Carol Bohmer

Representing Trauma: Political Asylum Narrative

The trauma narratives told by refugees in their appeal for asylum status in the United States are culturally constructed, based not only on local cultural discourses for talking about grief, tragedy, struggle, and displacement, but also on the legal and bureaucratic cultures of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (B.C.I.S.). On the basis of interviews with asylum seekers and with immigration lawyers and B.C.I.S. officials, we discuss the cultural obstacles of the asylum application process.

PRODUCING EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE IN THE POLITICAL ASYLUM APPLICATION PROCESS 1

The granting of political asylum is implicated in other often competing agendas and discourses, including national security, the obligation to provide safe haven, the histories of past immigrants and asylum seekers, and the criminalization of people who cross borders illegally, for whatever motive. Political asylum serves two sometimes contradictory ends: protection of the state and refuge for the applicant. This contradiction is at the root of the production of ignorance in a process that overtly seeks to generate knowledge. Restricted access to knowledge is part of persecution both as a form of control, and in the classification of knowledge as illicit, covert, or traitorous. We examine the conditions for producing knowledge and ignorance in the political asylum process in which the stories presented by applicants are evaluated by bureaucrats to determine whether they are credible and whether they meet the criteria of a well-founded fear of return to the homeland. We discuss narratives told by both asylum seekers in the United States and the United Kingdom and those who help them through the asylum process.

Gender and cultural silences in the political asylum process

Individuals claiming persecution on the basis of gender or as sexual minorities have faced many obstacles in the political asylum process including additional burdens of proof of identity and of persecution. Based on our own work with political asylum applicants, on legal reports, and on reports by groups providing assistance to asylum seekers, we review the law and the obstacles and consider the conditions underlying and supporting suspicion of the applicants. We observe how particular narratives are rendered untellable in the interrogation process and how the identities of sexual minorities become either invisible or hypervisible.

Your Bribery Is My Networking: Understanding the Meaning of the Exchange of Favors

This chapter focuses on cultural assessments to illustrate the difficulty of evaluating evidence cross culturally. The authors examine the use of bribery and corruption; bribery falls into the category of things that are “illegal” and therefore make the officials suspicious. They assume this is something only people from asylum-sending countries do, though in fact we all do it but we consider it perfectly acceptable and call it “networking” or “making use of contacts.” The authors show that certain kinds of fraudulence are considered offensive and reprehensible (and not credible) even though they are business as usual in the society from which the applicant is fleeing and especially so for someone fleeing persecution.

Victim or Perpetrator

This chapter examines the difficulty of differentiating between victim and perpetrator in some cases. There is no question that there are legitimate asylum seekers in great numbers fleeing violence, but the violence itself, especially in contemporary civil wars, makes it difficult to sharply divide perpetrators and victims. This complicated question of whether someone is a victim or a perpetrator illustrates the high stakes involved in the assessment of asylum claims in the current security environment. The authors examine cases where aggressors self-identify as heroic or as victims themselves, while members of the victim group, in particular in the diaspora, identify them as perpetrators. The authors’ goal is not to provide a panacea or easy solution (they argue there is none) but to elucidate the complexity.

New Forms of Evidence: Membership in a Particular Social Group

The category membership in a particular social group is increasingly used in asylum cases, and presents many challenges for how evidence is assessed. Although this is one of the original Convention grounds, the category has been expanded recently to include new types of claims to accommodate the recognition that people are persecuted for a broader range of reasons than was anticipated in the original plan, especially as a basis for claims on the basis of gender and LGBT persecution.We focus on the category of particular social group (PSG) because it has generated significant challenges to assessing deception. First, determining what constitutes a social group is difficult; and second, determining whether an individual applicant belongs to that group proves problematic. The authorities have used standard techniques that are often unhelpful for assessing credibility to make these determinations.

Telling the True Story

In this chapter, the authors examine the role of narrative in the asylum hearing process. In the absence of documentation, these narratives of what happened are a primary form of evidence and, thus, a focal point for suspicion. Narrative is a culturally specific form; how much description is given, and when it is given, whether at the beginning or in the middle of an account, differs according to cultural conventions. In some cases, asylum applicants fail to offer enough contextual information to explain what might otherwise look like a discrepancy. Although it is impossible to know with any certainty that a narrative is fraudulent, it is possible to identify some of the dimensions of narrative that are helpful for understanding discrepancies. The authors use discourse analysis to better understand the complexities of testimony, and the ways in which “truth” and “lies” are framed and perceived.

Science and Technology as a Way of Determining Credibility

In this chapter, the authors examine the efforts by many immigration officials to quantify what is in fact soft data. The authorities, especially in the UK, try to find what they consider to be more “scientific” evidence to question asylum narratives, by using tools such as language analysis, bone age tests, DNA, medical exams, as well as supporting evidence from experts. Many of these “scientific” tools have been discredited as unworkable or inappropriate in asylum claims. The body is also increasingly used as evidence, for example, scars resulting from torture, which increasingly require additional documentation, and the requirement for additional certificates or other authoritative expertise has served to shift what counts as truth and evidence in the asylum process.

The Uncomfortable Meeting Grounds of Different Vulnerabilities: Disability and the Political Asylum Process

Abstract: Political asylum is based on a discourse of rescue that corresponds in part to discussions of precarity, interdependence, and mutual vulnerabilities in transnational feminist work. Although political asylum can be seen as a response to a human rights solicitation, this solicitation is often refused, resulting in deportation rather than asylum for most applicants. Individuals who claim persecution on account of disability face additional obstacles and are caught between conflicting discourses of rescue, exacerbated by their being both invisible and hypervisible within the political asylum system. Building on our earlier work on discourses of refusal within the political asylum process, we examine how, consistent with disability rights discourses, the refused individuals themselves refuse the narratives and subject positions assigned to them. Further, we consider how the refusal of rescue itself participates in the maintenance of asymmetrical transnational power relations.