonic power more than displaced people. This is especially true given the current contest to the bottom level in asylum policy : with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to help in cachette resettling and others imposing restrictive plans www.ascella-llc.com that block all their access to place and pressure them back to dangerous and deadly excursions.