Doctoral Dissertation Research: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum Adjudications

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Abstract for NSF: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum Adjudications Asylum constitutes a core arena for negotiating tensions between the national interests of states and the humanitarian rights of the individuals seeking their protection. The dissertation project examines the ways in which these tensions are negotiated by investigating empirically a significant reconfiguration in the meaning and processing of asylum claims in the United States. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, the project will expand knowledge about the asylum adjudication process. Due to limitations of data, previous studies have yielded a somewhat misleading account of asylum adjudications as inherently inconsistent. In contrast, analyzing newly available data, this research project argues that there is considerable uniformity in how officers frame claims. Applicants are required by the state to align their narratives with the standardized "knowledge" of conflict formed about their country. Deviations from these standardized knowledge often meet resistance. This suggests that a key interpretative stage of asylum adjudications generates heretofore unexpected uniformity and consistency, with direct policy implications for asylum reform. Second, this project addresses theoretical debates concerning the gap between formal commitments to, and compliance with, humanitarianism. Previous studies have approached this question by focusing on the interrelations between humanitarianism and nationalism. This research goes beyond the nationalism-humanitarianism binary and reveals how humanitarianism functions are the organizing principle of an administrative adjudicatory regime. It suggests that the primary challenges of adhering to humanitarian principles in the context of asylum are not only national interests. Rather, it is the diversity of information inherent to the individuation of the adjudication process, which leads asylum officers to rely on default generalizations, obscuring the individual narratives they were supposed to prioritize. The research project addresses current gaps in asylum literature concerning a core stage of the asylum decision-making process, and sets to determine the impact of sheer information overload and ambiguous law, on organizational decision-making, by providing the first mixed method based account of how adjudicators translate individual testimonies of harm into the standardized rubrics of persecution recognized under law. Specifically, it analyzes new and comprehensive data, obtained by filing a Freedom of Information request from the Department of Homeland Security. The data consist of over one million cases adjudicated by the US asylum office between fiscal years 1995 and 2015. This is the first dataset to include such comprehensive information on officers' decisions about applicants' bases of claims. Quantitative analysis of this data is supplemented with participant observations at immigration firms and interviews with asylum officers and immigration attorneys. The findings of this study will shed new light on the workings of the asylum office, one of the largest adjudication systems in the country, and contribute to general sociological understandings of processes of classification and categorization in a constantly changing information environment.