Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum by Bridget M. Haas;Amy Shuman;

Author:Bridget M. Haas;Amy Shuman; [Haas, Bridget M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Digitalization of the Asylum Process (and the Digitizing of Evidence)

MARCO JACQUEMET

The contemporary sociolinguistic landscape is being transformed by digitalization—that is, the restructuring of social life around digital communication and media infrastructure. Focused, face-to-face interactions are now routinely layered with multifocal, multichanneled exchanges flowing through both local and distant nodes (Blommaert 2010; Jacquemet 2005). Digital communication technologies are much more than enablers of people’s interactivity and mobility: they alter the very nature of this interactivity, transforming people’s sense of place, belonging, and social relations. We are now witnessing the emergence of a telemediated cultural field, occupying a space in the everyday flow of experience that is distinct from yet integrated with physically close, face-to-face interactions. The integration of digital technologies in late modern communication transforms human experience in all its dimensions: from its social field (now globalized and deterritorialized) to the semiocapitalist marketplace (with its shifting methods of production, delivery, and consumption) to the production not only of new conveniences and excitements but also of new anxieties and pathologies (Duchêne and Heller 2012; Heller 2003; Tomlinson 2007). In this context, linguistic (and multilinguistic) skills have become valuable commodities in the global marketplace, and digital technologies have become the indispensable tools for its functioning. Moreover, because messages must become numbers before they can reach their recipient, digitalization has also placed translatability and reproducibility at the very core of these communicative exchanges and their sociolinguistic problems.

In judicial contexts, digitalization has produced an epochal transformation in the way interactions are managed and knowledge is accessed. In asylum proceedings, digital communication technologies are becoming the latest tool in the battle between, on one hand, immigration officers skeptical of asylum claims and, on the other, refugees and their advocates fighting for the right to asylum.

Until the late 1970s, agencies in charge of asylum determination placed high value on the asylum applicant’s account. In the absence of written evidence, applicants were prompted to demonstrate their credibility through a detailed narration of their stories. Evidence provided directly by the asylum seeker was generally accepted at face value (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Starting in the 1980s, however, we entered the current “age of suspicion” (Shuman and Haas, 2015): more restrictive policies were introduced in almost all Western nations (the final destination of most asylum seekers), and asylum agencies reduced their reliance on the credibility of the applicant’s testimony. As a result, asylum depositions increasingly acquired the flavor of cross-examinations, with asylum officers systematically questioning applicants’ narratives, seeking to disprove their accuracy, and at times curtailing their storytelling altogether (Haas and Shuman, this volume; Jacquemet 2010).

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the digitalization of the asylum process has provided state agents and asylum seekers (and their advocates) with new power technologies. In this chapter, I will look in detail at three of these power technologies and their related communicative features: the storing of information on digital devices, the emergence of and reliance on digital translators, and the role of databases and search engines in the management of asylum cases.

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