Processing payments, enacting alterity: financial technology in the everyday lives of asylum seekers

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the Asylum Support Enablement (ASPEN) card – a prepayment card provided to UK asylum seekers – enacts their alterity in ways that problematise the techno-optimist narrative of digital technologies as promoters of financial inclusion. Drawing on analysis of 53 documents alongside 21 interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, advocacy organisations and technology providers, the article proceeds in four steps. First, we trace the migration of Prepaid Financial Services’ (PFS) prepayment technology from the humanitarian context of UNHCR’s Cash Assistance Programme in Greece to its adoption in UK state practices, considering what this means for the mobility of policy norms inscribed in digital technologies. Second, building on the concept of ‘alterity processing’, we examine how the UK Home Office discursively co-constructs asylum seekers as ‘deviant subjects’ and its bureaucratic entities as indispensable. Third, we analyse how this co-construction is used to justify asylum seekers’ exclusion from mainstream banking, rendering them dependent on the ASPEN card. Finally, we elucidate how the card’s surveillance, encoded rules, and induced precarity govern asylum seekers’ behaviours. We thus demonstrate how financial technologies – as deployed across humanitarian and statist welfare contexts – engender new lines of marginalisation and forms of social control.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital welfare
• asylum
• migration
• alterity‌
• digital borders

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This research project commenced while both authors were affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, however, it was advanced and prepared for this output at our current institutional affiliations.

2 A point made to us by an anonymous reader in the peer-review process.

3 Although see Coddington (2019) for an examination of the ASPEN card’s predecessor, the Azure card.