This Haven Is in a Mess : A Punitive INS, Not the Refugees, Abuses Political Asylum

Asylum is being abused. So say U.S. immigration officials commenting on a recent upsurge of Central Americans crossing the South Texas border.

Yes, asylum is being abused--not by the individual applicants, but by the federal immigration authorities who have neglected and misapplied the asylum provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980.

The whole process of asylum, from defining its purpose to administering its paperwork, has become so twisted and defective that basic reforms are needed. Chief among them is removing the administration of asylum from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

By law, political asylum is granted to people who face threats to life or freedom in their home countries. These days, the INS presumes most asylum applicants to be economic migrants who are trying to gain a foothold in the United States. The INS says that a sharp rise in filings--more than 86,000 cases were pending as of last December--is attributable to aliens using asylum to avoid deportation and to obtain permission to work under new immigration controls. The largest groups represented in the filings are Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Cubans, Guatemalans and Poles.

To counter the increase in asylum filings, the INS is adding new deterrent measures to an existing arsenal of policies, including detention and stepped-up interceptions at sea. The agency has restricted the travel of asylum applicants in South Texas and assigned temporary staff to accelerate decisions in Los Angeles and Miami, and itis planning to require that refugees show at the outset that they will be granted asylum in order to be permitted to work.

Additionally, the INS now opposes the issuance of rules that would establish a corps of specially trained asylum officers to decide cases. It also proposes to abolish a unit in the Justice Department that was created to monitor asylum policy and procedures after an incident in 1985 in which a Soviet seaman was forcibly returned to his ship by the Border Patrol.

The INS misconstrues the problem, and the solutions that it proposes are retrogressive and inhumane.

Central Americans flee to the United States for a mix of reasons, including political persecution or economic devastation (which itself can be a consequence of political repression). Certainly, those who have a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their homeland deserve refugee protection.

As Justice Harry A. Blackmun explained in a 1987 Supreme Court decision, the implementation of the Refugee Act requires the INS to end its “years of seemingly purposeful blindness” to appropriate legal standards.

Only about 30 INS examiners are currently involved in deciding asylum cases around the country. These are low-level functionaries who receive little or no instruction on asylum; training materials have not been updated since 1983. Many worthy refugees are denied protection because of agency ineptitude.

Rather than deprive refugees of the opportunity to subsist, rather than seek to deter them by imposing restrictive or punitive measures, our government should invest sufficient resources in the asylum procedure to ensure that claims are fairly and expeditiously determined. The proposed asylum officer corps should be established immediately. Asylum adjudicators should be qualified professionals who are capable of evaluating the merits of cases on humanitarian grounds, without regard to the foreign-policy preferences of the State Department, which frequently dictate the outcome of cases under current procedure. These adjudicators should be trained in refugee law and international relations, and they should be deployed in sufficient numbers to decide cases within a reasonable period of time. Also, the standards that they follow should be published to promote consistent decision-making.

Even more fundamentally, asylum adjudication should be handled by an agency other than INS, perhaps a separate office in the Justice Department. The law-enforcement mentality of the INS is simply incompatible with the humanitarian act of providing asylum.

The current asylum “crisis” is not caused by an increase in the numbers of Central Americans coming to the United States. Rather, it results from the continuing failure of INS to achieve the humanitarian standards necessary to deciding asylum cases. To protect the people who have fled to this country seeking a haven from injustice, a new asylum system is crucial.