Citizenship and the Performance of Credibility: Audiencing Gender-based Asylum Seekers in U.S. Immigration Courts

Abstract

The Real ID Act of 2005 gave immigration judges more power over determining who is worthy to remain in the United States. One trend to emerge from this development is that judges in asylum cases evaluate the claimants’ credibility rather than the content of the cases in order to expedite their case load. To understand this shift I focus specifically on the conventions of audiencing used by immigration judges to evaluate the credibility performed by asylum seekers. I examine the cases made by women who claim asylum on the basis of gendered violence, as these are among the subjects most impacted by the dynamics of credibility. The argument proffered here is that the possibility of access to U.S. citizenship is increasingly dependent on asylum seekers’ ability to appear coherently credible, grounded on the performance conventions of good speech, narrative rationality, and embodied affect, which are based in exclusionary discourses concerning the proper performances of U.S. citizenship.

Keywords:

• Refugees
• Immigration Judges
• Speaking Well
• Narrative Rationality
• Emotion

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Karma R. Chávez, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for suggestions in crafting this essay

Notes

1. Additionally, asylum applications are channeled into the defensive process when the applicant's affirmative asylum claims are denied or when applications are in violation of visa regulations, such as when applicants have entered the country illegally.

2. Notably, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offered guidelines for hearing gender-based cases in 1995, but these guidelines serve as suggestions to asylum officers and judges, not formal protocol.

3. Interestingly, Niang is not the only individual who could be accused of proffering mis-information in the case. The judge himself confused Niang's home country of Senegal with Sierra Leone in determining the pervasiveness of female genital cutting. Of course, this mistake never factors into the evaluation of the complex circumstances that caused Niang to apply for asylum in the United States.

4. Based on fieldwork experience in Ghana, D. Soyini Madison makes clear that Trokosi is not monolithically performed throughout the Volta region, but that the “religious and cultural practice varied depending upon where the shrine was located. The variation of the practice was largely determined by economic circumstances” (399).

5. Asylum seekers typically flee their home states under extreme circumstances, when it is more important to exit the context, because their lives are threatened, than depart through proper channels or gather evidence to support their asylum case. It is not atypical for a claimant not even to know about the possibility of asylum when she/he flees.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara L. McKinnon

Sara L. McKinnon (PhD, Arizona State University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. A portion of this essay comes from the author's dissertation, advised by Thomas Nakayama