Rejecting Refugees

Political Asylum in the 21st Century

Carol Bohmer, Amy Shuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415773751
• eBook ISBN: 9781135977351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many nations recognize the moral and legal obligation to accept people fleeing from persecution, but political asylum applicants in the twenty-first century face restrictive policies and cumbersome procedures. So, what counts as persecution? How do applicants translate their stories of suffering and trauma into a narrative acceptable to the immigration officials? How can asylum officials weed out the fake from the genuine without resorting to inappropriate cultural definitions of behaviour?

Using both in depth accounts by asylum applicants and interviews with lawyers and others involved, this book takes the reader on a journey through the process of applying for asylum in both the United States and Great Britain. It describes how the systems address the conflicting needs of the state to protect their citizens from terrorists and the influx of hordes of unwelcome economic migrants, while at the same time adhering to their legal, moral and treaty obligations to provide safe haven for those fleeing persecution.

Rejecting Refugees is an insightful and fresh evaluation of the obstacles asylum applicants face and the cultural, procedural, and political discrepancies in the political asylum process. This makes it ideal reading to students and scholars of political science, international relations, sociology, law and anthropology.

1
No more huddled masses

Max Zisman (his real name) arrived in the US in 1901 from Lithuania, at the age of 31. He brought with him his entire family, including his wife and two children, his parents, and his eight siblings and their spouses and children. At his point of entry, in Boston, he faced a battery of health tests, but no one asked him to prove his identity, account for his political affiliations, or even explain why he had left. No one wanted to know why he was afraid of being forced into the Russian army, why didn’t he want to serve, was he a deserter, what would happen to him if he were to return? In fact, he did not face certain death or torture in Lithuania, although few young men in his village ever returned from service in the Czar’s army. The truth is that Max Zisman (who was Amy’s great-grandfather), was searching for a better life, and his story, like that of so many immigrants of his time, is about both escaping from a dangerous political situation and searching for greater economic opportunities. Berti Bohmer (his real name) was a Viennese Jew. On August 1, 1938 (the Germans were already in Vienna) he sent his wife and sister, Anny and Mitzi, out of Vienna on a train, with no money. They had been given permits to go to Britain as domestics – Anny as a cook and Mitzi as a servant – by a rich English woman (with no humanitarian motives). They tried without success to get a

permit to go to the US. Hitler entered Prague in March 1939. Berti needed a permit to leave Prague, which he managed to get after three futile attempts. He was finally successful because he met a German soldier, a high-ranking Nazi, who threw Berti into a small room, but then said that he recognized Berti as he knew his father and his father had been good to him. So he arranged for the permit for Berti to leave. He left two days before war was declared, crossing the Dutch border on a train full of German soldiers who thought he was English as he didn’t talk to them. Mitzi had applied for permits for Berti (who had been a businessman in Vienna) to be a farmer and for Anny to be a cook in Sussex. Berti was then interned as an alien, first in Scotland and then on the Isle of Man for six months where he learnt to cook. Mitzi joined the army. Berti and Anny worked in Britain until 1947. After the war, Berti made a number of trips back to Vienna trying to reclaim his property, which he ultimately succeeded in doing. They moved back to Vienna permanently in 1949. Berti and Anny (who are Carol’s uncle and aunt) were given refuge in the UK from the persecution and almost certain death they would have suffered at the hands of the Nazis had they stayed in Vienna during the war. The rest of the family were not so lucky. With the exception of Carol’s parents, Gusti and Hugh, who fled to New Zealand from Czechoslovakia in May 1939, they all perished in Auschwitz. Henri (not his real name, unlike Max and Berti whom we do not need to protect), is an asylum seeker of the twenty-first century. He is a refugee from the Central African Republic, who has no possibility of returning to his homeland. He is an educated man with an advanced university degree, and in his homeland he was active in opposition politics. In fact he was slated to hold high office had the coup he was involved in succeeded. When it failed, he went into hiding, in fear of his life. Unable to find him, his political enemies killed his father, his wife and two small children. Henri had no idea what had happened until later. Today he bears the guilt of these deaths, as well as of the shooting of his brother and the beating of his mother, not to mention the exile of other family

members. They and he attribute all this horror to his having been active in a failed coup attempt. Henri is applying for political asylum. He is not so much looking for a better life as trying to avoid the fate that would await him should he return to the Central African Republic. Life holds little promise for him now that he has lost much of his family and is estranged from the rest of it. His claim is based on his “well-founded fear of persecution” because of his political activity. When Carol first met him, he had been in the US for several months as a student at a local university. He was shabbily dressed and barely able to communicate because he was so traumatized by what had happened to him. His student visa was part of an effort by the leader of his political group to get him and some other activists out of the country to save their lives. When the university had to deny him admission for the second semester because he couldn’t pay the fees, they referred him to the agency with which Carol was working. Carol worked with Henri over a period of several months, preparing his asylum application, through many difficult and sometimes tearful sessions in which he was forced to relive the horrors of his terrible experience. Tragically, the more ghastly his experience, the “better” his case appears to the immigration authorities. So Carol had to keep asking, “What exactly happened to your wife? How do you know she was raped? Was your father killed first and then dismembered, or the other way around?” By forcing him into going over this experience, we built his case. While he wept at his loss, Carol made notes on each horrific episode. If the details are unclear, his case is weaker. At the interview, the asylum officer interviewing him would be likely to view this vagueness as a sign that he had made the whole thing up, which is the most common reason applications such as Henri’s are denied. So we went over and over his story, hoping to prevent his being caught out in an incorrect detail by the interviewing officer.

