INS Trims Red Tape for Political Asylum

With a new immigration law soon to go into effect, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has reduced thousands of political asylum cases generated by the 1980 Refugee Act to a mere trickle.

The INS started its rigorous program two years ago to eliminate the crushing backlog of cases in anticipation of the new immigration law, which officials had thought would be approved some time that year.

The law was finally approved last Nov. 6 and will take effect May 3.

“When I got my job as INS district director for examinations in the San Francisco office in 1983,” Philip Waters said, “I inherited 9,000 unresolved asylum cases. Now we handle 20 or 30 cases a month.”

San Francisco is the immigration service’s district headquarters for 49 Northern California counties.

Many Wanted Asylum

The 1980 act made it possible for someone to apply for asylum and get a temporary work permit while the INS reviewed the case. But so many people wanted asylum and there were so few people to work on the cases that thousands of cases were unresolved by 1983, Waters said.

“It used to take so long for the agency to process the applications that people who came here to apply knew they would not be deported right away,” Waters said.

“People knew we couldn’t adjudicate their cases, so they were using it as a way to get employment authorization.”

The San Francisco office trained a large number of INS employees in 1984 to handle the cases and eventually made a decision on every case, Waters said.

Fewer people apply now because the applications are processed much more quickly, he said.

“A person who wants to apply for asylum can get an immediate interview and if they present a non-frivolous case,” he said, “they will get work authorization while their case is being processed.

“A non-frivolous case means that on the face of it, the person seems to have a legitimate fear of returning to his or her country,” Waters said.

Cases Can Take Years

The average asylum case takes four or five months to decide, but if a person is put under deportation proceedings and goes through all possible appeals, it can take up to six years, he said.

Another reason why the INS now has so few asylum cases may be that the attorneys who defend immigration cases say they discourage clients from applying for asylum.

“I certainly don’t advise anyone to apply for asylum unless they have a clear-cut, outstanding case,” attorney James Mayock said.

“Otherwise you’re just subjecting clients to deportation proceedings and they might just as well wait until the immigration service comes to them.”

But the new immigration law will change that somewhat, Mayock said, because it fines employers if they hire undocumented workers. That means workers must have work authorization and the only way to get it is to apply for asylum.

“We hope many of these people will qualify for amnesty under the new law.”

The new law will grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants who can prove they entered the United States before Jan. 1, 1982, and will also punish employers who knowingly employ undocumented workers.

Waters said most people applying for asylum in the San Francisco office are from Iran or El Salvador.

If a person is given a temporary work authorization, which is good for one year, and something happens in his own country during that time, Waters said, the person is no longer a refugee and the INS denies a renewal of authorization and asylum.

The 1980 act defined a refugee as a person who is unwilling or unable to return to his or her country “because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”