‘P.O.V.’ Explores Anguish, Complexity of Political Asylum

Often lost in all the hoopla over the Elian Gonzalez case is the fact that it is a custody battle rather than a political asylum issue. He is a little boy who lost his mother, not, as immigration law defines asylum status, a refugee who cannot return home because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution.”

To see how political asylum really works outside the pressures of partisan politics, intense media scrutiny and the passions of the Cuban American community, viewers can turn to “Well-Founded Fear,” a PBS documentary that is part of its “P.O.V.” series and airing tonight on KCET and KVCR. The filmmakers--the husband-and-wife team of Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini--were allowed unprecedented access to interviews between U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service case officers and asylum seekers. What they’ve uncovered is a process that is sometimes fair, frequently arbitrary and, too often, appalling.

“We started to make this film because we had a real [point of view],” says Camerini, who has made documentaries about women’s rights in India, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and religious life in America. “The conventional definition of refugee status is that civilized nations promise not to refuse. It was great during the Cold War because they didn’t let anybody out. Now the Cold War is over, everybody is on the move, there are lots more people in trouble, what is our relationship to this ideal? This country has a complicated set of relationships to human rights, to an idea that other states are responsible in certain kinds of ways. All that stuff, our image of ourselves, due process, is wrapped up in this little process.”

Though there are matters of law to contend with, “this little process” really boils down to whether the applicants are telling the truth. Some of them clearly are, such as the film’s Chinese poet, who was tortured and has a telephone book-thick dossier of documentation to support his claim. Other cases are more amorphous, such as the Algerian woman whose family was threatened and the Romanian emigre who ran afoul of his government.

Adjudicating these claims are a cadre of men and women who may or may not be qualified to do so. In fact, one of the questions raised by “Well-Founded Fear” is whether anyone is qualified to make these Solomonic decisions.

“Nothing is clear; all of it’s gray,” says Gerald Brown, a former INS case officer who is featured in the film practically pulling his hair out. “And that’s what life is. Nobody is sure of any damn thing, and anybody who pretends that they are is kind of stupid.”

Another point made by the film, as it focuses on a handful of cases, is that officers can all too easily become cynical or burned out. According to Camerini, one novice interviewer told him of being profoundly moved by one applicant’s story and then profoundly disappointed to hear exactly the same story from another asylum seeker later the same day. While it is true that refugees often have similar experiences, it’s also true that some of them are provided with cover stories by the smugglers who brought them into the country. For example, applicants often present improbable escape stories. In one instance, an applicant claims that he escaped from a roomful of guards through a third story window, prompting the case officer listening to him, Jim, to actually roll his eyes at the camera.

Burnout Among Staff Adds to Turmoil

“Jim is a burned-out case and knows it, who doesn’t sleep well at night because of it,” says Camerini. “He has a harder time with what’s happened to him, with his own cynicism, than a lot of people. A lot of people there are cynical and are perfectly fine about it. He’s suffering.”

“When he saw the show he was stunned,” adds Robertson, who has made documentaries about the Khmer Rouge, the restoration of Ankor Wat, and the plight of girls in sub-Saharan Africa. “He called us and said, ‘I know I said those things and I know it’s there on film, but I didn’t realize I was that bad.’ ”

Brown says a lot of burnout comes from fighting management, which seems hell-bent on denying asylum. There’s a harrowing scene in the film in which a case officer is nearly reduced to tears by a supervisor who ridicules her reasoning for granting a particular case.

“You spend as much energy on that as you do trying to figure out the case,” Brown says.

Case officers also have to fight their own ideological predispositions, which manifest themselves in surprising ways. Brown says that there are basically two camps in the INS: what he calls the old INS types, who are conservative and don’t grant asylum easily, and the liberal lawyer and ex-advocate crowd, of which he considers himself a member, who are tougher than most people would think. These officers believe so fervently in the idea of asylum that they are loath to subvert it by granting it to people who don’t measure up.

Then there are hidden prejudices. When the film was being shot, in 1998, both offices under the filmmakers’ scrutiny (in New York City and Lynhurst, N.J.) were besieged by Chinese refugees. There’s a lot of chat between officers about how deceitful they are.

“Usually there’s somebody from someplace pouring through, so that particular kind of racist burnout can shift from one part of the globe [to another],” says Robertson.

One of the more thoughtful INS officials, Kevin, candidly worries that applicants who are well-educated are given a more sympathetic ear than those who aren’t (he says he’d give an applicant with a doctorate more consideration than a short-order cook). Ironically, some of his colleagues, who have been briefed about the world’s trouble spots, are sometimes ignorant themselves.

Camerini says that one of them didn’t know who the Dalai Lama was. Another mistakenly faulted an applicant for incorrectly naming the head of the Anglican Church. Still another got tangled up in rice planting arcana. Who an applicant gets as a case worker is completely random, and when it is suggested that perhaps a Russian Jewish refugee might be the best person to judge the validity of a Russian Jewish refugee’s claim, Camerini shakes his head and says that such an arrangement would open up the officers to bribes.

Unfortunately, the officers’ attempts to determine the truth, which are subject to their own limitations, are sometimes further undermined by the translators, employed by the applicants, who garble or flat-out misrepresent what is being said. On one occasion a sympathetic translator actually tries to cover up her client’s blunders, omitting his statement that he’s afraid to return to China because the government may sterilize him (forgetting that the reason he left China was because he’d been sterilized).

So where does all this leave us? Robertson and Camerini--and the movie--refuse to say, other than that they hope the film prompts people both inside and outside the INS to take a hard look at immigration policy. After all, millions live under some form of persecution, and the net effect of hearing these stories is the feeling that either many more applicants deserve asylum or none of them do, hardly an alternative. The last two cases, the Algerian woman and the Romanian refugee, dramatize this point vividly.

“It is kind of a subtext [in the film] that asylum itself is so narrow because it’s defined specifically on the basis of persecution that you were targeted for,” says Robertson, “and yet the world is much bigger.”

* “Well-Founded Fear” can be seen tonight at 9 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for coarse language).