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ABSTRACT
Anthropologists and social scientists are regularly asked to submit ‘expert’ reports focusing on social, cultural or political conditions in refugee-producing nation states on behalf of human rights organisations or lawyers representing refugee claimants in the Global North. In this paper I reflect on my own participation in the production of these reports and the cumulative effect of expert documents on sexual orientation and gender identity refugee claims as they accrue in the paper and electronic folders of courts, and state immigration and refugee departments, producing a governmental archive of knowledge on sexual orientation and gendered identity. I argue that these archives reinforce homonationalist discourses which contain a highly delimited – neo-liberal, classed and raced – definition of sexual and gendered identity that is folded into some nation states' discourses of the good immigrant and proper citizen, simultaneously creating its opposite, the bad immigrant and deviant citizen.
Notes
1. Names, locations and other identifying features of lawyers, refugee claimants and other participants or workers in the refugee determination system have been changed in order to protect confidentiality.
2. http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/Eng/resrec/ndpcnd/Pages/index.aspx (accessed 6 January 2014)
3. See Canaday Citation2009 for a discussion of shifting American state policies on sexual citizenship over the course of the twentieth century. Canaday outlines how homosexuality emerged as a category to be regulated over the course of the twentieth century in various state institutions such as immigration, the military and welfare.
4. Due to major changes to the Canadian refugee system initiated in December 2012, there has been a significant decrease in overall numbers of refugee applications. The ‘Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act' introduced a number of changes to the refugee claim process, including a much shorter waiting period between the lodging of the claim and the hearing, the implementation of ‘designated countries of origin’ which will result in an even more expedited claim process for certain refugee claimants and the introduction of mandatory detention for certain groups of refugee claimants. For a critique of this Act, see http://ccrweb.ca/en/refugee-reform.
In interviews with SOGI claimants who had arrived in Canada via the USA (i.e. individuals who left their country of origin and travelled through or temporary resided in the USA prior to migrating across the Canadian border and lodging their refugee claim in Canada), a number said they had been told (via networks of fellow nationals and/or SOGI refugee claimants) that the US government was increasingly supportive of SOGI refugees but Canada had a better reputation for accepting them. While I have not been able to ascertain data pertaining to annual numbers of SOGI refugee applications in the USA, the Obama government has been clear in stating its support for international LGBT rights and improving mechanisms facilitating LGBT refugee resettlement (http://www.state.gov/j/prm/releases/remarks/2012/190280.htm, accessed 8 January 2015)
5. It is important to note that there is a substantial body of anthropological research on western bureaucracies (i.e. Handelman Citation1981, Herzfeld Citation1993; Citation2005); however, much of the focus had been on the organisational cultures of bureaucracies and less on their material objects such as documents.
6. Good notes, ‘most anthropologists are likely to feel somewhat squeamish about having their evidence labelled (as expert witnesses), because many of the most important things they have to say arise out of the hermeneutic interpretation of intersubjective understandings communicated to them by individual informants' (2006:13). In other words, most anthropologists are more comfortable engaging with the context-dependent nuances, political complexities and shifting terrains of sociocultural spaces and experiences. However, American asylum courts and Canadian refugee claim hearings operate with different assumptions about and processes for determining knowledge, facts and truths about social-cultural experience, resulting in what could be viewed as an intercultural, inter-textual gap or problem of translation for the anthropologist as she tries to interpret, translate and communicate her knowledge about an issue, behaviour, person or moral code. Asylum courts and refugee claim hearings are juridical-legal environments where different conceptual frameworks and processes for determining and defining ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ are at play, resulting in what Povinelli (Citation2001) calls a problem of incommensurability for the anthropologist (as well as the refugee claimant, albeit through different registers) – worlds that do not speak to each other, but are forced to do so, and in the process lose something in translation. See below for further discussion on incommensurability.
7. There are a number of different routes through which a refugee application may be lodged and/or processed in Canada and the USA, and the format and content of documents submitted to USCIS and IRB are not identical. However, there are broad similarities between the two systems such as the requirement for claimants to be able to provide documentary evidence substantiating their gendered orientation or sexual identity (i.e. membership in a particular social group) and persecution in their country of origin.
8. For further discussion on the challenges proving one's sexual orientation or gendered identity in refugee claims, see Murray (Citation2011, Citation2014).
9. http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-prepare-affirmative-asylum-application.html accessed 8 January 2015.
10. ibid
11. There are a number of other sections in the Barbados NDP which do not contain any documents or links to documents. These include ‘judiciary, legal and penal systems' ‘media freedoms', ‘religion', ‘nationality, ethnicity and race' and ‘labour, employment and unions'. http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/Eng/ResRec/NdpCnd/Pages/ndpcnd.aspx?pid=6395 accessed 12 December 2013
12. This report also includes sections on ‘Treatment by Society', ‘State Protection' , ‘Treatment by Police' and ‘Support Services', and thus provides the most extensive and detailed information of the three documents listed in this section of the NDP.
13. The argument put forward in my research was that tolerance may apply to some Barbadian citizens but not to others, depending on a number of different factors including socio-economic status, education, religious and/or political affiliation (Murray Citation2012).
14. As noted above, NDPs are updated regularly (approximately every 6–12 months); the date of revision is listed on all NDPs.
15. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status, while discrimination may amount to a violation of human rights, it will not necessarily amount to persecution. As LaViolette notes, the notion of persecution lies at the heart of the definition of refugee, but it is a poorly defined concept (Citation2009: 450).
16. Excerpts from the NDPs of Saint Lucia, Jamaica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, respectively.
17. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada Claimant's Guide. http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/Eng/RefClaDem/Pages/ClaDemGuide.aspx#_Toc340245779 accessed 7 January 2015.