Refugee Roulette

by Ramji-Nogales, Jaya

• ISBN13: 9780814740743
• ISBN10: 081474074X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

Through the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States offers the prospect of safety to people who flee to America to escape rape, torture, and even death in their native countries. In order to be granted asylum, however, an applicant must prove to an asylum officer or immigration judge that she has a well-founded fear of persecution in her homeland. The chance of winning asylum should have little if anything to do with the personality of the official to whom a case is randomly assigned, but in a ground-breaking and shocking study, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Andrew I. Schoenholtz, and Philip G. Schrag learned that life-or-death asylum decisions are too frequently influenced by random factors relating to the decision makers. In many cases, the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns the application to an adjudicator. The system, in its current state, is like a game of chance.Refugee Roulette is the first analysis of decisions at all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: the Department of Homeland Security, the immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the United States Courts of Appeals. The data reveal tremendous disparities in asylum approval rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. After providing a thorough empirical analysis, the authors make recommendations for future reform. Original essays by eight scholars and policy makers then discuss the authors’ research and recommendationsContributors: Bruce Einhorn, Steven Legomsky, Audrey Macklin, M. Margaret McKeown, Allegra McLeod, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Margaret Taylor, and Robert Thomas.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xii
Foreword by Senator	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xix
Introduction	p. I
Refugee Roulette
The Asylum Process	p. 11
The Regional Asylum Offices	p. 17
The Immigration Courts	p. 33
The Board of Immigration Appeals	p. 61
The United States Courts of Appeals	p. 77
Conclusions and Policy Recommendations	p. 89
International, Judicial, and Scholarly Perspectives
Refugee Roulette in the Canadian Casino	p. 135
Refugee Roulette: A UK Perspective	p. 164
Consistency, Credibility, and Culture	p. 187
Asylum in a Different Voice? Judging Immigration Claims and Gender	p. 202
Refugee Roulette in an Administrative Law Context: The Déjà Vu of Decisional Disparities in Agency Adjudication	p. 227
Learning to Live with Unequal Justice: Asylum and the Limits to Consistency	p. 250
The Counsel Conundrum: Effective Representation in Immigration Proceedings	p. 286
Methodological Appendix	p. 307
Ninth Circuit Appendix	p. 327
Index	p. 331
About the Authors	p. 335
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