Hugo Bohmer (Carolâs father) grew up in what was then Czechoslovakia . As a young man, he worked in Germany in the 1930s, but his employer was forced to fire him because he was a Jew. He spent a lot of time in the late 1930s looking for a visa to get out of Europe. For someone without assets, connections, or family living outside Europe, this was a difficult proposition, more so as the 1930s progressed.
In the end, he was able to get a visa to New Zealand . He did this by telling the government that he was a farmer, because New Zealand was giving visas to farmers. In fact, although he had grown up on a farm, he was a textile engineer and had never had any intention of being a farmer. To obtain the visa, he also had to show the New Zealand government that he had some assets, so he borrowed the money from an acquaintance for a fee, put it in his bank account, and then having provided the bank statement to the New Zealand visa authorities, gave it back to the person he had borrowed it from. Visa in hand, he and his wife, Augusta (Carolâs mother), left Europe in May 1939. All the other members of their families subsequently died in the Holocaust. Hugoâs visa was obtained on the basis of two lies , without which Carol would not be around to write this book.
Hugo Bohmer did not obtain a visa as a refugee because such visas did not exist at the time. He would have had a valid claim as a refugee who fled because he feared persecution as a Jew . Not until after the Holocaust , which showed the tragedy of not providing a safe haven for those who were persecuted, did the international community come together and pass an international convention, called the Convention on the Status of Refugees , in 1951. That Convention defines a refugee as someone who, âowing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.â This definition is the basis for all asylum claims in the 148 countries that have signed on to the Convention or the Protocol, an expansion agreed to in 1967. The Convention was seen as a way of ensuring that should there be crises in future, countries would not stand by as they did in the Holocaust, but rather provide a home for genuine refugees.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and the decision about who is a genuine refugee is the central concern in asylum law and policy. How do we know that an applicant for asylum is telling the truth ? What evidence is enough for us to make that decision? The word âcredibilityâ is used constantly as the holy grail to differentiate the truth tellers from the liars. But as Hugoâs story shows, it is often necessary to lie , or at the very least to shade the truth . Was Hugo, the son of a farmer, who had been required to spend time working on his fatherâs farm, a âfarmerâ as defined by the New Zealand government? Or was his claim an outright lie ? The story of Jews using deceptive means to cross borders in the early days of the Holocaust are by now familiar and include lying to border guards and lying about financial means to gain a sponsor (Stapinski 2017) . Our book is based on the premise that there is an important difference between the lies desperate people tell so they can escape persecution to find a safe haven and the lies told by people attempting to game the system. Lying is widespread, but the lies vary greatly, from small, insignificant lies , to the use of forged documents, to lies that are central to the asylum claim, for example, people who claim to be victims of persecution, but who are in fact the perpetrators. In this book, we identify the methods used by the officials to differentiate between different kinds of lies , and we discuss how the climate of suspicion influences officialsâ decision. By failing to differentiate among the varieties of deception, officials sometimes disregard the difference between lies that count and those that do not (or should not) in the assessment of the legitimacy of asylum claims.
Weâre writing at a time when asylum policy has resulted in proportionately fewer and fewer acceptances each year, and increasing numbers of applicants are overwhelming the system. However, as we will argue, the numbers do not tell the whole story of what could be an impending breakdown in political policy practice. Understanding how the system conceptualizes deception is an important key that exposes often unarticulated attitudes toward particular groups of asylum seekers.1
Our book, focusing primarily on the UK and the US, also examines what the asylum authorities do about lying. Are any lies acceptable? If so, which ones? The tendency in host countries nowadays is to take a very tough line with any lie , however small and insignificant, as a way of limiting the numbers of people who successfully claim asylum. In this book, we also discuss methods used by the authorities in their attempts to decide whether someone is lying or not. How can we tell if someone is lying ? In fact, research shows that we are generally not very good at telling if someone is lying (Gray 2011) . This includes those whose job it is to assess the veracity of narratives, like judges and police officers (see, e.g. Vrij 2008; Ekman et al. 1999; Stromwall and Granhag 2003; Hartwig et al. 2004) .
