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ABSTRACT
This article examines the development and application of the inherently ambiguous screening category – membership in a particular social group - in US asylum law after the Cold War. I draw on interviews with frontline asylum officers, high-level policy officials and immigration lawyers, as well as unpublished administrative data on asylum applications filed between 1995 and 2015. I find that pressures toward standardisation and against use of overly broad asylum categories, led the asylum agency to impose considerable constraints on applications of the ambiguous screening category ‘particular social group’ category. At the same time, agency attempts to regulate and standardise the use of the category are never fully successful: since 1995 there has been a consistent increase in the number of asylum claims categorised under this category. These findings advance current studies of contemporary US asylum policy on the extent to which an ideologically neutral refugee definition is a concept with integrity or rather the product of the exclusionary policies of the institutions in which it is applied.
Acknowledgements
My research for this article received support from the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. I am indebted to Ann Orloff for her mentorship and valuable comments. My deep gratitude also goes to John Hagan and Ron Levi for their keen insights and meticulous reading. For valuable comments on previous drafts I thank Savina Balasubramanian, Carol Heimer, Michèle Lamont, Liz Onasch and Jane Pryma. I am grateful to participants of the Comparative Inequality and Inclusion Cluster at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, and members of the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University. The comments by the anonymous reviewers have also been extremely helpful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 USCIS Administrative Data, on file with author.
1 Applicants can also apply for asylum defensively through immigration court. A defensive applicant is one who applies for asylum after having been apprehended by DHS and placed in removal proceedings in immigration court.
2 These include that the proposed group be socially distinct (Re C-A Citation2006) and defined with particularity ((Matter of S-E-G- Citation2008); (Matter of E-A-G- Citation2008)).
3 These include social groups characterised by family membership, sexual orientation, and gender (in combination with nationality).
4 The question of why these groups became institutionalised and not others is beyond the scope of this article. Interview data nonetheless suggest that advocacy groups have played an important role in this process.
5 I define principle asylum source countries as countries from which applicants constitute a minimum of 4% of all applicants filing for asylum. Between 1995 and 2015 the following countries met this definition: China, Colombia, El-Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, India, Guatemala, Mexico and Somalia.
6 From USCIS data, on file with author.
7 Matter of A-T-, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Retrieved March 29, 2019 (https://cgrs.uchastings.edu/our-work/matter-t).
8 See 2015 U.S. Department of State Human Rights Reports on The Gambia, Guinea and Mali.
9 Affirmative Asylum Procedures Manual, Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate (RAIO), USCIS, May 2016, available at Affirmative Asylum Procedures Manual [accessed 22 March 2019].
10 USCIS Administrative Data, on file with author.
11 See (Re C-A Citation2006); (Matter of S-E-G Citation2008); (Matter of E-A-G- Citation2008).
12 Nexus-Particular Social Group: Training Module Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate, USCIS, 7/27/2015, p. 36; Matter of A-M-E- & J-G-U- 2007.
13 See (Crespin-Valladares v. Holder Citation2011); (Martinez-Seren v. Holder Citation2012).
14 USCIS Administrative Data, on file with author.
15 See Center for Gender and Refugee Studies Website, available at https://cgrs.uchastings.edu/news/cgrs-files-suit-seeking-information-sessions%E2%80%99-intervention-matter-b [accessed March 29, 2019].