Don’t Close the Door to Genuine Refugees : Asylum: Reform is needed, but the Administration plan would beef up enforcement at the expense of the truly needy.

The U.S. asylum system is in trouble. But rather than focus on ways of improving it that will benefit genuine refugees, the Clinton Administration has announced significant new restrictions that may deny protection to such refugees.

Earlier this month, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner announced a two-year strategy to curb unauthorized immigration. The plan calls for the expenditure of more than $300 million to deploy more than 1,000 Border Patrol agents in California and Texas, expedite the removal of criminal aliens, strengthen the enforcement of sanctions on employers who hire aliens not authorized to work and make access to asylum more difficult.

Asylum reform is to be specifically accomplished by charging at least a $130 filing fee, withholding work permission for for six months, linking the asylum process to formal deportation hearings, streamlining procedures and doubling the number of immigration officers and judges who handle claims. The priority is enforcement at the expense of genuine refugees. This emphasis on enforcement, however, raises basic questions about whether the INS should continue to have responsibilities for the asylum program.

What this plan ignores is that refugees are not illegal immigrants. Nor does our law treat them as such--on its face. Refugees flee political, religious and ethnic oppression by regimes whose values are often antithetical to those of modern democracies. They generally turn to the closest safe haven they can reach. Of the world’s 18 million refugees, most are in Africa and Asia. Relatively few make their way to the United States.

There is indeed an asylum crisis here, but it is mainly a lack of commitment by the authorities. The Refugee Act of 1980 required the attorney general to establish an asylum procedure to protect those refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries who made their way to the United States.

But the interim system established in 1980 was illusory. Only in 1991 was a permanent system established with a corps of professional INS asylum officers to decide claims. But inadequate implementation destined the new system to be overwhelmed. INS was able to complete only 34,513 of the 150,386 claims it received in fiscal year 1993; projections for 1994 are not much more comforting--only 10,836 of the 36,808 claims received in the first three months of 1994 were completed. By October of this year, 150 asylum officers will face a backlog of more than 450,000 claims. These meager resources are dwarfed by the size of staffs devoted to asylum adjudication in Sweden (800), the Netherlands (750) and France (600), which have only a fraction of the claimants.

The Administration’s plans for asylum are steeped in enforcement priorities and pose threats to genuine refugees. Unduly high filing fees will deny access to refugees seeking asylum, particularly since any fee-waiver provision will be implemented by an agency notoriously insensitive to such financial provisions. The categorical six-month ban on asylum applicants receiving employment authorization will undoubtedly victimize many genuine refugees who will have difficulties sustaining themselves here. This is so, particularly in light of the announced enhancement to the employer sanctions provisions. The Administration is telling bona fide refugees, “We welcome you to our shores, but only if you can survive without a legal way to secure food, clothing and shelter.”

The time has come for true asylum reform. Specifically, a single office should be established within the Department of Justice and made responsible for all phases of asylum decision-making--screening, formal status determinations and appeals. This office should be separate from the INS and the immigration court. In this manner, the humanitarian responsibilities associated with refugees would be divorced from immigration enforcement functions to the greatest extent possible.

This unitary asylum model brings other desirable benefits. The single office would avoid the considerable delays currently caused by bureaucratic complications, such as file transfers. Specialization throughout the system would enhance productivity. Moreover, the estimated expenditures necessary to fund this system would be no more than the $64 million projected for the attorney general’s planned asylum adjustments.

The Administration’s announced strategy does an injustice to legitimate refugees. These people come to the United States at the most vulnerable time in their lives. Certainly, our system must separate out those who are not genuine. But we should not punish the true refugees in this delicate exercise. We should treat those fleeing persecution with the dignity they deserve and without compromising their human rights any further.