Since Max Zisman arrived in the US about a hundred years ago, the US has moved from being a nation that welcomed the huddled masses with open arms to one frantically trying to keep its borders secure by allowing only a select few to enter. Every applicant for immigration or asylum is a potential terrorist. When Barney Shuman fled the Czar’s army last century, neither the US nor the UK had an official category of political asylum. Berti and his family, who would have qualified, instead had to rely mostly on good luck and perseverance to escape persecution. They were lucky to get a visa as part of the UK’s half-hearted program to accept a few refugees fleeing Hitler (Schuster, 2003:89). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political asylum wasn’t a necessary category because people didn’t have to justify their claim to admission. In the US, until the 1920s, anyone in reasonable health was allowed to immigrate (with the notable exception of the Chinese, the subject of a special racist exclusion statute in 1882, and the Japanese, by treaty). Today we have a category for the likes of Henri, but we are frightened to use it except in the most obvious and sympathetic cases. We fear that if we use it too enthusiastically, we will open the floodgates to all the miserable, needy, people fleeing war or crisis, so common in our current world. So we quiz asylum applicants endlessly, to convince ourselves that they are really fleeing persecution and not lying to us so they can slip into a safer country in search of a better life. The whole process is riddled with the fallout from this fear. We are not arguing that the asylum system is never misused by people who are not really fleeing persecution, but rather that the fear of the “bogus” asylum seeker permeates the system to the detriment of genuine asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are guilty until proven innocent.

We make rules to ensure a legal, fair process for asylum applications, and then we enforce them in ways that minimize the number of people eligible for asylum. We say we are concerned about processing cases in a timely manner, but we provide the immigration agencies with insufficient money to achieve this goal. We also have an elaborate system of hearings and court appearances but they are weighted against the asylum seekers, and we are careful to appoint judges to the courts and appeals board who are cynical and reluctant to grant asylum (Bernstein, 2006; Liptak, 2005). We keep tightening the law to make it harder and harder for asylum seekers to be successful in their claims.

Why do we treat asylum seekers this way? It is because we are deeply ambivalent about our responsibility for providing safe haven to anyone who needs it. On the one hand, the US has a history of taking in the world’s “tired, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” The UK has had a “right to asylum” since the early twentieth century and has taken in some refugees over the years. Both have accepted the 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol on refugees. On the other hand, we have limited concern for those suffering as a result of wars which are far away and in parts of the world about which many of us know nothing and care less. It is difficult for many Americans or Britons to empathize with the victims. How many readers know that there has been a war festering in Sudan for well over 20 years, of which the current crisis in Darfur is only one part, and that people have been fleeing persecution in significant numbers? Or that religious minorities are routinely persecuted in countries ranging from Uganda to Pakistan? Or that, in many countries, frequently women who are married to political activists are raped just because they are there when government forces round up their husbands?

It is not only the policies but the cultural dimensions of border crossing that have changed. Along with requirements for passports, procedures for obtaining visas, and various forms of border checks, there are institutions producing fake passports, media reports of remarkable border crossings, and informal networks assisting people in various ways. Not all borders are the same, and some countries have internal check points, refugee camps, and less visible borders, as well as forms of transport that present opportunities for greater anonymity. Not only the informal networks and practices but also the state strategies for controlling borders have cultural dimensions. A cultural approach to the political asylum process can help us to understand the conditions in which some individuals and groups of people seek political asylum. Our interviews with asylum seekers point to the need to take apart our assumptions about migration, both the idea that people move from one stable place to another and the idea that the association among people, language, culture, and land is stable and uninterrupted.

As we shall see in later chapters, an individual faces a number of obstacles when seeking asylum. These obstacles are practical, legal, and cultural. So, in addition to having to run the gauntlet of a daunting bureaucracy with complex laws and regulations, asylum seekers often find their applications stymied because their claims are misinterpreted as a result of cultural and political barriers. We will show the many ways in which the cultural predispositions of asylum officers and judges influence (and distort) their understanding of the details of a particular claim. Couple this with the general ambivalence toward asylum we mentioned, and many applicants with good claims fall through the cracks. Some of them are forced to return to the horrors of their homeland from which they have fled; others wait in detention, often in the company of ordinary criminals, for months or even years until their claims are dealt with by the system. Some commit suicide while waiting; one UK asylum seeker who tried to hack himself to death left a note which said “You have to kill yourself in this country to prove that you would be killed in your own country” (Moorehead, 2005:163).