The book is also about evidence. What counts as evidence? Is an applicantâs narrative enough? What about the veracity of documents? We also examine how the requirements for evidence have changed over the last couple of decades, as asylum has become harder and harder to obtain. The law generally says that an asylum seekerâs narrative should be enough, but the reality is that without some supporting documentation and other evidence, an application is often doomed to fail.
We also discuss the possible motivations for lying . For some applicants, the necessity of deception may be self-evident. Carolâs father lied about being a farmer and having some assets without which he would not have been granted a visa. But the motivation to deceive is not always so clear. Our research has found that often people lie even when the truth would have been more likely to result in a successful asylum claim. We assume they do so because they do not know what evidence is likely to support their claim and make assumptions, often unfounded, about what the authorities want to hear. We have also heard about people who get stuck in their lies when the strategic thing to do would be to accept that they had made a mistake and explain how that had happened. As we discuss, facing the challenge of relating unimaginable atrocities, legitimate asylum seekers sometimes embellish or exaggerate their accounts, perhaps, as some scholars explain, because the inconceivable âhad to be described as greater in scope in every retellingâ (Gessen 2017) . Are these exaggerations evidence of suffering (thus confirming the applicantâs legitimacy) or of deception (justifying a denial)?
Over the last decade, many political asylum scholars and policy makers have pointed to the issue of credibility as a fundamental feature of the success or failure of asylum claims. The literature includes extensive discussion about how we can determine whether the applicant is telling the truth or not (Shaw and Witkin 2004: Herlihy et al. 2012; Granhag et al. 2005) , which is something we can never know. We have no idea of how many people get asylum based on false information, or how many are denied because they are thought not to be credible when, in fact, they are telling the truth. Many in the field assert that there is a âculture of disbeliefâ in which the authorities assume that everyone is lying . As Didier Fassin points out, âThere was a time, not so long ago, when the relationship between the administration and the claimants was one of trust. It has reversed into mistrustâ (2013: 48). We challenge two faulty assumptions prevalent in asylum discourses in the media, both those who assume that everyone is lying and those who assume that asylum applicants never lie . We acknowledge that some applicants lie , attempt to game the system, and/or use deceptive means to gain asylum. However, the current practices for differentiating between legitimate and fraudulent applicants are seriously flawed and require careful scrutiny of what counts as evidence, how evidence is evaluated, and what forms of supporting evidence is useful.
One of the problems lies in the origin of the system, created to address issues post-World War II, as embodied in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees , and the 1967 Protocol, which removed previous temporal and geographical restrictions. The Convention was focused on issues that were seen as important at the time and was originally designed by European states for European refugees. During the Cold War , the system worked reasonably well, when refugee-producing states and those providing asylum were ideological opponents who welcomed refugees for political reasons (Hathaway 1990) . The officials just assumed that those fleeing the communist bloc to the West were fleeing communism, which made them perfect candidates for asylum, especially in the anti-communist USA. Since the end of the Cold War , for the most part, the political benefits no longer exist, and refugee-producing countries may just as easily be political or economic âfriendsâ as enemies. At particular moments of conflict, groups of people fleeing violence in failed states (or communism, in the case of Cuba) have been admitted without proving individually targeted persecution. Examples include Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria. These exceptions are temporary, and as we will discuss, asylum seekers sometimes attempt to pass as a member of a group more likely to be approved. Additionally, Brad Blitz argues that these shifts in political alignments have produced the current contradictions between border protection and the humanitarian goals underlying asylum (2017: 383). Some argue that preference is still given to people from particular countries facing particular forms of persecution. Chang and Lithicum report:
Statistics show that an immigrantâs chance of winning asylum depends largely on where he or she is from. In 2012, more than 10,000 people from China were granted asylum, compared with just 126 Mexicans and 234 Hondurans, according to federal data. Immigration court figures, which do not include cases approved in an initial hearing by an asylum officer, show a success rate of nearly 50% for Chinese versus 1% for Mexicans (2013, np).
Claimants today have to take into consideration how their cases will be viewed within current political circumstances and changing global attitudes toward those circumstances. Except for the few exceptions of those fleeing extensive civil war mentioned earlier, people have to prove that they personally have been persecuted and that this persecution was because they were part of a recognized persecuted group. Someone who flees civil war and arrives in another country where they apply for asylum must prove not only the existence of general persecution but also that they were at risk as individuals because of one of the listed bases of persecution, which include race...