The Pitfalls of Technosolutionism and Refugee Rights
Landing on the coast of Kos, Greece, a Syrian refugee accompanied by his wife from the war-torn city of Homs withdrew his mobile phone from a resealable plastic bag and proclaimed,
"Our phones are more important than food!"
- Wael, Syria (Assir, 2015, p. 1)
Unfortunately, the same devices refugees use to navigate, translate, educate and communicate during their journeys are utilised by governments and private sector actors as powerful instruments of surveillance, exploited to shape human beings into digital evidence (Taylor & Graham-Harrison, 2016).
The rationale for the consideration of technosolutionism for refugees is the growing trend of digitalisation across the world and the numerous obstacles it could help solve. It profoundly changes the context and execution of humanitarian assistance and how refugees are processed (Stoll, 2017). However, the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (2020) outlines that two distinct groups are at considerable risk of cruelty from racial discrimination exacerbated by the use of new technologies: those in the criminal justice system and refugees.
In this framework, both groups are exceedingly vulnerable to the detection and creation of evidence against them. The concept of digital evidence is critical in this analysis of technosolutionism. Oldham (2020) defines digital evidence as anything that the senses can perceive to support an assertion (Oldham, 2020). Although assertion can be both positive and negative in its hypothesis, the assertion often comes from the individual defining it and in first-order logic.
Its relationship to refugee rights is simple. All refugees claiming asylum worldwide are automatically judged and branded by immigration officials with the assertion and assumption that they are lying, and the evidence will prove that. If it just so happens that the evidence disproves this assertion. Well, that might be just luck on the side of the refugee.
Technology that helps accelerate the process of asylum applications does so on a mathematical agenda, which prevents the analysis of a case-by-case basis. Instead, it turns the application process into a judgmental, biased calculation formulated by technology that carries the same racial, gender and class-based inequalities as society. These calculations are not neutral and are based purely on omnipotent Western governments and their determination of merit. Furthermore, with modern technology feigning as a saviour to the worlds refugee problems, new human rights violations are born.
For technology to prevent these assertions, bias's, and human rights violations leading to immigration officials being mere facilitators of this inequality discourse, there needs to be a line drawn in the sand using technosolutionism in the asylum seeker application process. This line will prevent the overriding power imbalance, control and pre-perceived judgement of a refugee before they even arrive at a country's border. Additionally, it will reinforce the privacy and rights of refugees to allow the fortification of cultural sensitivity during the application process.
Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