In those rare situations where an individual case is picked up by the media, we learn enough to identify and feel sympathy. Take, for example, Fauziya Kassindja, whose story we will tell in Chapter 4. She escaped from her small village in Togo on what would have been her wedding day, to avoid FGM (female genital mutilation, a process which is customary in many parts of Africa) (Kassindja, 1998). As we will discuss later at greater length, FGM falls into a nebulous category that includes issues of cultural practices, the rights to state sovereignty, and political persecution based on gender. Fauziya first fled to Germany, but then came to the United States, where she had relatives and where she spoke the language. She used a borrowed passport, which she told the authorities about when she arrived at Newark airport. She was handcuffed and sent to jail to await a hearing. In jail, she was treated like a criminal, and was moved from detention center to prison after a riot, ending up in a maximum security cell with an American criminal. Eventually, she acquired a lawyer (a luxury for those in her position, though he handed the case over to a law student) and had a hearing before a judge. The judge treated both the law student and Fauziya with impatience and insensitivity, and immediately denied the asylum application because he found Fauziya’s disjointed and superficial story unconvincing (he had not allowed her to go into the details of FGM). She was again jailed pending an appeal.

So far this case is pretty typical. What is really unusual is what happened next. The law student persuaded her teacher, Karen Musalo, a leading authority on asylum law, to take on the case. Musalo made it her business to make sure that this case received widespread publicity. Articles about Fauziya, including one by Gloria Steinem, appeared in newspapers such as the Boston Globe and on the front page of the New York Times. On the day the Times story appeared, Musalo was contacted by a representative of the film star Sally Field, who was so outraged by what had happened to Fauziya that she wanted to help. When a case gets picked up like this, with media coverage and the support of public figures, the result is a successful asylum claim. So, Fauziya was granted asylum and also received the traditional perks of one who hits the front page, appearances on talk shows and a lucrative book contract.

Fauziya has a British counterpart whose story also hit the headlines, and as a result her asylum denial was overturned. Mende Nazer, as we will learn in more detail in Chapter 6, was enslaved for eight years in Sudan, her home country. She was sent to Britain to work in the household of a member of the Sudanese Embassy in London, where her treatment was not much better. She escaped and claimed asylum, which was initially denied. She was befriended by a journalist who publicized her case in the British media and worked with her on writing a book, which became a bestseller on its publication in 2003 (Nazer and Lewis). The British Home Office specifically recognized the power of publicity in its decision:

In view of the widespread publication of her book and the high profile given to her claims both in Sudan and elsewhere, I am satisfied that Ms. Nazer would face difficulties which would bring her within the scope of the 1951 convention were she to be returned to Sudan. For these reasons it has been decided to recognize her as a refugee and grant her Indefinite Leave to Remain in the United Kingdom.

Interestingly, in both Fauziya Kassindja and Mende Nazer’s cases, media attention was itself taken into account in determining asylum status. As we will observe, visibility and profile are crucial elements of asylum cases; visibility can make an applicant’s situation more dangerous, as the officials recognized in Ms. Nazer’s case. Also, visibility can give the officials heightened and more precise awareness of an applicant’s situation and can serve as a corrective for the officials’ cultural assumptions or lack of understanding.

Those whose cases don’t hit the headlines may vegetate in detention until they are deported back to the country from which they fled or, if they are a bit luckier, like Henri, spend the time awaiting the result of the application living hand to mouth, ineligible for any government support or even permission to work legally until six months after the application is filed. In the UK, while applicants are usually provided with benefits, they are not permitted to work while awaiting the outcome of their applications.

Asylum policies are often carried out arbitrarily. So much depends on where the person comes from. If an applicant is unfortunate enough to be persecuted by a government that is a friend of the US or the UK, the chances of getting asylum are minimal. If, on the other hand, they come from an “enemy” country, they stand a much better chance. In the bad old days of communism, those fleeing persecution from communist countries had no trouble getting asylum either in the US or the UK, which shared the US enthusiasm for anticommunists. Those fleeing countries which the US was involved in supporting, like Guatemala, or countries with which we have fragile but important trade relationships, such as China, may find it more difficult to claim persecution. A recent study showed that between 2000 and 2004, applicants from Cuba were granted asylum 82 percent of the time, while the figures of those from China (25 percent), Haiti (11 percent) and El Salvador (3 percent) were much lower (Bernstein and Santora, 2005). For example, in 1993 the ship Golden Venture ran aground in New York Harbor with 296 Chinese aboard; they were incarcerated for years until political activists and folklorists brought them to the attention of President Clinton, in part through an exhibition of their folded paper sculptures, made in prison (Westerman, 1996). Some were fleeing China’s sterilization policies (they had more than one child and faced or had already experienced forced sterilization). The US has been reluctant to offend the Chinese government by categorizing those policies as political persecution, even though it has now decided that those fleeing the one-ch...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 No more huddled masses
• 2 The system
• 3 Are you who you say you are?
• 4 Did this really happen to you?
• 5 Politics gets personal
• 6 The personal is political
• 7 Safe haven for whom?
• Bibliography
• Index