Abstract

In April 2024, the German parliament decided to introduce a payment card for asylum seekers. Referencing the goals of “reducing bureaucracy” and curbing the “financing of smuggler crime”, the payment card represents a technology designed to enable the provision of social benefits to asylum seekers predominantly without the use of cash. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to grasp the payment card as a “machine” in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, governing the agency and processes of subjectification of refugees. The aim is to demonstrate how the payment card, as an expression of socio-technical relations, enables the modulation of individual freedoms and the stabilisation of prevailing state orders. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's diagnosis of the “control society”, the article hence argues that the payment card is not merely a reaction to challenges in migration policy but also a symbol of the technological transformation of power relations in modern societies. In this light, the analysis highlights how refugees are restricted in their freedom of movement, consumption options, and social integration through the socio-technical instrument of the payment card. With this in mind, the article conceptualises the payment card as a relational artefact—both an expression and a tool of state control policy. This argument is developed in three steps: First, the power-theoretical logic and political function of the payment card will be analysed. Next, the material consequences of the payment card for refugees are examined. Finally, the role of the payment card in the processes of the subjectivation of refugees is explored.